OneLogin has always channeled the “Challenger” brand and sales mindset, consistently going up against Okta, the 800-pound gorilla of the Identity and Access Management space. Despite being a startup with 5x less resources than our larger, better funded competitors, we often punched way above our weight and won. Taking this same approach to our brand strategy and marketing campaign, my CMO and I went big with the idea to state that our brand name does exactly what it says - it’s that simple! The campaign ran online and offline for 4 months and increased brand awareness by over 50%, which influenced pipeline YoY by 2x for our sales team.
Led the in-house creative team and web developers
Collaborated with Cutwater SF on media strategy and brand recall focus groups
Worked with CMO and executive leadership to allocate budget and set metrics for success
OneLogin hadn't previously embarked on a brand campaign effort for a multitude of reasons: scale, resources and budget. But when brand awareness is low and the sales team needed air cover for outbound and inbound lead gen efforts, my CMO answered the call. We shortlisted and briefed several prominent agencies to pitch for the effort. After reviewing proposals from everyone, we awarded the project to the very smart, talented and responsive media team at Cutwater SF to help us make a big splash.
Working closely with Cutwater, we matched our target account list to a very short shortlist of cities to run this brand campaign. Cities with the highest density of prospects and logos allowed us to concentrate our media budget on higher frequency (32x) and reach (combo of digital and outdoor ads).
Some cost savings were achieved by producing the ads in-house, which also allowed us to iterate quickly and test messaging to avoid burnout.
The brand campaign was a success from an awareness perspective and moving prospects from TOFU to MOFU.
Any marketer can throw money at a lack of brand awareness, but it's not sustainable if pipeline and revenue growth doesn't rise in parallel to support further activities. Nor is this type of investment in the brand a one-and-done deal. It was followed up by BOFU direct response lead gen campaigns to pay off on the message of simplicity.
