In a nutshell:
Voipfuture was already a mature company when we came on board. It had sound marketing foundations, but it wasn’t running any inbound strategies. The team defined a clear challenge: Making Voipfuture stand out in the ultra-commoditized telecom market. They also wanted to see the marketing efforts translated to business outcomes through quality leads.
We needed to create two simultaneous streams of work:
- Build an inbound operation from scratch
- Optimize the existing marketing foundations and all legacy materials
Results:
- Inbound efforts resulted in quality business opportunities. One of those turned into a deal within 48 hours from initiation (!!). You can read about it here: https://www.voipfuture.com/blog/a-crazy-story-of-a-dialing-platform-we-can-all-learn-from/.
- Market feedback shows brand dominance in the form of event organizers approaching the company with a request to take part and speak, other companies using its brand name in their materials, and more.
- A significant increase in traffic to the website and social media networks as well as engagement.
This case study details how we achieved these results, complete with supporting data.
About Voipfuture
Voipfuture is a premium voice service monitoring and analytics company that provides a unique technology for assessing, aggregating, analyzing, and visualizing voice quality information, for better data-based insights.
A German HQ company, Voipfuture’s products offer a precise view of both the media and control planes to communication service providers, wholesalers, enterprises, call centers, and cloud-based voice services. Since its launch, it has been at the forefront of voice quality monitoring and continues to redefine Voice over IP by connecting customers’ views on service quality with high-resolution user experience, in addition to insights that enable next-gen voice services.
Making Voipfuture stand out in a highly commoditized industry
Voipfuture’s innovative and advanced solution requires prospects to run some market education in order to understand its added value.
After conducting a competitive marketing landscape analysis, we realized there’s a need to polish the messaging in order to emphasize Voipfuture’s differentiation. This was done by running an agile messaging sprint using our unique methodology.
We studied competitors’ stories and realized that instead of focusing on the product, it’s better to shift focus to the pain points. We fine-tuned the messages and then decided to focus the content strategy on the pain points as well (visit the Voipfuture blog to learn more).
With telecom-related technologies being in such a traditional and conservative industry, we saw an opportunity to shine, by following the “edutaining” content concept. After all, people are people, and they enjoy light and informal reading (we did keep the industry standards, though).
At some point, we needed to create deeper technical content, in order to educate the market on the reasons why conventional voice monitoring solutions are not sufficient (See this solution brief as an example)
Knowing that this industry expects to consume such assets, we added white papers, guides, and PRs to the mix.
Building an inbound machine with optimization of marketing foundations
Despite some marketing foundations being already in place, major optimization activities were needed. Some materials even had to be built from scratch.
The first step was to create a brand new website that follows best practices of user experience. The previous one was nice but too ‘out of the box’ for the average visitor.
The new messaging, content, and other materials all had to be integrated into the new website.
The following graph shows the effect on blog page views:
Next, we moved to fine-tune organic social media efforts, focusing on constantly increasing the company’s page followers and the network of the chosen evangelist (i.e., front persona).
We knew that this industry is small and highly connected. We kept creating and promoting content through leadership, events, PRs, and achievements while leveraging the LinkedIn algorithm to ensure that we reached as many relevant eyes as possible.
Results were quick to follow:
The next step was to “rip” intent in this highly commoditized market. Voipfuture already being mature and having a sound customer base worked to our advantage. The existing knowledge base allowed us to know what the pain points of our ICP were and focus the KW research accordingly.
We launched several Google Ads campaigns. As mentioned above, this campaign brought quality business opportunities and paying accounts:
“After two weeks of frustrations, a Google search for “SIP monitoring” led PhoneBurner to this Voipfuture video. PhoneBurner’s CEO reached out to us on a Saturday, and we immediately understood the situation and put together a plan to improve PhoneBurner’s network visibility. By Sunday, a Qrystal for AWS was in place and provided data helping to improve the service.”
Summary
Our journey started with the realization that working in a traditional and commoditized market would be quite different from engaging with a new startup that disrupts a young industry. However, we also know that people are people, and buyers are people; if you run your marketing methodically and consistently, you will see the results.
Several other components were involved in the marketing mix. Want to find out? Reach out to hear more.
