The groundwork for global ABM
Outstanding insights and messaging in lightning speed
Since 2002 Riverbed has helped the world’s largest organizations empower the digital experience and drive enterprise performance with two industry-leading solutions that transform data into actionable insight. To lay the groundwork for a shift to a global ABM model, we worked with their team to produce highly detailed market insight across several industry verticals, as well as messaging houses, at speed. This led to multiple successful global ABM campaigns, all in market far quicker as a result.
The Challenge
The Riverbed team sought to shift from a lead-gen model to a more targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM) model for better cut-through in key industry verticals, and to drive higher lifetime value from strategic accounts – a go-to-market overhaul that would revolutionize their global marketing function. The challenge for Just Global was to produce highly targeted intelligence and insights for Riverbed’s new go-to-market foundations. The ask was to deliver this as fast as possible, and in as much detail as possible.
The Solution
Our strategy team covered a total of 11 industry verticals globally, and increased the level of intelligence on five strategic accounts.
This involved:
- Understanding key themes and trends across segments.
- Unearthing the Decision-Making Unit (DMU) in each vertical and mapping the buyer journey.
- Revealing key personas for engagement – their challenges, media and topic consumption trends – and mapping this intelligence to content strategies aligned to the buyer journey.
- Discovering competitor pressures – including their positioning, differentiators and marketing activities.
- Mapping target account DMUs’ – understanding their internal pressures, business transformation initiatives, topic consumption habits, and technology dependencies.
It was important to provide a global context and understanding, as well as regional differences to inform the program and targeting strategies. Riverbed could then focus on target accounts and deliver the greatest return possible with memorable and personalized content.
This combined with Just Global’s tech stack, and 1-2-1 calls with market leading analysists at Gartner and Global Data, meant intelligence was delivered to Riverbed at lightning speed.
Our content team developed contextual value propositions and messaging houses for each industry vertical, along with outlines for key items like thought leadership reports. This ensured content journeys were connected to the insights, and as targeted as possible.
Our media team also discovered channels underused by competitors that would give Riverbed the edge.
An Example
One of the industry verticals is international banking. Intelligence revealed priorities for the audience were:
- modernizing legacy systems
- automating processes
- enhancing customer experiences
- addressing sustainability concerns
Regional differences showed NAMER over-indexed on some topics when compared to EMEA and APAC, such as user and customer experience. Incorporating this into the strategy led to tailored assets to address these needs, highlighting the solution’s value in solving critical banking challenges.
Content became about innovation and customer-centricity, and centrally incorporated the word ‘reimagine’ to paint a picture of a more efficient and effective world.
This really resonated with regional audiences and saw web visits from target accounts increase by 1,161% in just one quarter.
The Results
By focusing on a smaller subset of accounts, Riverbed’s pipeline contribution within these accounts increased by 148% YoY.
For one vertical – banking – the campaign delivered a 443% increase in target contacts engaging, and $11.1M in pipeline in just four months.
The level of detail involved, and the speed to market of operating in two-week sprints, gave Riverbed the means to pivot to an agile way of working, and launch a highly targeted campaign in market far quicker.
We have been beyond impressed by the work carried out by the Just Global team. The understanding of our mission, together with the insights produced for us have been exactly what we’ve needed to execute with speed and precision.. Just Global were able to support Riverbed in multiple markets, allowing us to get a true global perspective on the industries and accounts in our sights. By And, by Just Global establishing our relevant research team fast, allowed us to get into market at great speed with breadth across GEOs.
“We have an amazing strategy team who collectively have so much experience, and importantly, across a diverse range of disciplines. We have honed our ability to work at speed and depth and delivered truly great insights that have underpinned Riverbed's go-to-market strategy.”
Looking to drive results like these? Explore our ABM solutions.
