For over eight years, I led strategy for an integrated agency of record relationship with Eaton. Since then, we've worked across the $20 billion global enterprise, to redefine the brand at the highest level, penetrate new markets for business units and to launch countless products.
The "Things Have Changed" campaign, which the My IT Empire campaign was part of, has been recognized as the most creative marketing campaign by Oracle and Eloqua on four separate occasions. It's won numerous industry awards, from Reggies to Webbys, and been recognized by Eaton as the best marketing effort internally.
Most importantly, it's delivered results. Demonstrable ROI for individual efforts have ranged from 300% to over 1000%. Since we began working together, our efforts, in combination with a stellar sales organization, led to a huge surge in top line growth and market share from 3% to 17%.
My IT Empire was one of the most unique and successful initiatives we undertook with our partners at Eaton. And the results spoke for themselves.
The Challenge
Eaton is a multi-billion global power management company, but Eaton’s Power Quality division is dwarfed by the leader, and so is its marketing budget. Meanwhile, the Power Quality industry is commoditized and competitive brands have low levels of product and service differentiation. We set out to make Eaton the most loved brand — rather than the biggest — while still hitting the aggressive lead generation and familiarity increase goals that would feed the business.
Insight
B2B marketing has become a world of uninspired thinking. Traditionally, brands have offered potential customers incentives (white papers, webinars, etc.) in exchange for information. But Eaton’s savvy IT professional audience had stopped providing accurate information about themselves and felt misunderstood by brands looking to interrupt their productivity with sales calls.
We saw an opportunity to show that Eaton is a company that gets IT: both functionally (Information Technology) and emotionally (the plight of the IT professional).
Idea
What better way to become the champion of IT professionals, than to position them as rulers of their very own IT infrastructures and offices? Enter My IT Empire.
We knew IT professional’s favorite content type was infographics. So we created a campaign and digital tool that flipped infographics from being all about an industry trend, to being all about the IT professionals themselves. This combination of pride in their IT infrastructures, combined with a healthy dose of egotistical fuel, struck a chord.
The Experience
Our digital tool generated infographics as quirky as our IT professionals — putting them at the top of their IT empires. To create each infographic, we asked our IT pros 48 different questions. Some questions were purely for fun and based on target insight (Which do you prefer: Star Wars or Star Trek?), while other questions were IT-specific, designed to familiarize the audience with Eaton’s offerings and gather sales qualification data (How many servers does your data center have?).
As our audience answered the questions, text and icons populated an infographic-style poster right before their eyes, reflecting their different personalities—right down to their underwear preferences. Because of the large number of data points (48 per user), the campaign generated quality lead profiling more valuable than typical form submissions (and informative as a primary research channel itself).
Once the infographic was complete, we mailed participants free, oversized posters of the infographics they created. That meant they not only received office décor, but also a daily reminder of the Eaton brand, something especially important given the long sales cycle of power management products.
Results
The campaign broke through in a way Eaton had never seen before. With a constrained paid media budget and aggressive success targets, our campaign surpassed expectations across set objectives and ancillary benefits:
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1028% return on investment (ROI)
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34% brand familiarity lift
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4,514 new leads generated
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216,672 prospective customer data points gathered