The transformational power of an entertaining story.

The back story

ResponseTap are leaders in ‘Call intelligence’. If the phone call is an important part of the customer journey (high ticket items e.g. holidays) then Call intelligence allows marketers to understand which campaigns, channels and keywords make their customers pick up the phone.

Over a pint – ResponseTap came about over a few beers in a university bar between the founders Ross and Richard. Two years later the business had 100 customers and had joined the Telegraph’s Tech Start-Up 100 most promising technology start-ups in Europe. Today, having raised £4m in funding, the business has 80 staff and offices in London, Manchester and Atlanta.

The quest

Back in early 2019 it was clear to RT that traditional content marketing wasn’t working. It had become so bad that recent campaigns had generated zero responses. Webinars and ebooks didn’t engage prospects and SDRs felt on the back foot when making an initial call.

Like any good marketing team, ResponseTap had to think and act on the fly. What they learned through their failures was, the more creative and interesting they made their campaigns, the more this gave SDRs an invaluable ‘ice breaker’ moment.

According to their data and sales feedback, trying to engage customers using the traditional funnel approach just didn’t work anymore. Nick Ashmore (VP Marketing) states: “It takes too long to take prospects through AIDA. Sales team want conversations with prospects immediately.”

Lucy Brook, Marketing Manager at ResponseTap, commented: “We try to kick start the buying cycle and create ice breakers for our sales team using creative direct mail campaigns and face to face events. However, due to the absence of a clear company vision and mission, we are stuck in the cycle of telling the same benefit-led story with a new, single use creative angle each time. We needed a fresh approach.

We set out to:

• Create ‘ice-breaker’ moments for Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to engage customers and create new pipeline opportunities.
• Generate £250k of new revenue.
• Educate marketers on the gap in their analytics stack and create memorable conversations.
• Position ResponseTap as ‘not just another’ MarTech brand.

Audience

• 4,000 medium/large businesses in sectors where the phone call is important to the customer journey; including travel, finance,
  insurance, automotive and healthcare.
• Marketing Managers, Digital Marketing Managers, SEO and Analytics professionals.

Insights

• Not all marketers are the same – some are digitally savvy others are trying to do the basics well and juggle both traditional and digital.
• Regardless of specialism they all try to optimise and deliver better results.
• They all experience the pain of Martech, with multiple overlapping tools that take too much time to configure.

Strategy

• To create a brand platform based on an inconvenient truth at the heart of 21st century marketing. To bring this story to life in a fun, entertaining and memorable way. To position ResponseTap in a positive light and drive sales.

The entertaining story

Winging It.

Have you ever been asked a tough question by your boss, like “What’s the CPA on our latest campaign?” Have you ever felt so pressurised that you blag your way to some nonsensical answer? You’re not alone. We all do it. It’s called ‘Winging it’.

We decided to take this truth and amplify it in a creative/humorous way creating a bit of light relief around a difficult subject using the comedic talents of Alistair Green.

Activation

The success of this campaign required buy-in from the Sales teams. The marketing team spent 3 weeks promoting the campaign internally before going live to prospects in August 2019. This included briefing sessions, quizzes as well as internal promotions and merchandise.

• New campaign website www.howtowingit.com
• 6 comedy video sketches featuring Alistair Green (dry, oddball style comedian) trying to blag his way through difficult questions.
• The site contained a humorous download of different styles of Winging it, including: Divert & Distract, Duck & Dash, Bluff & Fudge and Baffle & Bewilder.
• The campaign kicked off with a challenge to the creative industry on Twitter via @Oneminutebriefs
• The campaign was pushed out via the internal marketing team at RT using Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn as the main platforms. This was followed up with an orchestrated email programme as well as a small budget for paid social and retargeting.