In light of Seismic’s limited presence in the EMEA market, our key objectives were to:
- Create and build brand awareness of Seismic within EMEA, specifically the UK, France and Germany.
- Raise the profile of Seismic’s EMEA executives and other spokespeople.
- Support lead generation and business growth across the region.
We implemented a tailored multi-region content and media relations strategy to help raise awareness of the Seismic brand in EMEA, building on our work with Seismic in the US. Our activity was targeted at sales and marketing decision-makers and C-suite leaders in enterprise organisations. This demanding audience, combined with the disruption of 2020 and the fact that sales enablement was not a well-known term in EMEA, meant that our messaging had to be razor sharp to make an impact.
It also had to be localised to address country-specific challenges and opportunities, as well as requiring a high level of flexibility given the ongoing impact of the pandemic.
After analysing the market and Seismic’s proposition, we focused on connecting Seismic’s value proposition with local concerns to fuel demand for Seismic’s stories in vertical and tech press, before targeting national/premium business publications.
Using a combination of market insights and input from EMEA leadership, we developed a set of strategic content themes that geared content creation towards the most salient messages. This ensured consistent and impactful stories. The themes were based on the key challenges facing prospects/customers in each region, positioning Seismic’s offering as a solution to these pain points.
Our content strategy focused on five key pillars:
- Put people into the story – humanise and localise the Seismic message. Use the company’s knowledgeable EMEA executives to bring stories to life and position them as industry thought leaders.
- Be bold and opinion lead – define the narrative and lead the conversation on high-impact topics that connect with Seismic’s business, without relying on ‘sales enablement’ being a known term. Communicate key talking points consistently across the market.
- Educate, don’t sell – move away from product specific messaging. Elevate the conversation by focusing on the strategic business benefits of sales software. Prioritise educating business decision-makers through thought leadership to drive engagement and impact top of funnel leads.
- Be timely – attach Seismic to current events and hot topics that align with journalists’ agendas to generate media opportunities. E.g. the shift to online selling amidst Covid-19.
- Make use of the ecosystem – build media interest and market credibility by leveraging case studies, partnership news and joint speaking opportunities.
With this blueprint in place, we aligned individual spokespeople with key industry topics based on their expertise and region. We then used a combination of thought leadership, news, reactive comments, speaking submissions and executive profiling to build momentum, raise the profile of Seismic and its executives across a range of channels, and scale the brand in EMEA.
Campaign management and content creation was handled centrally by our London team. Our local experts based in Paris and Berlin managed content translation and localisation to ensure that it resonated in their geographies, as well as handling all local media relations.