The First Annual Marketing ARC Awards celebrated the best campaigns that have embraced marketing technology solutions, and winners were announced at LeadsCon New York in August.
Chief Marketer created this awards campaign in response to the explosion of tech solutions being leveraged by marketers in recent years. The marketing technology landscape is 
constantly expanding and evolving, and savvy marketing teams are making the most of the tech coming their way—from marketing automation and customer data platforms, to big data and social media marketing solutions. Chief Marketer created this awards program to honor the marketing teams who have embraced and are taking full advantage of the latest tech solutions in the midst of this shifting landscape. That’s why we have called the program the Marketing Adapting to Rapid Change (ARC) Awards.
The winners in our 10 categories this year have created wonderfully engaging campaigns that also demonstrated measurable results—and they all have leveraged marketing technology to bring it all to life.
And the winners are:
LEAD NURTURING
Who: Marketo
What: In-House Multi-Channel Interest-Based Nurture campaign
The Lowdown: The goal of the campaign was to engage more people with Marketo content to convert them to qualified sales leads.
The challenge for the Marketo team was converting leads into sales-qualified and ready leads. To do this, marketers needed to engage leads and nurture them. Marketo implemented an interest-based nurture campaign that based on people’s activity, would nurture them under specific topics such as social marketing, email marketing, and marketing automation.
Marketo used its own marketing automation solutions to track people’s behaviors across multiple channels, and were able to capture their activity whether they referred someone on social, clicked on a PPC term, or clicked through on an email. When that behavior occurred, Marketo was able to automatically populate a field that would then begin nurturing prospects based on their interests.
For example, if someone searched for social marketing and clicked through on a Marketo ad, they would automatically be placed in a social marketing nurture track. If they then went to an email marketing event a month later, they would automatically move to the email marketing nurture track.
Marketo compared its interest-based nurtures to its regular nurtures by role, starting by only looking at content pieces that had deliveries of more than 500 in the past two months, so that they would have enough data to look at. Marketers then looked at how many content pieces they could compare between the interest-based track and regular nurtures.
The content piece tied to the campaign was Marketo’s “Definitive Guide to Social Marketing.” The team looked at three email marketing metrics to compare the performance:
The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing in Marketo’s regular communication tracks had an open rate of 21.7 percent, a clicked-to-open ratio of 23.4 percent and a ‘percent clicked’ of 5.1 percent. The same piece of content in the interest-based track had a 35 percent open rate, a 37.1 percent clicked-to-open ratio and a 12.6 percent click rate. The interest-based track had higher numbers on an absolute level across all three email marketing metrics.
“The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing” content piece tied to the campaign saw a 56.68% increase in open rates and a 147% increase in click through rates.
CONTENT MARKETING
Who: Asante SNAP in partnership with Vpak Media
What: In-Print Video Brochure campaign
The Lowdown: The Asante SNAP insulin pump was developed to provide a simpler option that made set-up and management on insulin delivery easier and to give people with diabetes “Less prep time. More life time.”
The challenge Asante marketers faced was in making sure the Asante SNAP story stood out by communicating the pump’s innovative features to patients who already had to hold so much life-saving information in their heads, and were only familiar with standard pumps – if they were familiar with pumps at all.
The Asante team was looking for way to communicate this information to patients without physicians or CDEs present to walk them through the information. The smaller, start-up Asante also needed to accomplish this awareness and education initiative in a smart, cost effective manner.
The team partnered with Vpak media, whose Vpak Video-In-Print brochures are self-contained personal High Definition LCD screens designed to eliminate obstacles to consuming video content. Video content automatically begins upon opening the brochure and the user interface allows patients to select the information of most interest to them.
In addition to six demonstration/comparative videos, the Asante SNAP Vpak brochure contained a 28-page printed brochure for patients to explore feature-rich content. The cover features a “lenticular lens” effect, highlighting the average time savings a patient can expect when utilizing the Asante Snap pump versus competitive brands. As the patient shifts the angle of the brochure, the timer shifts from 8:57 to 0:00 minutes, reinforcing the nearly nine-minute weekly time savings the Asante SNAP pump delivers, and again reinforcing time savings and balance in their lives.
To encourage action, a simple patient information form was included with the brochure. When completed and faxed along with a prescription from the patients’ health care professional, the Asante customer team begins the process of coordinating insurance benefits and delivering the Asante pump.
The Vpak Brochure has been redistributed six times, totaling 20,000 video brochures, and sales figures indicate that in offices where the Asante Vpak Video Brochure were distributed, patient requests for the pump far exceeded requests from offices that did not receive these video brochures.
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Who: Marriott Rewards, executed in partnership with Yesmail
What: Marriott Mobile Check-in campaign
The Lowdown: In order to have a bold and impactful launch of its innovative Mobile Check-In functionality, exclusive to Marriott Hotels in North America, the brand relied on email as the primary means to boost app downloads, increase awareness, and promote use of Mobile Check-In.
Marriott turned to Yesmail Interactive’s creative team before sending eight million dedicated emails to mobile and tech-savvy Marriott Rewards members in the U.S. and Canada.
Yesmail implemented responsive design techniques and as a result, the promotional campaign consisted of two designs coded in a single framework—one for desktop, and one for mobile. This dual function of the email allowed guests to read it on a larger desktop computer monitor or just as easily on a mobile device, with no need to pinch or zoom. Yesmail also streamlined the Marriott Rewards email using scalable design practices, namely stackable content sections (the message had two), while enlarging text to accommodate for small mobile screens.
Tailoring copy was also part of Yesmail’s mobile-first strategy. Only the most pertinent messaging was included and it was clearly focused on the key benefits of the Mobile Check-In offering. In addition, the “GET THE APP” buttons were dsigned to be “bulletproof,” so they could be read and clicked even with images turned off, thus catering to the different default settings of various operating systems. Yesmail leveraged the functionality of mobile devices so that when users clicked these calls-to-action, they could download the Marriott Mobile app via their respective device’s app store. If people clicked the other CTA, “Visit TravelBrilliantly.com”, their mobile browser would take them to Marriott Hotels’ travel site.
Yesmail also incorporated a smartphone animation of the Mobile Check-In interface on the app that showcased Marriott’s new capability. This animation worked well on both iOS and Android devices, appealing to users with various operating systems.
Just a few days after the official Mobile Check-In launch, Marriott had more than 27,000 downloads in one day, and the ranking of Marriott Mobile in the iTunes app store increased to #1 in the Travel category (up from #25) and #47 overall (up from #938).
TARGETING
Who: TalkTalk Business, executed with Stein IAS
What: Integrate Britain campaign
The Lowdown: The campaign’s goal was getting network, telecom and broadband provider TalkTalk Business on the radar with systems integrators and value-added resellers, which are consultancy-led organizations that bolt together technology components from different providers to create a complete IT/communications solution for large-scale organizations.
The campaign’s focus was lead nurturing–not brand exposure–so the overriding objective was to get prospects to engage with campaign content, with a focus on the awareness stage of the B2B buyer timeline). Marketers also aimed to get the industry to reflect upon the danger of defaulting to preferred suppliers, and give TalkTalk a credible voice among enterprises.
The campaign strategy revolved around a proprietary marketing process called “Mi 3,” which Stein IAS has developed to enable clients to go from blank sheet of paper to revenue by create the fastest path from first touch to sale, and marketing automation technology from Eloqua.
Stein leveraged Eloqua to collect data on any prospect that engaged with the campaign through a digital channel, track prospects, via their digital body language, across all paid, owned and earned media (in this case email, website, landing pages, PR, social media, PPC and display advertising). Eloqua was also used to trigger campaigns in real-time when a prospect entered buying mode due to the number of clicks, downloads, return web visits they perform over a given period.
The campaign resulted in $9 million-plus in annual sales pipeline value, seven qualified leads, 146 webinar registrations and 178 views of supporting video assets representing 49 percent boost in visits to TalkTalk’s YouTube channel.
PERSONALIZATION
Who: PCH.com, in partnership with Evergage
What: PCH.com Personalizes the Online Experience campaign
The Lowdown: Leading multichannel direct marketer Publishers Clearing House, is a widely recognized provider of value-based merchandise, magazines, promotional offers and digital “play and win” entertainment for consumers. The main goals for this campaign were to increase game playing among site visitors, engage players and keep them onsite longer and convert players into customers.
The team needed an intuitive solution that wouldn’t require a lot of technical implementation or overhead. They also needed a way for the online marketers to analyze, create and manage the campaigns and messages themselves, without needing to rely on IT or data scientists. The marketers needed to do the persona profiling, continuously test new messages, see how they performed and make changes on the fly. Another key challenge was to see if initial test results could be repeated.
Using Evergage’s real-time web personalization platform, PCH.com was able to analyze, create and test relevant messages for its audience, based on whether the user was engaged or not. Different messages (which talked to the player in a manner appropriate based on previous plays) were shown to different users based on where they were in the cycle. By testing, PCH.com was able to determine whether or not the messages were driving results. With this information they were able to optimize messaging and target different segments with specific messaging.
Since implementing real-time, personalized web messaging, PCH.com is accomplishing its goals of lifting website engagement, with an average lift of 12% in revenue-per-thousand visits. More specifically, different types of targeted messages have brought in varying results. For example, a personalized header bar for existing customers has shown a 36 percent lift in engagement, while a similar message for unengaged users has seen a 19 percent lift in new customer acquisition. In addition, a popup message promoting an exclusive prize to already engaged users netted a 26 percent increase in games played.
CHANNEL INTEGRATION/MESSAGING
Who: Xerox Corporation, with partners The Phoenix Group, Martino Flynn, SMITH Agency & McAfee
What: Xerox ConnectKey Technology Marketing campaign
The Lowdown: The main goals of the ConnectKey Technology campaign were to grow overall revenue and market share by two percent, increase awareness and consideration amongst customers and non-customers, and to address the new customer buying funnel where customers are already 60 percent through the purchasing decision process before talking to a sales rep.
Xerox used a variety of technology platforms to convey its “Simplicity Redefined” value proposition. The first use of technology was a high-level unveiling video that would provoke the viewer and pique their interest. This video resides on both YouTube and the ConnectKey platform landing page, and has viewers driven to it via various promotional channels such as social media and emails. Currently on YouTube alone it has had over 335,000 views.
Another critical element was an Interactive brochure. The interactive brochure was a way for the Xerox team to showcase the capabilities of Xerox ConnectKey and how it ties to the customer value proposition of security, productivity, cost control and convenience. Users can click through the embedded digital assets such as videos, simulators, infographics, virtual demos and more – to help them deliver a more powerful ConnectKey story.
A ConnectKey Vault PDF housed all critical customer-facing ConnectKey material under one roof, making it easy and seamless to navigate from one to the other. Both offline and online versions of this tool are available for consumers.
Other multimedia assets offered are the “Day in the Life” videos that present the viewer a humorous perspective on how ConnectKey devices solve their businesses challenges. The series consists of five, one-to-two minute video “episodes” to entice the target audience and educate potential customers on the unique features of ConnectKey —and how it can make their lives easier and their work more efficient.
To facilitate sales learning and training, Xerox developed a new sales tool that teaches reps the basics of what ConnectKey products offered, as well as provided them a quick way to create a workable configuration of a device of their choice. The Build Your Own tool allows a rep or a customer to learn about and build their own multifunction printer that they could then buy off of Xerox.com or from a rep or dealer.
To help the field find and utilize all the assets, the Xerox team created and implemented a searchable, interactive PDF of resources that contained over 50 sales and marketing assets available for the field. The app version of this tool is mobile and tablet-friendly, adding the link to the users home screen on their mobile device.
Xerox also leveraged social media for ongoing marketing and messaging. ConnectKey has been the subject of many tweets, a “Simpler Work” YouTube Video series on future of work, chat sessions and a guest blog. The team included social media links on the ConnectKey web page, and here have also been “Ask the Experts” Google + sessions.
The ConnectKey campaign has help Xerox gain a three percent share, and delivered a 13 percent growth in install activity.
GLOBAL/LOCAL
Who: Lionbridge Technologies, with supporting partners Marketo and Salesforce
What: Lionbridge In-House European Global Email Campaign
The Lowdown: The Lionbridge Global Email Marketing campaign launched in spring 2014 to share best practices around executing global campaigns and highlight its Global Marketing Operations solution. To practice what it preaches, the language translation experts at Lionbridge sent emails and associated assets that were localized for target European countries.
Beyond translating the campaign’s emails, the team also adapted a video, solution brief, eBook, and landing page into five different languages. Lionbridge was able to effectively approach markets with different communication requirements, times zones and language barriers, while maintaining consistent messaging for its brand. The campaign is still available on an opt-in basis for sales to leverage with their prospects.
While the Lionbridge marketing team had executed successful email campaigns across multiple languages and nationalities before, it had not developed a systematic and easily replicable process around such a project. Through this campaign, marketers were able to connect to top markets and communicate with prospects in their native languages, on a much larger scale than ever before.
The team leveraged Lionbridge onDemand, a self-service, translation solution that is conducted through an online portal. This aided the campaign because it allowed the team to quickly and accurately translate assets across content types – email, video, whitepaper, eBook and landing pages. Turnaround time for translation projects is a matter of days, which allowed Lionbridge to execute quickly on strategies with quality translations.
Marketo hosted all campaign assets, members and workflows. Lionbridge used it to gather and normalize data and send out the campaign. Personalized tokens, segmentation, and dynamic content were all Marketo tools that were used during this execution.
Salesforce served as the connector between marketing and sales. Lionbridge used Salesforce campaigns to let the sales team opt their contacts into the campaign and choose a language for them. Salesforce (and the Marketo Sales Insight add on) served as a window into their leads’ engagement in the campaign, including email opens, clicks, form completions, web visits, contact requests and more. Marketers could also automatically associate opportunities with the campaign and thus prove ROI.
The campaign was delivered to more than 5,800 people and the number is continuing to grow due to sales members opting-in more leads that they feel are qualified for the campaign. This campaign contributed to 28 different sales opportunities for Lionbridge, valued at $2.6 million (whereas the cost of the campaign was very low – mostly just time). The biggest sales win to come directly from this campaign so far is a deal with one of the largest airlines in Europe, valued at $62,500.
INTERACTIVITY/ENGAGEMENT
Who: Lincoln Financial Group, with tech partner Customedialabs
What: Chief Retirement Savings Officer Quiz
The Lowdown: A little background: Lincoln Financial Group sponsored the Lincoln Retirement Power Participant Engagement Study to help its clients (employers who sponsor retirement plans) better understand retirement savers. The study identifies 12 types of retirement savers, each named for positive attributes revealed through the research (such as the “Leader,” the “Analyzer” and the “Believer”). Although the study was not promoted to participants/retirement savers (only to employers/plan sponsors), it informed Lincoln’s participant outreach.
Based on the study, Lincoln developed an online Chief Retirement Savings Officer quiz to engage participants in an innovative, game-like way. The online quiz leveraged the corporate “Chief Life Officer” advertising campaign, which was used directly with participants. Plan participants make up the primary audience for the quiz. It is also being demonstrated to employers (plan sponsors) and intermediaries (financial advisors and consultants) for their use with participants.
For the B2C end-user audience, the goals of the Chief Retirement Savings Officer Quiz are to increase engagement with Lincoln among current participants and increase both one-on-one meetings with plan representatives and traffic to its participant web content.
For the plan sponsor and intermediary (B2B client) audiences, the quiz offers a new opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of participants as well as plan-level insights and a chance to increase participant engagement in retirement plans.
The focal point of this campaign, an interactive engagement tool, is itself a technology solution; it is a web-based retirement personality quiz.
Results so far: 2,500-plus Quiz site sessions, 2,000-plus Quiz site users, 7,000-plus Quiz site page views, and two of the top three articles on LincolnFinancial.com are linked from the quiz results page, due to click-through activity by quiz takers. The quiz has been featured at several events, including industry conferences, advisor/consultant due diligence meetings, sales presentations and webcasts.
ANALYTICS, MEASUREMENT & ATTRIBUTION
Who: Chicago Board Options Exchange, with partner agency Stein IAS (Americas)
What: CBOE Execute Success Campaign
The Lowdown: The campaign’s goal was to determine under which conditions the target audience of traders would be most likely to respond to Chicago Board digital advertising – and use that intelligence to drive future media planning and form the foundation for additional studies.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and Stein IAS (Amercias) teamed to apply advanced data analysis to drive marketing strategy and results. CBOE is the leader and pioneering exchange for trading options and volatility products. Last summer, the agency began to more closely examine the relationship of broader market activity to advertising response.
Stein collected and analyzed click-through rate data for CBOE across all digital display venues for several months. The data was analyzed by day of week and hour of day – overlaying daily market data for DJIA and NASDAQ. Outliers and market anomalies were removed or significantly reduced, such as major CBOE announcements and the impact of higher visibility rich media ad units.
The team was able to discover under which market conditions engagement with CBOE’s ads significantly increased – as well as pinpoint which days saw increased engagement, regardless of moves in the market. Based on this intelligence, the team has been able to accelerate impressions by day and in response to market conditions. CBOE and Stein are currently expanding the analysis further to determine potential impact on engagement with ads by product type according to day of week and market conditions to further hone the ability to serve up the right financial product at the right time for investors to consider and trade CBOE options.
Technology, and more so the integration of disparate platforms into one actionable database, drove the nuanced learning and, ultimately, opportunity for CBOE.
Front-end performance (i.e. response rates) for the campaign outperformed industry benchmarks by 66 percent, website traffic spiked 15 percent and website visits per-user spiked 20 percent. Over 1,200 traders registered for Chicago Board webinars (with a 50 percent average attendance rate).
INBOUND LEAD ACQUISITION/GENERATION
Who: Tableau Software
What: In-House Medium Data campaign
The Lowdown: Tableau’s software delivers fast analytics, visualization and rapid-fire business intelligence on data of any size, format, or subject. The campaign was aimed at spreading the word that Tableau allows users to get answers from data quickly, no programming required. From executive dashboards to ad-hoc reports, Tableau lets you share mobile and browser-based, interactive analytics in a few clicks. The Tableau team had three goals for this quick-hit campaign: to foster discussion on social media platforms, gain interest and coverage from the media and drive product trials to its website.
The campaign ran for one day only, so the team had to move quickly to have everything go off without a hitch. A cross-functional team of marketers worked together to make it all happen. This involved creating a script, producing a video, creating a new webpage, pulling together a social media plan and incentives given to users who engaged with the campaign.
The social campaign was the most integral part of the campaign. The team used Hootsuite to manage all social sharing and conversation. Marketers used the in-house website CMS, Drupal, to create the page, hosted the video on the Tableau YouTube page and used Google Analytics to measure success.
The campaign received a wide variety of media coverage, a big boost in social shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn, as well as 850 clicks to its custom Bit.ly link. 130 product trials were attributed directly to this campaign.
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