Brand and Campaign Strategy & Execution

Head of Marketing at Relay42

2018-2020

Relay42 is a Dutch tech company that quickly grabbed significant market share at home: major banks (ABN AMRO), airlines (KLM/AirFrance), telecom providers (Vodafone/Ziggo) and beyond (Mazda, Foot Locker).

The challenge

Breaking out of the Netherlands meant going head-to-head with some of the most formidable giants of the tech marketing world: Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle - all of whom, regardless of their competitiveness on technology, could easily outmatch us in marketing spend.

 

The ask

As Head of Marketing, I was tasked with:

  • Defining a strategy for brand growth outside of the Netherlands.  

  • Leading the brand marketing team (content and design) to craft and execute a content marketing strategy against the brand awareness & growth strategy. 

  • Delivering an aggressive amount of net-new qualified leads on a shoestring budget (and no digital or events staff).

 

The solution

The only way for the company to survive (and thrive) against the MarTech goliaths, with effectively only a comms team of 3, had to be a challenger strategy by industry (vertical), and I pursued it as follows:

  1. Definition of the brand strategy, stemming from a combination of product research, in-depth interviews, cross-department collaboration and deep industry research. 

  2. One top-of-funnel brand awareness campaign per half-year to draw in new audiences around our challenger messaging: carefully structured marketing activities coordinated with sales outreach and supported by social, events, and analyst relations magic to bring to market a differentiating campaign and 3-5 industry-specific sub-campaigns.

  3. Testing and learning to identify lead generation channels, activities and tactics that had the most impact per dollar - then leaning into them to squeeze out as much as possible, while they worked.

 

The results

  1. Delivery of 127% of annual MQL target in 2018, and 105-118% per quarter so far after that.

  2. Web traffic increase from 2.3K to 30,000K+ monthly unique visitors, and immediate organic lead-generation results via the first brand awareness campaign

  3. Thought leadership positioning that resonated through video, digital and event content, leading to a 10-point jump in domain authority and 3 first-page Google results in the first 6 months.