Establishing a content & events marketing programme for BT Ireland

BT Ireland at a glance

BT Ireland is a subsidiary of BT Group, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in 180 countries.

BT’s portfolio is a powerful combination of cloud services, global networking, IT integration, carrier voice and data services, contact centre solutions and professional security expertise, enabling customers to solve complex business communications requirements on a global scale.

BT has maintained its leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Services 2021 Vendor Assessment, improving its position year-on-year for its ability to execute. BT is widely recognised as a leader in CSR, sustainability and leading healthy workplace employer in Ireland.

Their marketing vision

Supporting the strategic sales goals of both new and existing enterprise accounts, BT Ireland's marketing team are tasked with maintaining their strong brand position within the market whilst growing revenues within existing accounts and securing net new logos.

Supporting a large sales team of 7, amongst other programmes, the marketing team are tasked with establishing a dialogue with new buyers. BT Ireland's buyers are working on 3 key business objectives (1) transforming network infrastructure to capitalise on the latest digital technology e.g. SD-Wan (2) securing the enterprise network from increasing cybersecurity threats (3) building new collaboration solutions to support the distributed workforce and post-pandemic 'digital employee'.

How we are helping

With the help of senior experts at BT Ireland we continue to build thought leadership programmes that aim to engage and inspire business and technology leaders from across the US and Europe, ideally, all who are currently working on the 3 key business objectives mentioned above or will be in the future. Through close collaboration at weekly review meetings with BT Ireland's salespeople, we work hard to identify the right target buyers. BT's buyers are invited to participate in the TechPros.io managed interviews and in doing so enjoy an intellectually stimulating experience, and benefit from raising their profiles in eBooks on LinkedIn. We have integrated virtual events programmes with interviews and content publications, including both roundtables and workshops.

Theme's to date have included:

(1) ‘Daring to Disrupt: How digital leaders are transforming network infrastructures' (2) 'Pushing the Perimeter: How Digital Leaders are Securing the Dispersed Enterprise' (3) 'The Trailblazers: Leading The Remote Working Transformation' (4) 'Transform to Perform: How tech leaders are transforming their collaboration infrastructure for the distributed workforce'

We run a range of virtual events for BT Ireland. In Jan 2021 we planned, marketed and moderated and an interactive panel discussion featuring BT Enterprise Fotis Karonis, CTIO of BT Enterprise, Keith Kiernan, Group CIO of Bank of Ireland and Venkat Lakshminarayanan, Sr. Director, IT Infrastructure Engineering & Operations at ServiceNow. Besides the events Network Sunday has produced several eBooks and articles which have been published widely and acknowledged dozens of contributors.

Results to date

From its inception in early 2020 the marketing programme was quick to deliver results. BT Ireland made a sale within a few months and the sales team quickly experienced a ramp-up of exploratory meeting with interview participants.

Thanks to an open and collaborative culture between both parties our joint team have worked hard to fine-tune the programme, evolving processes and proceedure. Together we have learned the ingredients for success and a combination of careful thought leadership theme title selection, team coaching and programme service levels have helped optimise performance.

The virtual events were a success with over 85% positive feedback, offering a new format to nurture buyers. The interactive panel format offered the 76 participants an opportunity to vote on which questions were put to the panellists by TechPros.io’s moderator Jermaine Edwards.

Recent introductions of virtual workshops now give BT Ireland's salespeople valuable offerings to sales leads as next steps in the buying journey.

Network Sunday received public congratulations in BT Irelands 2020 year-end Town Hall meeting for its contribution to BT Irelands marketing achievements.