Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain is the world’s leading provider of secure information management services for online and offline document storage, scanning services, secure destruction services and disaster recovery services. Established in the US in the 1900s in an actual ‘Iron Mountain’ to store confidential government information, Iron Mountain has expanded into over 30 countries and supplies the world’s leading organisations, including over 80% of the UK’s FTSE500 companies.
The company’s high profile presence among major corporations and key verticals, such as the Legal and Pharmaceutical sectors, has helped it secure a strong foothold with Europe’s leading companies. However, with a desire to grow the business, Iron Mountain wanted to enter into the SME space by targeting medium sized enterprises across Europe.
Initial research into this market conducted by Iron Mountain showed low awareness levels of 1%. When prospects were discussing ‘information management’ they tended to look to larger companies like IBM, HP etc as the main players in this space. It also revealed a relative naivety towards these services, with organisations believing that they could confidently cope with this type of information management in-house and an inherent reluctance to outsource to third parties. With little notoriety and tasked with championing a service the market clearly felt it didn’t need, the challenge was palpable.
Approach
Through our proprietary Brand Asset Management (BAM) process we
developed a strategy which allowed us to strongly position Iron
Mountain and its product portfolio to SMEs. The strategy informed
us that the audience was at a basic level in their understanding
and simply wanted their information kept secure. The opportunity
was for Iron Mountain to show how they were the trusted leader in
assuring protection and optimisation of all information assets.
Turning this into a creative platform we developed the "Where's
your tipping point?" concept. This encouraged the audience to
think about what they were doing on a daily basis and whether it
really was the best thing for them to be doing? The creative was
designed to get people to stop and think for that moment,
"Actually, have I reached a tipping point?"
The execution of the creative used the universally known symbol
for information 'i' and created a series of characters which
depicted 'tipping point' moments the audience typically experiences
- showing how Iron Mountain can help them overcome these
problems.
With this being a new target market for Iron Mountain a fully
integrated contact strategy was developed, with a campaign site at
the heart, designed to move people through their understanding of
'information management'. Content was developed to answer specific
questions the audience had throughout the buying process and key
landing pages were designed to intercept traffic depending on where
they were in the buying cycle in order to increase conversions.
Channels used in the campaign were PPC, email, direct mail,
affiliate marketing, display advertising and banner
retargeting.
A lead nurturing programme was also developed, meaning that once
people had downloaded a key piece of content we could start to
nurture them with the appropriate educational or 'welcome'
messages.
The activity is in the process of being replicated across eight
countries with the creative concept being translated into the
relevant languages.
Results
Six weeks since launch the campaign is still in its infancy, but
as an initial indication of campaign success there has already
been:
- A total of 3,900 unique visitors to the UK campaign site,
spending an average of four minutes each.
- 600 leads generated through online and offline and channels.
The conversion rate is currently unknown as the process from lead
to sale is roughly 3-6 months, depending on the product.
Involvement
This work was undertaken by BBN UK: IAS b2b Marketing.