Teradata, a company named for the volumes of customer data its software analyzes, was recently recognized for running the most successful tech marketing campaign in Indiana. CMO Lisa Arthur was awarded TechPoint's 2013 Mira Award for Tech Sales and Marketing for executing a content marketing campaign that grossed a whopping eight figures in revenue for the company.
It's easy to assume that content marketing success of this magnitude would require extensive resources, but that wasn't the case here. A small Indianapolis-based marketing team within Teradata's integrated marketing management unit partnered with Indy-based content promotion agency, DigitalRelevance, to pull the campaign off with limited means.
From the outside though, this campaign looked more like a product launch than content marketing. Teradata's story is one of quality over quantity, with content promotion efforts focusing on just several pieces of advanced content, including the, "Be a Big Data Marketing Hero" eBook and Lisa Arthur's Big Data Marketing.
A primary goal on the road to revenue creation was to receive meaningful online press coverage of their advanced content. Teradata wasn't interested in just publishing owned media on their site and waiting for their target audience to stumble upon it in search and social. They intended for their content to first earn meaningful coverage from the online media outlets their target audience already frequented and trusted. In this case, success in social media and search would be the natural byproduct of online earned media coverage. The campaign targeted both mass awareness outlets, like CIO and Inc, and niche outlets, like KDNuggets and SmartData Collective.
Engineering content that would receive such impressive coverage was a tall order. The content marketplace in the big data marketing industry was overly saturated to say the least. There already was plenty of "noise" around big data and marketing, and Teradata wasn't part of the conversation yet.
This was the problem Teradata planned to solve with the campaign. The team knew that rising above this noise would require something very special, but at the onset they weren't quite sure what would resonate. Thorough research was in order.
Teradata's research process was threefold. It consisted of a content analysis, an audience analysis and a media analysis. As part of the content analysis, a content gap assessment was performed - identifying opportunities that may have been missed by their competitors to create and promote content that the audience would highly value. They also started developing a content strategy and recommendations for promotional opportunities based upon their findings.
The team then conducted an audience analysis to uncover the target audience's online habits and determine degrees of separation from influencers. Finally, they performed a media analysis to identify key online media outlets for outreach, which also helped their media outreach team compile a list of social media influencers relevant to the target audience.
Research informed the creation of the, "Be a Big Data Marketing Hero," eBook. This eBook by Lisa Arthur was a significant contribution to the industry, but great content doesn't mean much if it doesn't get in front of the right people.
The media outreach team worked to establish connections with appropriate media outlets and online influencers based on the media analysis. Their approach centered on working with editorial staff at targeted media sites in an effort to secure articles written by these media contacts that would support or showcase the eBook. Earned media coverage on major industry sites like Inc.com, VentureBeat.com and SmartDataCollective.com helped increase awareness and drive inbound traffic from the media outlets themselves, search and social media.
The campaign ultimately resulted in nearly 3,000,000 media impressions, a 24% conversion rate on referral traffic and eight figures in new business to Teradata. To achieve this level of success the team from Teradata and DigitalRelevance fully committed to Forrester's finding that brands can actually step down content production and step up promotion to get better results. A more detailed case study on the content promotion portion of this integrated content marketing campaign can be found here.