Ciena’s Marketing as a Service Delivered Engaged Prospects
Creating a cohesive story, meaningful content, and an attractive value proposition to engage with both enterprise and wholesale customers sounds daunting. But with the right partner, itis absolutely possible.
A carrier recently partnered with Ciena through the Marketing as a Service (MaaS) program to achieve that goal. As a part of their Partnership Success Model, Ciena created the MaaS program to directly engage and collaborate with their customers to create customized marketing and sales enablement solutions for long-term business success.
Strong marketing assets and brand awareness were in place for the client’s existing lines of business, but they needed to build awareness and targeted messaging for their new, robust diverse offering. Given their target customers’ desire for quick and easy access to key information like maps, specifications, and other relevant details, the carrier needed to bolster their content library for the launch.
Through multiple discovery sessions to truly understand the carrier’s product and marketing objectives, the Ciena MaaS team developed a multi-channel, engagement-driven marketing plan that enabled the carrier’s sales team to have meaningful conversations with target customers and convert them into new business opportunities.
The marketing campaign targeted key roles and decision-making unit (DMU) members involved in the optical transport buying process and included a wide range of tactics:
- Raising brand awareness through writing and distributing a press release announcing the carrier’s new investments
- Engaging the target customers with new content focused on their needs
- Enabling the sales team to succeed with new resources, including a one-sheet, a network map, and a pre-launch carrier kit
- Driving customer engagement through multiple channels– a multi-stage email campaign, and an account-based display ad campaign
- Generating leads through new landing pages specific to the DMU
- Generating awareness and buzz through static and animated social content
- Training the carrier’s sales team to leverage social coverage and generate customer interest
Offering unique routes and customer-centric value propositions, the marketing program showed tremendous success:
- 60% engagement from 2,960 email opens
- 12,500+ landing page views
- 4.7% conversion rate through ABM display advertising
- 83 new business opportunities
The carrier’s sales team continues to leverage the evergreen campaign resources. They use the customer insights from the CMaaS program to effectively engage with key stakeholders and wholesale buyers at international, national and regional service providers (RSPs) through multiple methods.
Partnership success is the cornerstone of Ciena’s MaaS program. The team has spent considerable time collaborating, developing strategies, and building tactics from the ground up. Together, Ciena and the client built a seamless marketing experience tailored to the carrier’s specific business needs – and saw considerable success as a result.
About Ciena MaaS
With the Ciena Partnership Success Model, participants of the Ciena Partner Network can leverage a dedicated Ciena MaaS support team, resources and tailored services, and a suite of third-party sales and marketing technologies to support their unique business goals. The Ciena MaaS martech stack ensures clients get the benefit of the latest sales enablement and marketing tools and intelligence – without the heavy price tag and long-term contracts. Ciena client partners have access to unparalleled marketing strategy and tactical resources with detailed success reporting to see how their marketing investment is driving business success.
Check out these resources to preview Ciena's Marketing as a Service offering.