VMware Case Study – How We Achieved 9:1 Ratio of Marketing Expenditure & Revenue

The key to success of any business depends on how it approaches potential customers and build relationships. The role of marketing at this stage cannot be overlooked, which involves creating buyers’ persona as per different stake holders and creating a marketing funnel according to that.

At the online marketplace of Techjockey.com, we create a promotional landscape which gives our OEMs a platform to cater to the wider audience. Let’s have a look at the strategy that we adopted to attract a large customer base for VMware solutions on our e-commerce platform.

VMware Case Study : Creating Marketing Strategies That Sell

• Finding Our Audience and Mapping Purchase Journey

Creating personas is critical to understanding our target audience in terms of demographics and their pain points and challenges. We did buyer’s profiling on the basis of company size, designation, pain points, revenue, nature of business, etc.

Different buyer personas were involved at respective stages of buying timeline. While procurement team of our targeted companies (large enterprises mostly) were involved at the procurement stage, the purchase team took care of requirement freezing. And the finance team came later at the negotiation and purchase stage.

We looked out for decision makers and run targeted campaigns for them with selective keywords on selective platforms. Decisions makers for VMware virtualization are Tech and IT Heads, who are quite active on LinkedIn, email, etc. And, they often consume content in the form of informative articles, case studies and whitepapers.

The content that we created for them were such that we were able to grab their interest to the idea of server virtualization effortlessly which solved their problem at different levels.

• Developing the Marketing Funnel

Leads were generated from different platforms, such as, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. And, those were further segmented into three stages – Problem Identification, Solution Identification & Product Identification.

Accordingly, we pitched content to our prospects to assist them at every stage of the marketing funnel.

1. Problem Identification
2. Solution Identification
3. Product Identification

• Creating Lead Nurturing Strategy

At the problem identification stage, we pitched content which talked about the pain points of prospects.

As prospects moved down to the solution identification stage, the marketing inventory became targeted towards pitching solutions to their pain points. And, then followed the stage where we pitched the right product for their obstinate problems.

Our role didn’t end at pitching a set of IT solutions to our prospects. To further assist our prospects in making the right buying decision, we provided online product demonstrations too.

• Leveraging the Existing Customer base for Marketing Success

Retaining the existing customer base is as important as attracting the new ones. This is where SISL’s experience and expertise come in. The strategy for upsell and cross sell is working wonders in this scenario.

As our sales and marketing teams are aware of the purchase history of existing VMware customers, we pitch them additional products to improve the overall efficiency.

During the cross sell and upsell, we can easily cut through the stages of problem and solution identification, and pitch IT solutions to our existing customers as per their past purchase.

Virtualization Case Study VMware: Expected Results

This strategy has shown outstanding results in the case of VMware:

• Reduction in purchase journey by 30 percent
• 65 percent increase in upsell and cross-sell opportunities

The retention strategy has further reduced the expenditure in nurturing leads and increased efficiency. 27, 000 words of content have been created for VMware in just three months with 247 work hours dedicated to planning and execution.

By just spending 7 Lacs in the marketing funnel, we have achieved the encouraging revenue of Rs 65 Lacs. And, this exciting 9 is to 1 ratio of the marketing expenditure and the revenue is what motivates us to take up many more challenging yet exciting campaigns in the future.