Fortune 500 company ServiceNow helps its customers digitize and automate siloed processes to make work intuitive, accelerate innovation and create new value. In 2019, ServiceNow was early on in its partner marketing journey when their leadership team saw an opportunity to drive customer success and expansion through its partner ecosystem. ServiceNow’s top priority was enabling its consulting, solution and implementation partners to help their customers realize more value from their existing investments in ServiceNow and solve new problems with ServiceNow’s solutions.
“
At ServiceNow, we consistently come back to creating the next conversation. Our focus is on preparing our partners to position the next chapter in our joint customer’s transformation journey and to get customers excited about expanding their use of ServiceNow’s solutions. Partnering with [Informa] TechTarget helps us reach buyers where they are at, understand what they care about and create a relevant dialog with them.”
—Ashley Eikenberry
Director, Partner Marketing, Global Partners & Channels
Building the plane while flying it
To capitalize on this opportunity, ServiceNow hired Ashley Eikenberry, an expert at helping companies grow revenue through partners, as their Director, Partner Marketing, Global Partners & Channels. Starting out as a team of one, Ashley was faced with limited budget and resources, plus several other obstacles:
- The ecosystem was growing increasingly crowded, and ServiceNow needed to win partner mindshare and stand out from the competition.
- Many of ServiceNow’s smaller partners lacked the resources and expertise to execute successful installed-base marketing campaigns.
- The digital buyer’s journey had become non-linear, with customers and prospects doing research on multiple websites and seeking out information from multiple sources.
To overcome these challenges, ServiceNow’s Partner Marketing team focused on developing holistic, “white box” marketing programs that were easy for partners to execute and consistently delivered stellar results. This approach set the stage for driving results quickly and in a repeatable way that would scale.
“
We’re finding that this piece of our marketing mix is doing really well for us. When our partners run a joint [Informa] TechTarget campaign with ServiceNow, they get more than just leads and downloads – they get valuable insights into who is actively researching relevant solutions. If our partners have space to do one more thing in the quarter, they are seeking us out because they want to run this program.”
—Ashley Eikenberry
Director, Partner Marketing, Global Partners & Channels
Identifying and empowering the next conversation
ServiceNow didn’t want to just generate names – they wanted to help close that business as well. In turn, they set a goal of creating 2-3 incremental opportunities with current customers from each partner campaign. To effectively drive customer expansion and upsell, the team set their sights on helping their partners identify and pursue the biggest opportunities for expansion within their current customer base. A critical element of this approach was pinpointing which customers were ready to explore the next chapter in their transformation journey and helping their partners position the most appropriate potential engagement to these accounts.
Engaging a trusted lead generation partner
ServiceNow knew that finding the right vendor would be crucial to the success of its Partner Marketing initiatives. Many of ServiceNow’s partners had a global presence and needed to easily execute campaigns in multiple geographies. It was also important that their partners trusted the quality of the leads and felt confident that their co-marketing funds would yield tangible results.
Based on these criteria, ServiceNow partnered with Informa TechTarget for two key reasons:
- Market Reputation: Many of ServiceNow’s partners were doing business with Informa TechTarget in other areas of their business. This familiarity created confidence and trust.
- Global Reach: Informa TechTarget’s network of 50M+ permissioned B2B members worldwide enabled ServiceNow’s partners to easily rinse and repeat programs in all of their geographic regions.
The ServiceNow team works with Informa TechTarget to support three key initiatives:
- Account Targeting: Informa TechTarget’s accountand prospect-level intent data helps ServiceNow pinpoint which accounts are ready for the next chapter in their transformation journey.
- Lead Generation: Informa TechTarget’s content syndication programs enable ServiceNow and their partners to engage the buying committee at these best-fit accounts.
- Buyer Insights: Informa TechTarget surfaces valuable insights that empower ServiceNow’s partners to have the right next conversation with their customers.
By working with Informa TechTarget, ServiceNow has found that they are attracting more partners who want to run joint campaigns, scaling the team’s capacity to support them across the globe, and driving tangible results to the business.
Our dedicated Partner Marketing Services team can help refine your joint messaging, deliver compelling content to fuel the buyer’s journey and generate better leads that convert into partner pipeline. Learn more about our solutions for Strategy, Content and Demand or connect with us to explore how we can help.
What is your current marketing and demand generation strategy?
Our marketing and demand generation strategy is centered around account-based targeting, focusing on specific strategic accounts for our organization. We aim to uncover additional contacts from the buying groups of these accounts for effective contact mapping. Given our organization’s diverse product offerings, we want to identify IT professionals within very specific industry segments that align to our offerings, which can be challenging. To address this, we create various audiences and export groups in [the Informa TechTarget Portal] tailored to these segments and deliver industry- or account-specific content to each of those groups. We run smaller drip campaigns using marketing automation to engage these prospects, ensuring that the content aligns with their topics of interest, as identified by the intent data in [the Portal].
In addition to intent data, we leverage [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation programs to fill our pipeline with in-market leads, including content syndication and Confirmed Projects.
[The Informa TechTarget Portal] is a crucial component of our marketing strategy. The platform enables us to acquire highly qualified, relevant and GDPR-compliant prospects for our database and precise intent data from specific accounts and segments. More specifically, we use [Informa TechTarget] Prospect Exports to uncover new prospects and prospect-level intent and [Informa TechTarget] Account Intent Feeds to deliver accountlevel intent into our systems. Before Account Intent Feeds, I used to manually aggregate account-level data myself. Now, we get account-level intent as a direct feed that helps inform our account targeting and marketing outreach.
In addition to uncovering new opportunities, [Informa TechTarget] helps us enhance our existing opportunities. We upload our existing opportunity accounts to [the Portal] so we can see what’s currently happening at those accounts, and we further leverage that intent to monitor progress and accelerate those opportunities. We also encourage our sales team to utilize [the Portal] to find valuable insights about their target accounts and support their outreach. Overall, [the Portal] helps us enhance marketing’s role beyond just generating marketingqualified leads (MQLs) to driving true business intelligence.
As a very data-driven person, Market Monitor is a goldmine to me. Market Monitor helps us better understand the current and near-future market interests, such as what the current research trends are within the market, especially around topics that are relevant to us, and which industries are showing a higher interest than others.
Market Monitor insights and trends are sourced from real people’s behaviors, so it’s a great resource for our content strategy. The tool can help us define and orchestrate the optimal customer journey and create the best content to map to those journeys. Plus, the data in Market Monitor is very easily accessible and downloadable.
Market Monitor is the next best thing to speaking with your customers directly to better understand what topics and content work best for them. I recommend spending time in Market Monitor to understand more about the market you’re in, your audiences’ buying habits, and the content consumption trends from buying groups in your target segments. It’s definitely worth digging into!
We track several key performance indicators (KPIs) related to our [Informa] TechTarget program, focusing primarily on digital engagement and commercial impact. One KPI we monitor is digital engagement: we assess how well the contacts from [Informa] TechTarget, whether from [the Portal] or our content syndication program, remain engaged across our digital platforms by tracking “returning active users.” Our goal is to have contacts engage with our content multiple times within a few months. Another primary KPI we track is commercial impact: how are these opportunities impacting our pipeline? Ideally, we want to create multiple marketing touchpoints over time to connect the contacts we have from [Informa] TechTarget to our existing business opportunities and measure that impact.
Our [Informa] TechTarget program, [the Portal] in particular, has positively impacted our pipeline, even when faced with long sales cycles. The leads we’ve generated are high-quality, and we see strong performance with them through our marketing programs and follow-up conversations. Notably, over 10% of contacts sourced from [the Portal] are “returning active users,” indicating high engagement, “stickiness,” and interest in our offerings, compared to our benchmark rate for returning active users from other lead sources, which is in the single digits. This success reflects our effective audience segmentation and contextual outreach, as these contacts engage significantly more than those from other sources. This is due largely in part to [Informa] TechTarget’s powerful and precise intent data, which helps us personalize our outreach at both the account and prospect level to drive maximum impact. I’m pleased to say that we’ve achieved a healthy ROI and maintained a robust pipeline for sales through our [Informa] TechTarget program.
A big thank you to Alexander Pasch for sharing this success story with us. We look forward to hearing about more of his wins using Informa TechTarget products in the future!
