Wacom EMEA leadgen
Wacom had to adapt to the new normal caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its target audience had changed how they worked, and Wacom had to meet their new needs through its tools. We created a remarkable lead generation campaign by providing an offer for the Education and Media & Entertainment markets in a total of 25 EMEA countries.
The challenge
Leads generated by Wacom showed low quality, with content marketing initiatives not showing enough nor tangible ROI. There also were substantial difficulties in offering tangible value to B2B prospects and prove the great benefits of Wacom’s technologies. Local & European Headquarters teams were typically working under sales pressure, lacking the necessary resources to build a solid lead generation basis.
At the same time, Europe had strongly been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, making millions of people having to stop their social and work lives suddenly. Wacom’s pen tablets and screens were typically used in on-site environments, such as digitalized classrooms or productivity tools in media & entertainment production outlets. But the company had a key asset on one specific aspect that could now help decisively millions of people to have a better work and education experience: a vast amount of knowledge on hybrid tools, mixing traditional handwriting with screens and digital inputs. So, Wacom had to create a unique offering to the market in order to cover their new needs.
The strategy
The social media ads strategy focused on tackling the pain points for each Buyer Persona precisely.
For media & entertainment, the key pain point from studio owners, directors, designers and visual artists was to keep excellent creative levels in the new normal and during lockdowns. But also making sure the creative workflows could not only be as good as they were before but, if possible, exceed the pre-pandemic performance.
We launched a series of contents around the new normal and the animation future to address that need, offering free 1:1 consultation sessions with animation experts across the 25 included countries.
Instead, for education, the critical pain point from teachers, pedagogical managers, directors and IT managers was to keep the education quality in a suddenly remote environment, with millions of students having switched to online video calling platforms in a few months. In general, education processes had replicated online what they used to do offline, losing a significant quality factor and missing the big shift: going from ensuring education could go on remotely to making sure education quality was kept! But the education community was utterly exhausted. We owe so much to our education heroes!
We offered our heroes free 1:1 demos across the whole geographical scope on delivering the best education experience on an elementary basis. Mixing our cultural and millennial handwriting tradition with digital boards, providing heroes and students with an enhanced remote environment has proved a simple but significant shift to make.
The target audience
Our strategy’s fundamental goal was building lead generation campaigns that could become the basis of Wacom’s pipeline generation. We created LinkedIn and Xing campaigns targeting two key verticals. One side is the core audience of media & entertainment, including animation, visual effects, and gaming. On the other side, we targeted the education market. In both verticals, we impacted only the decision-makers.
25 EMEA countries were included in the scope: Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Czech Rep., Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and South Africa.
The execution
We mixed account targeting (ABM) and member targeting on LinkedIn. As a result, we targeted 1.300 animation companies and 270 key education entities across the whole territory in terms of account targeting.
An audience of 71.000 key decision-makers in media and animation was defined, with a strong focus in countries where the vertical has more relative weight within GDP. For education, the audience was 340.000 members across the functions described above.
We launched eleven campaigns on LinkedIn and Xing, with three key formats: single image post, carousel ads and message ads. The optimization strategy is based both on creative and audience optimization. Ongoing weekly optimization meetings with LinkedIn take place, and metrics are reviewed daily by our team.
The results
The results were excellent. We exceeded the forecast and obtained high qualified leads. Through the right messaging, accurate targeting, and the use of suitable platforms, we made this campaign a success. In addition, the campaign won an international award.
The results were impressive in terms of actual metrics: millions of impressions, thousands of interactions, hundreds of B2B leads, of which 70% of them were qualified.