Internap, started in 1996, has made their mark in the Information Technology industry. Delivering performance-enhancing technologies through their colocation, managed hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud services, Internap is a global leader in IT infrastructure solutions.
BRAND & AUDIENCE INSIGHTS
Despite its stellar product and rave customer reviews, Internap was struggling to build an identity in a highly commoditized Internet hosting vertical, an extremely competitive landscape led by five large firms so a large portion of Internap's marketing budget was going toward paid media campaigns, which had no overarching strategy and were performing inefficiently.
Before building out our paid media strategy, we conducted audience and competitive research to identify potential points of differentiation in the industry and craft a message that would resonate with their audience. We talked to key stakeholders, existing customers and many potential customers within the target audience of web developers, technology directors, solutions engineers, COOs, CTOs and more.
We created a product offering comparison matrix to give further insight into how Internap stacked up against the competition. We created a detailed competitive analysis to see how the competition was perceived with the audience and what messaging they were using so we could stand out.
Finally, we executed a secret shopping campaign to analyze the customer service and sales support of both Internap and their competition. We then used this research to recommend a new direction for Internap's brand and messaging.
SOLVING THE PROBLEM
We used these findings to build out completely new paid media campaigns.
These campaigns were two-tiered. First, campaigns were separated by very specific aspects of Internap's product offerings. Second, campaigns were separated by Internap's targeted international locations. In the U.S., certain campaigns were further geo-targeted to a radius around cities with major data centers.
We focused campaigns around keywords that reflected our research findings, shifting from broad concepts to more specific points of differentiation: hybridization, instant provisioning, cloud-like control features and complete infrastructure solutions.
We then created custom landing pages by region that spoke specifically to ad content and the product being promoted. These were used to a/b test multiple content assets and calls to action to find the most effective messaging to drive engagement.
Most importantly, we researched to determine how the audience made purchasing decisions and mapped out our paid media efforts to reach the audience with the right message at the right time. We used both managed and contextually targeted display ads to reach the audience in the awareness stage. Our geo-targeted keyword campaigns reached an already interested audience with differentiated messaging, and we used retargeting to keep the audience engaged and move them down the funnel.
RESULTS
We launched our new campaigns in Q2 of 2013 and with this new buyer journey, value-added content approach, our campaigns shattered expectations and quickly exceeded goals.
During the first seven months of our engagement, leads per month nearly doubled. Search network conversion rates increased 107 percent, and retargeting campaign conversions increased by 262.16 percent from Q1 to Q4.
Most importantly, sales opportunity values increased significantly every quarter while cost per conversion decreased.