Huddle is a secure cloud collaboration service for enterprises and government organisations worldwide. The collaboration platform market is highly competitive, including some well-established major players and frequent new entrants. On top of this, it is arguably one of the hardest areas of Enterprise Technology to differentiate in.

Challenge

Instead of pursuing the generic corporate market by trying to compete simply on function or price, Huddle adapted its go-to-market strategy to be more targeted and secure higher-value deals. It examined its user base and identified a series of re-occurring use cases for its technology in specific industries. One of these was how its collaboration platform made the bid management process more efficient in professional services, and particularly in accounting.

But in order to market to this discrete audience, Huddle would need to adapt its marketing processes to address these buyers’ particular needs.

Huddle’s VP Marketing, Tim Deluca-Smith worked with us to kick-start its new strategy. The objective was to increase this audience’s awareness of Huddle’s overall brand and of the commercial benefits, it could deliver to professional services, particularly in bid management. Crucially, this awareness would have to inspire identifiable reactions and generate leads.

Creative

The team designed a content marketing campaign that would centre around a core, registration-only asset on the Huddle website that would then be promoted through a broad range of paid, earned, shared and owned channels. However, the campaign’s message could not simply describe Huddle’s capability and technology. It had to prove Huddle’s unique and particular value to professional services.

We partnered with a market research agency to quantify the precise impacts of poor collaboration amongst professional services organisations, both generally and specifically within the bid management process.

Drawing on the input of senior decision-makers within these firms across the UK and US, the Huddle and CCgroup team drew clear causal links between poor team collaboration and project inefficiency, lost billable time, deteriorating service levels and in some cases, even lost clients. In particular, bid projects – Huddle’s key use case for accountancy firms – were proven to be costing more than $24,000 each in otherwise billable time due to inefficient collaboration.

Using these findings, the team drafted a white paper, a shorter ebook, byline articles, press releases and social media posts. The campaign was then extended and made applicable to wider marketing channels with an infographic, paid media materials, eDMs and account-based marketing (ABM) content. In tandem, we also produced a series of case studies with relevant professional services customers in order to prove Huddle’s performance and track record in this vertical.

Consequence

Over the course of a three-month campaign, the CCgroup team co-ordinated with Huddle’s US PR team to secure coverage for the key findings across the technology, business and professional services media. Indeed, we achieved a ‘full house’ of coverage in all top-tier UK accountancy publications.

The thought leadership position in the US and UK was then capitalised upon with demand generation activities across a series of digital channels, including PPC and social media. Meanwhile, the campaign collateral and case studies were used for targeted ABM activity.

12 months after launch, Huddle was working with eight of the 10 largest accounting firms in the world.

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