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How the Smart Take from the Strong

Andrea BensonVP of Demand Generation & Marketing OperationsSimpliVity Corporation

Jillian CoffinVP & Group Publisher, TechTarget

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

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Andrea BensonVice President of Demand Generation

& Marketing OperationsSimpliVity Corporation

Jillian CoffinVice President & Group Publisher

TechTarget

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Marketing and sales leaders face internal and external challenges

Today’s technology landscape is hard and your job is hard

Market Challenges Sales and Marketing Challenges

• Shift to the cloud

• Commoditization

• Data growth

• AI

• Consolidation

• Delivering ROI

• Differentiation & awareness

• In-bound and web visibility

• Prospect identification & ABM

• Pipeline sales conversion

• Nurturing & attribution

• Tracking ROI

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How the Smart Plan and Strategize

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Our story

• Founded in 2009, launched first product in 2012

• $276M in funding to fuel product development, marketing & fast sales growth in 2015

• New market: Hyperconverged infrastructure

• Aggressive hiring across Sales and Marketing

• Early on, marketing was more simplified: event heavy

• Transition from start-up with limited consideration to revenue generating powerhouse

• Delivered 7X increase in consideration of SimpliVityamong in-market hyperconvergence buyers

HCI estimated to be a

$6 billion marketby 2020 (IDC)

1 in 3 enterpriseswill consolidate & replace existing hardware by 2020 (TBR)

The Competition

Market backdrop

Nutanix

Scale

SpringPath

(Cisco)

Maxta

HPE

VMWare

EMC

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Bad News

• Very immature market

o Who is the buyer?

o Daunting task of educating a broad audience

o And need to influence too many different stakeholders across IT (expensive)

• No brand awareness, lack of visibility & low consideration

Good News

• We had a compelling story: Hyperconvergence market getting lots of buzz and growing fast

• SimpliVity solutions offer simplicity, consolidation and align well to broader trend of “Next Gen IT”

• Strong product offering and identified key differentiator (Data Protection)

• VC-funded

SimpliVity State of the Union

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The new reality of BtoB marketing

Sources: Infront, Pardot

Problem

Discovery

RFI/RFP

Process

Need

Identified

• Personalization not realistic

with resources

• Prospects want to talk to

sales later in the process

• Huge pressure on marketing

to be everywhere

78%of B2B buyers turnto Google

90%click on first page organic results

More buyers to reach and more channels to support

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1. Define the market

2. Find and engage relevant IT roles who care about HCI

3. Source the right accounts, the right people, in the right places

4. Messaging and content

5. Support the ambitious growth goals

Five biggest challenges to activate marketing

Sources: Infront, Pardot

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Focus efforts with partners who can make the greatest impact, and who had insight into the Market and our target audience

Expand digital marketing effort beyond events

Take advantage of TechTarget’s search authority in Google

Ramp content marketing to educate and drive demand

Introduce purchase intent data to give SimpliVity an edge

Our strategy for each challenge:

Content, integration and intent data

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Why TechTarget? Benefits to SimpliVity

Purchase IntentSee the facts you need

AudiencesFind the buyers you want

Marketing ActivationGain the outcomes you seek

Market insight

• Intelligence on what prospects do when not engaging with SimpliVity

• New, emerging points of entry for SimpliVity to exploit

• Direction on messaging, content best practices

Focused Reach:

• Access to the right audiences

• Ability to influence across display, content and data

Thought leadership:

• 3rd party platform to influence SimpliVity’s Target Influencers/Buyers

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How the Smart Execute

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#1 established the “four P’s plan”

Building a foundation for success

PeopleMarketing resources and tools

PositioningMarket messaging

ProcessLead to close process

PerformanceTrack performance and ROI

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#2 Identified and prioritized the audiences we needed to influence

Hyper-

converged

Private

Cloud

Apps

Data

Protection

Server

Virt

Remote

Office

Storage

Refresh

Desktop

Virt

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#3 built an always-on integrated plan

Essential elementsWhat does integration really mean?

• Social channels

• Search

• Content development: blogs, articles, webinars, video, whitepapers, etc.

• Research

• Digital advertising: targeting, retargeting

• Native advertising

• Content marketing

• Intent data

• Physical & Virtual Events

• Architecting a marketing strategy that

maps tactics to business needs

• Efficiently surrounding the buyer at all

times across different channels

• Consistently learning, optimizing

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#3 built an always-on integrated plan

Essential elementsWhat does integration really mean?

• Social channels

• Search

• Content development: blogs, articles, webinars, video, whitepapers, etc.

• Research

• Digital advertising: targeting, retargeting

• Native advertising

• Content marketing

• Intent data

• Physical & Virtual Events

• Architecting a marketing strategy that

maps tactics to business needs

• Efficiently surrounding the buyer at all

times across different channels

• Consistently learning, optimizing

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SimpliVity media strategy maps directly to buyer journey

Google Search

Deep content footprint and Search dominance drives active buyers into TechTarget’s network

Content Marketing

Contextual SimpliVitydisplay

Native Branded Content

Priority Engine

Buyer research details tracked across Hyperconvergencemarket provides visibility into purchase intent in key markets for SimpliVity

SimpliVity content

Retargeting to continue influencing as users continue research across web

SearchConvergedInfrastructure

SearchServerVirtualization

SearchCloudComputing

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Account view:

Smart taking from the strong (10/16 – 4/17)

6 members of

buying team influenced via demand generation

9 active prospects

in Priority Engine

Competitor Activity

Editorial Activity

SimpliVity

Priority Engine

Vendor Page views

(Native Site)

April

January 2017

October 2016

October – March 2016

January 2017

December 2016

November 2017

October 2017

October 2017

December 2016

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How the Smart Measure and Track

ROI

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Results by the numbers

Reach & Amplification Consideration Pipeline

• +30% of total pipeline influenced via TechTarget

• Represents 10:1 return on investment

• 700% increase in purchase consideration

• From 3% consideration to 24%

• +14.7M targeted, relevant impressions

• +2X content volume than relying on vendor content alone

• Leads & intelligence on +16K accounts in market for converged IT solutions

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• Embrace the same goal = producing revenue

• Build a plan for success

o Common sense marketing begins with a strong foundation

• Establish right processes

o Don’t re-create the wheel – put pieces together in a meaningful way

• Secure buy-in from all stakeholders

o Sales, Marketing, Channel, Operations

• Execute and optimize

o Tweak as needed to align activities with desired business results

Keys to success “We view TechTarget as a critical ‘must-have’ partner across all aspects of our marketing strategy with demonstrated impact on pipeline and MQL conversions.”

Marianne BudnikSenior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer SimpliVity

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Questions?

Andrea BensonVice President of Demand Generation & Marketing OperationsSimpliVity Corporation

Jillian CoffinVice President & Group PublisherTechTarget