Mimecast
In May 2007 éclat was selected by Mimecast, a cloud-based unified email management company, to develop and manage its UK PR and AR campaign. PR was to form the strategic foundation for all of their UK marketing activities and the company was looking for an agency that could build their company brand amongst IT and board level decision makers. The original goal was to build CSO awareness to enable them to compete more effectively with the larger players in their market who had well established profiles and significantly higher market shares.
When éclat started work with Mimecast their editorial share of voice against key competitors was at 0.4% at the bottom of the list of companies in their sector. The challenges were significant: to develop a cohesive message about the company and its solutions and to educate the market about the benefits of a unified email SaaS solution rather than individual premise-based products for email archival, security and continuity.
éclat initially set about developing the corporate messaging and media training the spokespeople and then embarked on an intensive campaign to begin the process of building relationships with key press and analysts.
The analyst campaign commenced with a series of high level face-to-face briefings. Twelve briefings were organised with analysts in the initial tour representing Gartner, IDC, Ovum, Bloor, Burton Group, EuroLan, Radicati, Quo Circa and Freeform Dynamics.
To gain the attention of the media, éclat commissioned a survey by an independent research house on corporate attitudes to email. The key findings were developed into press releases and a series of press briefings were organised. This first story generated 23 major articles for Mimecast and SaaS.
Quarterly proactive PR campaigns were developed by éclat, each focusing on a different aspect of the company’s proposition consisting of email archival, security and business continuity as well the benefits of a cloud-based service over traditional premise-based software. Different issues-based subject matter was developed for each area and a campaign consisting of an opinion article, customer case study and survey-based materials were created to provide a consistent flow of news content.
One campaign involved selling into the Financial Times the idea for a diary and podcast series from the CEO of Mimecast, based on his experience of giving up email completely for one week. This ran online and in the print and podcast sections of the Financial Times Digital supplement throughout the month of October ’08.
Twelve months from the commencement of the PR campaign, the share of voice statistics for the period from June – Aug’08 showed that Mimecast had surpassed the coverage of its larger competitors; Message Labs and Sophos and was positioned in third place behind Google and Symantec. The sales team at Mimecast was also reporting a regular flow of enquiries referring to news stories and the company itself had doubled in size and expanded into the USA, Nordics and Middle East.