Want to build a demand center? Take huge helpings of expertise, mix with nimble support

Background 

In 2011, Yesler built a comprehensive marketing- and campaign-operations program for one of our global tech client’s North America teams. Since then, we’ve partnered across the organization’s global and field marketing groups and all its acquired companies, providing a range of services such as creative, digital and paid media, marketing automation, and program management.  

Growth, change, and acquisitions are facts of successful business. So like most companies, our client wanted to streamline and standardize marketing tools, processes, and messages on a global scale. The goal was to create centralized frameworks in a comprehensive model that could be used for end-to-end campaign creation, delivery, and analysis. In 2018, Yesler helped them realize it. 

Strategy 

The work began in late 2018. Having tackled similar projects for other enterprise and mid-size clients, we knew creating a demand center required standardizing and centralizing martech tools and execution, and evolving all existing marketing services to align to relevant operating models and teams.  

Our plan was to supply: 

Expertise. An all-encompassing project calls for strategies and plans for major elements like the evolution of marketing services, development of operating and governance models, and the rollout of a cloud marketing platform. We delivered best-practices instruction, skill-enhancement opportunities, and knowledge backed by industry standards and tailored to the organization’s needs. The team trained leaders on how to help marketers learn to use the demand center’s digital capabilities and resources. And since we had a bird’s-eye view of the project, we also provided cross-regional insights to ensure consistency for our client. 

Project support. We helped implement the overall strategy we helped define. Our team planned, delivered, or assisted with rollout-program identification, decomposition (breaking deliverables progressively into smaller components), and development. We consulted on optimizing nurture and data-driven programs, and we built an asset- and scenario-based template library.  

Solution 

After the project launched in October 2018, the core Yesler team held daily internal Agile meetings and monthly business reviews with stakeholders. Our team was based in Seattle, but members traveled or dialed in to meetings and strategy workshops held globally. 

As of mid-2019, Yesler had cohosted two strategy workshops (with more planned) with the client’s go-to-market and marketing operations teams. The focus of the workshops ranged from technical implementation and marketing program development to overall demand center strategy.  

Because the project was fluid—sometimes a change management task expanded into overall operational or marketing strategy—we consulted our internal experts as needed. A few helped our core team by consulting on martech strategy and technical implementation, including change management.  

As inter-team operational support and strategy work continued, we refined and adjusted the services we delivered. These included: 

Coordinating the implementation of the organization’s marketing automation tool and an intake platform (a marketer request tool). We created a requirements framework and advised on marketing automation and API integration.  

Consulting on marketing operations, performance-tracking strategy, governance, tele-strategy, change management, and training and readiness materials. 

Designing a unified look and feel for the demand center project. This led to creating a field marketing awareness campaign which included email templates, an interactive infographic, and animated video ads.  

Performing a content audit and creating project playbooks and executive communications. 

Results 

The demand center’s first nurture programs went live in November 2018. Early results showed that the center significantly streamlined processes. For one pilot region, marketers used the demand center to send 30,000 emails, engaging 6,000 contacts, activating 1,671 of them, and sending 172 to telemarketing, for a 25% average increase in open rate and 183% average increase in click-to-open rates. 

Then, in early 2019, we began working with executives to help address larger, related issues like the organization’s marketing operating model, including how marketers engage with each other, measure success, and plan new campaigns.