Pivot3 delivers smarter hyperconverged infrastructure for high performance Enterprise IT workloads. They turned to GaggleAMP to help them better compete for share of voice on social media.
Pivot3 is an emerging leader in the hyper-converged infrastructure space, providing customers fully integrated solutions including computing power, storage and networking components, optimized in a single chassis. They count Fortune 500 companies as their customers and a who’s who list of global technology firms as their competitors.
For an emerging leader like Pivot3, the status quo is rarely the right path. Disruption becomes both an opportunity and a necessity when trying to upend a market where entrenched players dominate. “While we’ve seen tremendous success since inception, we know we can’t compete dollar for dollar in terms of marketing spend with some of the companies we challenge,” according to Michele Fanning, Pivot3’s Senior Director of Corporate Marketing.
"When it comes to differentiation, leveraging social media and social selling are key tools for us to connect with potential buyers. We see GaggleAMP as critical to getting our message out to as many prospects as possible.
Michele Fanning
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Pivot3
Pivot3 was familiar with leveraging social media before deploying GaggleAMP. The marketing team would carefully curate and create content mapped to the customers buying journey. But the process was too manual for the salespeople and had not expanded out to the general employee population.
“Our team would identify content and email it out to salespeople who would cut and paste the posts we wanted to share,” says Fanning. “The participation rate was very low in sales, and we were getting no traction with our engineers.” Pivot3 realized that both a lack of knowledge and the “hassle-factor” was inhibiting those who were willing to share content.
Pivot3 discovered GaggleAMP and knew quickly it mapped to their need to be the loudest voice in the market via social media.
"We conducted a pilot including 17 people and tested GaggleAMP for one-quarter. During the pilot, we saw a 32% increase in impressions in the first month, which expanded to an 84% increase after ten months. The pilot proved the tool is so easy to use and effective that we've rolled it out to over 100 employees, and have plans to set up Gaggles for our partners to participate in as well."
Michele Fanning
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Pivot3
Maximizing Investments in Event Marketing
In the technology industry, events are a major part of customer outreach. Firms like Pivot3 spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure space, set up and ship demos, and fly-in their talent pool from around the country. Sales and marketing teams dash from the show floor to presentations in the hospitality suite with little time to think about their day jobs; no less have time to share what’s going on via social media.
“Each year, Pivot3 makes a large investment in time and money in VMworld, a show run by one of our technology partners,” said Fanning.
In years past, Pivot3 tried to integrate social media into the strategy, tweeting from sessions and posting product announcements. “We saw some success, but we couldn’t get the level of engagement we wanted,” according to Fanning.
"This year, armed with GaggleAMP, we made a social media splash at VMworld."
Michele Fanning
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Pivot3
Pivot 3 partnered with their PR firm, Idea Grove, and leveraged GaggleAMP to support a team who shared social media posts in real-time from the show floor while another team back at HQ attached additional content and amplified the posts.
The results were outstanding. Pivot3 employees globally were immediately able to share content and posts from VMworld with their social networks as if everyone was there on the show floor. During the week of the show alone, GaggleAMP helped Pivot3 reach more than 600,000 people with updates and content. This yielded 569 click-throughs, leading to over 1,800 engagements and nearly 100,000 impressions for a single event.
Influencing the Influencers
In addition to social selling and maximizing the investments in events marketing, GaggleAMP is proving a valuable tool to accelerate mindshare for Pivot3 in the analyst and influencer community.
"When we share content from a key analyst on our Gaggle, we help those content creators and influencers expand their reach as well. We've had analysts tell us they see us all over social media and thank us for sharing their content. We know this comes back to us by increasing our mindshare with the people covering the technology market."
Michele Fanning
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Pivot3
In summary, GaggleAMP allows Pivot3 to speak with a larger voice than their competitors, without the comparable marketing budget of a larger firm. They can maximize the effectiveness of every dollar spent on content creation, events marketing, and even compete effectively for mindshare with the industry analysts whose voices are critical in the technology marketplace.
