In collaboration with AccTech Systems we’ve proved that true smarketing is possible, achieving a 3000% ROI

CHALLENGE

When we began work with AccTech, the company already had a small marketing team doing a great job growing their brand in South Africa. While they may have been struggling a little with content creation and the nurturing process, they were one thing above all - clever, with a whole bag of great tactics to talk to their market. That’s why we were so keen to work together. What AccTech needed was the strategy to pull everything together - an overarching approach. And working together, we knew we could deliver on this.

‘We had never worked with a big agency like Wings4U before. Our marketing team is small, made up of six people. We didn’t have the capacity, especially when it came to content creation, to run campaigns ourselves. We were relying heavily on the product and business unit owners to supply content. It was difficult. We weren’t able to target our customers effectively and provide quality information and value to customers to help them make decisions.’ - says Kelso Hannay, Digital Marketing Manager at AccTech Systems. When we started our collaboration, the main focus was to create awareness about the need for digital transformation in the agriculture and manufacturing industries. This was structured as two independent campaigns, which were focused on generating leads, nurturing qualified prospects and creating sales opportunities for Dynamics 365.

Although we were sometimes pushed for time to launch content at opportune moments, the team at AccTech was always fully committed to understanding and integrating our strategic guidance - always asking questions and keen to learn. On our part, we’ve strived to deeply understand the focus industries and how AccTech helped in specific and tailored ways. The AccTech team has been pivotal to content excellence, providing their expertise and insights every step of the way.

SOLUTION

At first, we were focused on building a campaign strategy. This included identifying the buyer personas for both industries and content, which helped us to formulate the necessary topic ideas and create content focusing on the prospects’ pain points. When we presented the findings to the AccTech team, discovery was made to see how close to the target they had been: they were hitting the right objectives, but weren’t aligned with the way in which prospects or clients perceived their company and its value. Content created spanned blogs, eBooks, nurturing emails, social media ads, and landing pages - all set up and managed through Hubspot.

Moreover, in order to ensure that qualified leads would be managed by the sales team and to help with the lead nurturing process in general, we organised an alignment workshop involving AccTech sales and our marketing team. Soon thereafter, when the nurturing process was set up and SLAs between marketing and sales confirmed, we came to understand just how much thought leadership the AccTech team already had in their industry. The team truly understood the first principles of inbound as they started sharing the blog posts in their own networks and, in parallel, we were able to optimise the paid media with the insights coming back from the sales team on the prospects we were getting. The result: liftoff and high-quality leads started to come in. All the activity prompted the AccTech team to start learning about what was being done and why, so they would know how to implement the same strategy for other products in their organisation.

‘Before we engaged with Wings4U, we were using a marketing approach nowhere near as mature as we came to experience.’ adds Johan Potgieter, Divisional Director at AccTech Systems. ‘With Wings4U we were introduced to a well-structured marketing engine that delivers results. We’ve closed one deal and are very close to a second as we speak.’ With the second manufacturing-focused campaign, we extended our work, building further momentum after our initial success.

RESULTS

The results speak for themselves. And so much of that was down to the great work from the AccTech team who were not only super diligent with following up and nurturing the leads that we handed them, but also kept us in the loop in terms of the kind of content they needed to nurture and close the deals.‘Awesome work equals awesome results. There was a lot of work that went into the campaigns. The scale of content was incredible. And it all came together efficiently – the collaboration, timelines and content. We’ll build on it going forward.’ says Hannay.

Ultimately, it was AccTech who brought it home.Our collaboration worked because they understood the value of effective digital marketing and we were able to understand their industry. ‘Microsoft was the enabler in bringing AccTech and Wings4U together. Now, seeing the methodology behind the campaigns and the qualified leads Wings4U has given us, we have a whole new perspective on marketing.’ Potgieter sums up. With a campaign ROI in excess of 3,000% for AccTech Systems (and 450%+ for Microsoft), AccTech has reaped the rewards of the campaigns and lined up a number of major deals, with one already closed. More than this, AccTech continues to benefit from a major reputational boost in the marketplace, realising new opportunities with effective digital marketing.