BEA grows sales through narrowcasting

Audience specific microsites and targeted email newsletters deepen relationships with key customer groups

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

BEA is the leader in developing and implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, but it faced stiff competition from big industry players like IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

BEA needed a strategy to achieve three goals:

1. Differentiate itself from the competition by telling a unique story
2. Market a highly technical solution to a variety of audiences–both technical and non-technical
3. Support a sales cycle that averaged between 6 and 12 months

Middleware technology involves complex implementations and requires a great deal of education to support the sales cycle. Yet developers, architects, IT managers, and CIOs all have very different concerns and responsibilities. BEA needed to find a scalable, efficient way to deliver relevant information to each of these groups.

TENDO PROGRAM

In order to deliver the right information to the right people, Tendo developed a targeted content strategy that:

• Researched and identified the information needs and preferences of two key audiences: execs and IT managers
• Developed a customized website destination for each audience designed to fit its particular needs; for example, the IT2IT site featured discussion forums allowing user interaction, while the Exex2Exec program relied on in-person hosted events to communicate key information
• Developed a corresponding newsletter for each audience to drive traffic to the site and reinforce BEA's brand value

Tendo provided ongoing support by creating, developing, and managing a wide variety of content for the IT2IT and Exec2Exec websites and newsletters.

RESULTS

The audience marketing programs proved to be an efficient and cost-effective way of developing individual relationships with prospects and supporting the sales cycle:

• Prospects could easily find the information that applied to their role and learn about the benefits of SOA and the competitive advantages of BEA's product suite at their own pace, without being turned off by a hard sales line
• The e-newsletters served to anchor relationships with target prospects by delivering practical, helpful content to them individually, fulfilling their need for information, while also reminding them of the value of BEA's products
• The newsletters drove registrations for events, both online and in-person, initiating qualified leads for the field sales team