The Backstory - Creating An ‘Unexpected’ B2B Telecom Campaign for GTT

At some point in history, telecom companies all started to sound the same. And eventually, that morphed into telecom speaking a language that no one else spoke, a style of jargon-packed marketing fluff that annoyed and confused business leaders and completely frustrated engineers trying to source and operate a seamless global network. 

GTT is different from their pack of B2B telecom competitors. GTT wanted to speak a language that its customers understood, could relate to, and ultimately trust. They needed a campaign unlike any other in their company history to help them do this, so they asked Intelligent Demand, a leading revenue transformation agency, to help.

In order to align GTT’s message with its audience in an engaging way, Intelligent Demand personified the indecipherable telecom company and created a series of digital shorts and engaging content that would live in a modern, user-guided content environment. These short videos featured the Big Telco Translation Service, where GTT translated the complex jargon spewing forth from big telco companies into words that actual humans could understand. 

The Challenge

GTT offered something completely different for its customers, but due to lack of brand awareness in the global market, most target accounts didn't have an understanding of why GTT was different from its competitors, or, in some cases, who GTT even was.

Knowing that they had to both engage leads interested in SD-WAN, and also tell the broader GTT story through the company’s updated messaging strategy, the ID team wanted to develop a campaign that was unique, memorable, and somewhat adventurous for the traditionally conservative global telecom industry—something that was completely in line with GTT’s desire to be disruptive. 

ID shared their own opinion about messaging in the telecom industry, which they believed was all pretty uninspired. It all sounded the same, looked the same, and was super safe. They felt that this approach would be disruptive in the way that they brought it to life. GTT chose the idea of the “Big Telco Translation Service,” so ID’s Creative Team went to work writing, directing, and producing a series of digital shorts that would not only be engaging, but would play a key role in an ambitious media strategy.

In the first series produced specifically for the SD-WAN campaign, Big Telco was brought to life in “The Sales Pitch” and “The Executive Readout,” where GTT was positioned as the helpful guide who translated the Big Telco jargon that left the actors confused, withdrawn, and even falling asleep at the conference table. 

Creating the Content Experience

Now that the story of Big Telco was brought to life and the messaging was clear, the next step was finding a place for GTT’s content to live and a way to connect revenue dollars to the investment the company had made in content creation.

“We all agreed that a content experience was the best architecture to use because we didn’t want to assume where these people were and what education they were searching for. We thought it would be best to give them a self-guided mechanism to enter the content experience, see what was in there and go, ‘Yes, that’s the information I need. I’m going to engage there,’” said Theo Romeo, Creative Director at Intelligent Demand.

When it came down to it, there was only one viable option for a content experience that would give GTT the functionality and reporting they needed—that was Uberflip.

The Content Experience Strategy - Automation

With the decision made to use Uberflip as GTT’s content experience platform, the next step in bringing the SD-WAN campaign strategy to life was creating an integrated campaign architecture that would connect the Uberflip hub with a sophisticated Marketo email nurture program.

“For GTT, we created a lot of new content and resources related to their SD-WAN product offering and we wanted to house all of that in a place that was easy to binge and digest all in one place. We chose Uberflip for the user experience and its ability to integrate with Marketo, so all the engagement that happens on the SD-WAN campaign flows into the right programs in Marketo,” said Caitlin Kelley, Technology Strategist at Intelligent Demand.

To encourage engagement from active leads, ID’s team designed a 10-touch email nurture and retargeting campaign that actively served leads with content they hadn’t previously engaged with and that was relevant to their behavior within GTT’s website. Leads were also allowed to touch-skip nurture emails based on whether or not they had already engaged with that particular piece of content within Uberflip, which allowed GTT to create a better and more personalized user experience. 

The Results

In its first several months in the market, GTT’s Big Telco Translation Service campaign produced remarkable results. The overall campaign drove above-benchmark MQLs for GTT, with content engagement metrics indicating that the hub was a significant driver of prospect engagement. 

• Multiple content pieces demonstrate a higher than average 13%+ conversion rate on form fills for lead generation.
• Content performance metrics provided clear strategic direction for further content development.

“To start the year, GTT faced a tough task of developing a demand generation campaign that struck a fine balance between maintaining brand with conservative characteristics, yet establishing the company as a disruptor of industry behemoths, like AT&T and Verizon.  This wasn’t the only challenge GTT faced, however.  We received a mandate from the CEO and Board to stand up a scalable, robust demand generation platform within 90 days despite no infrastructure or people (other than me) existing on day 1. I knew my one shot at success would hinge on using tried-and-true partner that could deliver quickly, work in an agile fashion, and offer a deep bench of professionals to cover all aspects of demand generation – from tech to creative to media.  We needed it all, and Intelligent Demand and Uberflip came through in a big way.” - Gavin McKelvey, VP, Corporate Marketing at GTT