Industry: Technology

Technology /
Page 4

London | Technology

PR Senior Account Manager

Who we’re looking for

April Six is a global B2B PR and marketing agency headquartered in London and with offices in Harefield, Bournemouth, Munich, San Francisco, Seattle, and Singapore. We take looking after our talent seriously – the right candidate will enjoy excellent career opportunities and become part of an exceptional team delivering real business impact, redefining what clients should expect from agency partnerships.

As part of MISSION, our agency has access to capabilities and services not typically found in specialist tech agencies, meaning our talented staff are not only able to gain an unusual depth and breadth of experience, but are also able to offer innovative and often unexpected and creative solutions to our client briefs, driving highly valued and long-term partnerships.

Responsibilities

  • Day to day, to manage clients through the agency, carefully managing expectations and ensuring you adhere to best practice client management through the use of all appropriate systems.
  • To have an in-depth knowledge of the client’s business and the sector in which they operate, and apply this knowledge in your day-to-day management and long-term planning for the client.
  • To ensure we deliver a consistently excellent service and outputs for our client, being responsible for the quality of delivery.
  • To confidently deliver excellent client copy and harness existing journalist relationships to secure media opportunities.
  • To manage client budgets and plan and monitor team hours.
  • To manage the workflow for the Account Executives that you have responsibility for, trouble-shooting where needed, and generally mentor more junior members of the team as they develop their PR skill sets.
  • To identify opportunities for organic client growth, and contribute to/lead the creation of reactive or proactive proposals, ensuring they strike a careful balance between the practical and the inspirational.
  • To contribute to and participate in new business pitches, supporting research, and bringing our ideas to life in presentations.

Benefits (Location Specific)

Room to Grow

Appraisal system with individualised growth objectives and real time feedback

Professional Development Plan

We look to support skills growth with internal support and coaching, alongside online and in-person training and development opportunities

Paid Time Off

28 days’ holiday (plus bank holidays)

Health care cash back scheme

Giving you money back for health-related fees such as dental appointments, contact lenses, prescriptions or physio

Mental Health Hotline

24 hour GP phone or video consultations and a 24-hour helpline offering counselling and supportive information

Moments that Matter

An hour every week to relax, exercise, or pursue something that’s important to you

Anniversary gifts

A special gift every year on your work anniversary to say thank you for being a part of our team

Company lunch

Lunch on the company once a month

Schemes

Electric car leasing scheme, refer a friend scheme, cycle to work scheme.

We are focused on working with the most exciting, forward-thinking mobility brands and manufacturers

We are a people-powered agency whose philosophy is built on the pillars of diversity, sustainability, and inclusivity. If you’re a curious, fearless individual ready to take the next step in your career, there’s a home for you at April Six.

Technology /
Page 4

Elevating the power of tech positioning

The Brief

For more than two decades, Firebrick Consulting has positioned some of the technology industry’s most exciting brands and products from its headquarters in Silicon Valley. Having previously partnered with April Six on successful client initiatives, Firebrick invited our North America team to refresh its overall design and storytelling. The company was seeking to more closely realign its brand elements (logo, visual treatments, website, photography) to its world-class methodology.

The Challenge

What does a world-class brand look like? 

Before our team could begin crafting this new look, we took a deep dive into Firebrick’s existing branding—and that of its competitors—to identify components to improve, remove, and stand apart from. 

We developed and shared seven unique branding concepts (examples above), including preliminary logo explorations, mood boards, and creative examples. These creative directions were inspired by different insights and facets of Firebrick’s business, each of which informed what a world-class brand could look like.

The Solution

“There’s greatness within nearly every tech business—and Firebrick is focused on unleashing it.“ Leverging that core insight, the April Six team built a design logic that feels both modern and sophisticated. In messaging and imagery, the refreshed brand speaks to the deep-down aspirations of CEOs and other senior decision-makers for growth and, yes, greatness. The brand has been intentionally humanized, its differentiated positioning feeding everything from tone-of-voice to look & feel.

The refreshed brand and website advances Firebrick to a premium, sophisticated territory that speaks more assuredly to the modern aspirations of tech leaders.

Technology /
Page 4

Turning a Company of Two Halves into a Single Market-Disrupting Brand

The Brief

Launching into the highly competitive Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) & Cyber Security space, SureCloud needed a familiar yet stand-out rebrand that signalled its bold intentions to break into the U.S. market amid ongoing business transformation.

The Challenge

SureCloud—a cloud-based GRC & Cyber Security provider—felt that, after several years of operating as two independent businesses, it was time to merge operations to create something unique, differentiated, and disruptive.

April Six was on hand to help them plan, execute and communicate this new chapter, internally and externally, with a fresh new visual identity. This was supported by exploratory CISO interviews and guided by an internal playbook, and with a full-scale creative rebrand, underpinned by social campaigns, event stands, and a new website look and feel.

The Insight

Unifying two distinct operations creates wholesale business disruption, and plans can quickly change in this dynamic environment. We saw this as an opportunity to work hand-in-glove with the SureCloud team, maximizing communication at each touchpoint to establish consistent messaging and focus for the lifecycle of the project.

The Creative

We positioned SureCloud as the only provider capable of targeting real-world CISO challenges directly—elevating it from a commoditized ingredient of a GRC & Cyber Security solution, to the main character in a unique end-to-end approach to Governance, Risk and Compliance, through the concept “Sure You Can.”

The Execution

“Sure You Can” is a concept uniquely ownable to SureCloud, it conveys its brand promise of never saying no, and is also a rallying cry to all CISOs stuck worrying if they can handle escalating levels of risk. To date, campaign rollout has included touchpoints across several forms of media, including:

  • Comprehensive website refresh
  • Customer-facing sales deck
  • Internal brand playbook
  • Custom-built event stands
  • LinkedIn and Twitter social tiles
  • Spotify podcast assets

We have a stylish new brand and a unique proposition in-market… April Six has been a valued contributor at every step.

Caren Havelock, CMO

Technology /
Page 4

Creating a New Category in Cloud

The Brief

Lucidworks helps enterprises deliver the delightful experiences that customers expect (yet rarely receive) by connecting insights from anywhere and making them available everywhere. The team at Lucidworks challenged April Six to relaunch the brand and introduce its Connected Experience Cloud (CXC) not merely as a new solution in an existing category, but as an entirely new category pioneered by the company. 

In differentiating CXC to Lucidworks’ prospects, April Six would need to highlight the urgency of understanding customer intent—and reminding the audience that a customer isn’t just the person buying the company’s services. It’s also the company’s employees who rely on access to knowledge to deliver innovation to buyers, and the support agents who are on the frontline of customer experience.

Our Insight

A moment is all it takes—to keep customers engaged or lost to the competition; to keep employees enlightened or lost to the indecision. In that simple, foundational insight, the April Six team identified a relevant truth that would inspire both verbal storytelling and visual design. This is “Lucidworks in the moment.”

The fresh, new brand approach reflects Lucidworks’ mission: to make it simple for its customers to deliver the best search, browse, and discovery experiences. From the refreshed website to updated content and digital-marketing assets (including a series of dynamic use-case videos), the design and messaging invites relevant audiences to explore the possibilities of Lucidworks and engage eagerly with the brand.

The Solution

In design and execution, it was about capturing that instant of clarity or discovery, and conveying the impact of connected experiences. That’s “Lucidworks in the moment.”

The brand’s clean, crisp look-and-feel can be described as “hyper-realistic.” It is designed to cut through the marketing clutter with bold hues and dynamic photography of individuals surrounded by radiating waves of color. It all comes together to signify the human impact (clarity, meaning, confidence, etc.) that CXC-enabled individuals feel in critical shopping or searching moments. The flexibility of the “_____ in the moment” theme allows us to extend the idea beyond the Lucidworks brand to include any action or objective. In that way, “Lucidworks in the moment” serves as a timeless launchpad for branded storytelling.

Technology /
Page 4

Establishing a Challenger to the Tech Giants

The Brief

Seeking to demonstrate to cloud service providers (CSPs) that there’s an alternative to hyperscaler lock-ins, VMware needed to create a clear and distinct value proposition to show it alone could deliver the agility required to thrive.

The Challenge

VMware’s approach to communications was siloed, and its value proposition was becoming lost in the noise of seemingly disparate products and campaigns—each with its own marketing wrapper and message. Ultimately confused by conflicting offerings, CSPs simply couldn’t see a singular, coherent reason to work with VMware—this needed to change.

The Insight

Speaking to a diverse selection of cloud providers and VMware stakeholders, we concluded that VMware needed to carve out a position of undisputed value in the minds of CSPs.

We knew we could achieve this by positioning the VMware cloud platform as the natural choice for CSPs craving freedom and flexibility for the future. Through this single overarching message, we could unify VMware’s marketing, and provide a focused route to market with a streamlined product proposition.

The Creative

From this insight, our creative—A Natural Partnership—was born. It centered on the notion that VMware is a collaborator, a trusted advisor, and a partner whose technology could help CSPs achieve their business ambitions without the dependency restrictions typically imposed by hyperscalers.

Visually, we brought the campaign to life using symbioses found in the natural world. Representing VMware and its ecosystem of CSPs, each pairing reflected distinct VMware offerings operating in mutually beneficial harmony.

The Execution

By getting smart about segmentation, we helped VMware create a program mechanism that could cope with the overwhelming range of CSP technology choices, varying ‘start states’ with the brand, and differing strategies and focus areas.  

To reach VMware’s typically time-poor audience, A Natural Partnership initially used social media channels, especially LinkedIn, for precision and community targeting. Ultimately, the program pushed our audience to informative content, including:

  • Live-action videos
  • eBooks
  • Technology overviews
  • Infographics
  • Events, such as vmLIVEs

The Results

1,430,950

Unique views

6,000

Total leads

77,000

Initial views

0.80%-1.38%

CTR range

Our latest campaigns – all developed by April Six – have seen significant uplift in engagement with VMware.

Guy Bartram, Global Director – Product Marketing

Technology /
Page 4

Tailoring A Global Brand Message to Multiple Local Markets

The Brief

As part of a brand update, ST Telemedia Global Data Centre (STT GDC) embarked on a series of brand updates to enhance its presence and foster greater brand recognition and loyalty in diverse Asian markets. It sought to unite its extensive global reach with the deep local expertise of the multiple markets it served into a single, coherent brand narrative.

The Challenge

STT GDC asked April Six to create a series of collaterals that would serve as the source of brand messaging moving forward, both internally and externally. We were then tasked with developing the brand rollout plan for STT GDC in Asia, positioning them as the leading partner of choice and the only platform for customers to scale through verticalized content.

The Insight

The markets in which STT GDC operate are at significantly different stages of data center maturity, and with different strategic priorities as a result. Speaking to each effectively would mean discovering what about the STT GDC proposition appealed most in that territory, while ensuring the overarching brand messaging came through clearly.

The Creative

Knowing that STT GDC had something of specific value for each of its markets, we hit upon our central theme – Built For You. By altering the object of the sentence depending on the asset, we had a construct with plenty of room to flex, but which retained a boldness of vision and directness of purpose.

The lines that sprang from ‘Built For…’ sat perfectly across STT GDC’s collateral. With them, we could easily craft a sense of STT GDC as a unified entity that was focused on delivering a personalized touch.

The Execution

STT GDC had six main markets for the brand update—Singapore, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Korea, and Philippines. To best reach each, we segmented the campaign by designing every asset with market-specific messaging and localized imagery. In this way, we made a universal brand update, local.

Technology /
Page 4

Rethinking Product Management

The Challenge

As the leading provider of product management software, Productboard is on a mission to help its customers build truly excellent products. The company tasked April Six with the creation and execution of a high-funnel brand-awareness campaign. The campaign was initiated to increase familiarity, recognition, and authority for the Productboard brand with targeted prospects, buyers, and influencers worldwide. The campaign needed to connect emotionally with the hearts and minds of a multi-lingual audience while positioning Productboard as a thought leader in the space. In addition to driving interest in the marketplace, the campaign would also need to work as a recruitment tool.

The Objective

April Six wants to convince Productboard’s audience of product managers that there’s a modern tool/system (really, a new way of thinking) that can transform how they see the world around them, process data, and make faster, better product decisions. We want them to know that the status quo no longer applies. We want to inspire them to break the rules, do new things, and change the future of their products. In other words, “Stop trying to use the tools of yesterday to build the products of tomorrow.”

Key Idea: When you’re less consumed with the decision in front of you, you can solve problems that are yet to come. Productboard was created to help you win today and plan for tomorrow.

The Solution

The Productboard campaign takes relevant, recurring problems product managers face on the regular—and invites them to imagine a world in which those problems no longer exist. Through the omission or “striking-through” of selected words, the problem-statements become modern solutions. With some playfulness and attitude added for effect, the concept conveys to Productboard’s audience that the brand understands their challenges—and, better yet, knows how to solve them. 

Supporting this creative concept, April Six planned and executed a global integrated campaign featuring high-impact Out-Of-Home (OOH) placements, Radio, Digital Audio, and Digital Media executions based on the strike-through campaign concept. OOH placements were acquired strategically around key product management and related event-dates in highly visible transit hubs. Supplementing the OOH placements, programmatic digital and audio placements reached product managers on the web.

Technology /
Page 4

Influencing the Influencers With ABM

ABM Program

With marketing spend a fraction of its closest competitor’s, AMD needs to be especially smart and strategic with advertising dollars. They have identified a group of Value Added Resellers (for Cloud hardware solutions) and we’ve built a marketing program centered around them. It’s the B2B version of influencing the influencers.

Media

Initial ABM efforts utilized Madison Logic, subsequently migrating to Demandbase. LinkedIn and AdDaptive intelligence have also been used, as well as endemic publications such as CRN.

Insight/Campaign Strategy

  • Utilize best-in-class technology to reach niche audiences, internationally, while evangelizing internally
  • There’s a reason ABM isn’t ABA (“Account Based Advertising”) – it extends throughout the marketing organization and requires stakeholder buy-in
  • Measurement and attribution are key to validating media spend – particularly given recent cookie consent modeling updates which have restricted tracking capability

Results

By partnering with AMD to build the foundational business case for ABM, priorities have shifted away from prior HCI efforts, consolidating limited dollars into VAR, given substantial business impacts. Demandbase platform continually shows growth in metrics pertaining to key accounts and landing pages, as shown at right.

Plan at
a glance

Phase 1 (First Quarter)

Display only

Phase 2 (Remaining quarters)

Integrated media mix

Segment Program

Despite having a superior product, at the start of 2019 AMD EPYC competed in a market almost entirely dominated by Intel who had over 98% market share. Awareness of AMD EPYC was generally low, at best it may have been known for ‘good value,’ with limited SOV. AMD needed to increase targeted awareness by creating more moments of engagement with highly targeted audiences.

Insight/Campaign Strategy

  • Reach the “heart of the market” – those IT decision-makers / influencers in enterprise and mid-market organizations who would recognize the importance of the processers and the impact they have on performance/reliability (data center decision-makers)
  • In the Phase 2 “Rome” campaign, audience segments extended to include Cloud Users and HPC Stakeholders

Media

Phase 1 featured display only (due to limited creative availability and need for immediate in-market coverage), while Phase 2 introduced native, digital video (including CTV), and custom units.

Results

By better-adhering to best-practice media allocations, Phase 2 drove 64% more clicks and 2.3x more on-site engagement vs. Phase 1, while also garnering nearly 3.5MM video views, a wealth of custom content, and significant lift in brand awareness, as measured by Teads: 34% directional lift in US/UKI, with a lift of 27% (@ 90% confidence) for AMD EPYC.

Clicks

Engagement

Brand Awareness

Technology /
Page 4

Building Awareness Through Shocking Targeting Tactics

The Challenge

Sysdig’s mission is to make every cloud deployment secure and reliable. Its marketing team tasked April Six with the creation of a new brand-awareness campaign. Its previous campaign theme, “Secure Your Cloud from Source to Run,” accurately described what Sysdig does but offered little differentiation or emotional connection with its audience. Security architects (CISOs) are often overwhelmed by alerts with little context to know which alerts are critical to address. The new campaign needed to give them confidence that they could effectively manage cloud risk by seeing, in a glance, which alerts pose the most serious threats and merit immediate attention.

The Objective

The campaign developed by April Six acknowledges the challenge CISOs face—continuously mitigating security risk in the cloud—while making the point that, without separating urgent risk from the everyday variety, you’re just swimming in noise. We wanted the audience to know that, by eliminating the chaos of undifferentiated alerts and prioritizing urgent cloud and container risk in real time, Sysdig had their backs. Prioritized security embedded throughout the development cycle “from source to run” means less noise, less time spent chasing down false alarms, and less worry of missing critical notifications.

The Solution

As a universally recognized symbol of risk, nothing beats a shark. We can all imagine finding ourselves face-to-face with such a creature—a security threat of the highest order. The visual execution places a safely-caged diver in the company of a shark, communicating the idea of “Risk, prioritized.” Supporting the concept, April Six planned and executed a global integrated program with high-impact out-of-home (OOH) placements at key industry events and digital media executions to expand awareness. The media plan leveraged multiple tactics and high-impact ad units to reach audiences in contextually relevant environments, while also driving awareness through content. Multiple data sources helped to ensure that the campaign reached audiences at every point of the research/purchase journey, and those targeting tactics were further optimized based on performance metrics. 

Technology /
Page 4

Creating SMARTer GTM Strategies

by Melissa Koonce

Advertising, Branding, hidden, technology

Practical ABM strategies can translate to program success.

I enthusiastically jumped back on the B2B marketing event circuit recently, attending the Demandbase SMART Showcase 2023 in San Francisco. The conference was the first in a series of events Demandbase is hosting this year, including upcoming showcases in Austin (June) and New York (November).

Upon my arrival, I entered a room full of senior marketing leaders from a wide range of B2B industries and enterprise organizations. These marketing practitioners were eager to learn about practical ABM strategies, how to bring them to market, what “program success” looks like, and ways we can all leverage technology insights to make our go-to-market planning and activation strategies SMARTer.

As I reflect on the benefits of attending in-person events, I typically come back to asking myself, “What did I get out of this? What are the core themes I can take with me in my day-to-day activities—guiding my clients, empowering my teams to think beyond the initial ask; pushing past the status quo, and ensuring that, as agency partners and trusted advisors, we are adding value. As a continuous-learner in the ever-evolving B2B landscape, what insights will I take with me?” Ultimately, three key themes stuck with me—all of them directly applicable to the common challenges marketers face today.

1/ Creation of outcome-driven campaigns
Aligning sales and marketing and, more importantly, getting them to “speak a common language” is key to identifying the right qualified accounts to target, consider account size, intent, relationship, and engagement.” That was the POV from F5’s Jessica Kao, Senior Director of Marketing Ops and Hannah King, Director of Global Demand Response. Think about the FIRE model to find in-market accounts: Fit accounts in your ICP (firmographic and technographic), Intent interest in your products and/or competitors, Relationship context and history with the account, Engagement time spent with your company. Remember that your sales team does not care if your marketing asset performed or how well your campaign worked. Empower them with tools they can leverage to “get that meeting.” Determine what is important to these top accounts and customize marketing efforts so that the speak to how your offering can solve relevant customer pain points.

Just as marketing and sales must work together to quantify what the success of the program will look like, what are our SQL and MQL goals, how many top tier accounts are we working to convert? This is a question agency partners should be asking clients during discovery and client onboarding discussions, as well. What are primary and secondary objectives that will help the program team hit its business goal? Reducing cost per lead? Increasing average deal size by 10%? 20%? More? Specific costs per benchmark? True partners should be invested in understanding of KPIs at the onset of the program to bring outcome driven strategies to life. If this step is skipped or alignment is missing, setbacks and churn will plague the program from the onset.

2/ Personalization strategy across touch points
The gathered marketers were presented with some timely “why” and “how” examples that put into context the need to follow through on implementing a customer-first approach to personalization. Sophia Agustina, IBM’s Global Demand Strategy leader, made the point that there’s a difference between “companies that talk the talk…and those that walk the walk.” In her recent blog, she advises teams to, “Focus on “context” as it relates to the customer.” As customers become more advanced in their purchasing decisions, we need to consider and apply multi-tier strategies that leverage technology platforms around AI, marketing automation, personalization, and intent. As we are in the era of “do more with less” we need to be thinking about how we can target smaller audience sets in more personalized ways. Gaining an assist from technology platforms to inform our strategies is critical to creating program effectiveness and keeping your brand in the consideration set of your target audience.

At April Six, we are constantly working to upskill our team around new technologies and platforms. Instead of approaching the changing technology landscape with fear, we determine how the new tools can help us optimize, personalize, and delight our customers with what our products/solutions can offer. If your agency partner is not testing and learning with AI and new ways of customizing experiences today, they will be light years behind when it comes to meeting customers where they are tomorrow. Whether it be through digital marketing, sales enablement, and/or event activation, trusted agency partners need to lead and guide with integrated go-to-market thinking. Let’s push beyond the status quo and campaigns limited to common ho-hum tactics. Testing and learning needs to be integrated throughout the program lifecycle and applied to future strategy optimization efforts.

3/ Intent capture to replace declining MQL conversion rates
“Where have all the buyers gone?” rhetorically asked Qualified’s VP of Demand Gen Sarah McConnell. Then she brought the theme to life, sharing the stat that, in 2022, the industry average MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) conversion rate hit 2 percent—an all-time low and less than half the average rate of a decade ago. No one is filling out forms and, if they do, the efficacy is compromised. The focus for marketers today needs to move beyond the MQL and into a mindset around how can we best leverage intent.

ABM strategies should be focused on aligning around key target accounts, understanding where to reach them, and providing the right level of detail on your product/solution to solve customer challenges. Frankly, leveraging and capturing intent data is still something many marketers are struggling to get a handle on effectively. Distinguishing the intent-data platforms on the market—assessing pros and cons to evaluate which platform maybe the best fit to meet your organization’s specific needs and budget—is a great first step for those still undecided on how to leverage intent data within their marketing tech stacks.

If you want to hear more about our perspectives on how these trends are impacting our clients and our agency, and how we approach strategic GTM planning, drop us a line at ­­­­­info@aprilsix.com. We’d love to talk with you!

Melissa Koonce
Head of Client Service, April Six NA
Melissa.koonce@aprilsix.com