Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
The EMEA Marketing team at Aruba have found the perfect way to scale their activities across 40 countries. With CRMT’s Demand.Center platform, they’ve improved the quality, consistency and speed-to-market of their campaigns — with remarkable results
The Challenge
When Jon Moger took up his role as Senior Director EMEA Marketing at Aruba, a company specialising in networking and security, including mobility and IOT, he recognised the team he’d inherited was under immense pressure.
“At the time, there were just eight marketers compared with 600-plus salespeople,” he recalls. “In effect, they were having to reach 40 different countries within EMEA, which meant having to prioritise and make difficult decisions.”
Scaling the business was Jon’s top priority. He increased EMEA Marketing to 17 people, but other challenges lay ahead.
“Aside from running campaigns, we needed to get people on point with our story and message — so everyone could articulate the narrative and the vision in a consistent way,” says Jon.
“Marketing is not an island, so we also had to find ways to collaborate better with others across EMEA, such as Sales Operations, Sales Enablement and other teams, so they could act as advocates for Marketing and what we’re trying to do.”
An opportunity to innovate arose when Aruba adopted HPE’s Marketing Automation System (Eloqua) as part of HPE’s GDPR compliance programme.
“We took this as a moment to step back and review what else we needed to be successful,” says Jon.
The outcome proved a game-changer for EMEA Marketing. Jon saw the need for EMEA Marketing to scale, but he didn’t want an over-reliance on external marketing agencies for events and other activities.
“That might have introduced GDPR compliance risks, data
integrity challenges and a lack of visibility of interactions across formats,” he says.
The Solution
Within weeks of launching Demand.Center, key benefits became evident. So, why is Demand.Center so effective?
Typically, the platform enables marketers to:
- Drive closer collaboration and alignment between central and field marketing teams
- Simplify segmentation with audience targeting
- Accelerate go-to-market using campaign playbooks
- Increase governance using a briefing mechanism
- Enable brand consistency using asset templates
- Orchestrate multi-channel campaigns with management tools and a campaign calendar
- Drive effective campaign reporting with a CRM-integrated campaign hierarchy
- Gain operational insights via a reporting suite
Getting the most from the platform
Demand.Center is delivering results for Aruba. But what kinds of other companies might benefit? Jon offers his perspective:
“The platform is ideal if you have more than about 15 people in your marketing organisation and you want to simplify marketing automation. Suddenly, you can scale your operations. And if you’re operating in a complex environment, the platform simplifies it for you
What were the key achievements?
“Time to market accelerated dramatically,” says Jon. “Demand.Center has given us an agility model that’s reduced marketing execution times from weeks to 2-3 days — and we’re on course to make it just hours.”
Within the first 10 weeks, the EMEA team set up over 50 campaigns with the tool and started averaging up to 10 initiatives per week.
“We now have the ability to look at marketing performance in a more holistic manner,” explains Jon. “We can see what’s set up, how it’s been done, and this allows us to monitor the delivery of campaigns against the budget allocated.
“We can make better use of data. We also have the ability to add new variables that enrich data around an account or individual. We can also identify gaps in our current data governance model — and fill these in a more thoughtful way.”
Demand.Center is a great fit for Aruba’s team. Marketers just starting out in their careers can develop their skills and create their campaigns in a safe environment with clear boundaries and best practice playbooks, without needing to be experts in the execution platforms such as Eloqua. Meanwhile, experienced professionals can still drive innovation utilising bespoke campaigns through the same platform and processes ultimately progressing towards more strategic management opportunities
10
Average number of initiatives launched per week
2
Number of days to get a campaign in to market, accelerated from weeks
40+
Countries supported by local campaigns
Next Steps
Although Demand.Center has got off to a strong start, Jon believes that reaping the full ROI is a gradual process:
“First, it’s about adoption by our team and improving their effectiveness. Next, there’s better analytics from our campaign performance. And from there, we get increased revenue. It’s early days, but I feel very positive about all of these things.”
Already Aruba is looking to deepen the use of Demand.Center to drive far more granular reporting down to an individual asset level. The company is also broadening the reach of the platform to other territories beyond EMEA.
