Achieving Clarity Through Strategy

Dangers and Desires

When we first joined forces with AzteQ, they’d recently merged their three separate technology businesses into one. They fervently believed that through unification, they had a powerful market model which brought enormous benefits to customers.

AzteQ were unsure who their target customer was and therefore felt compelled to chase all sales opportunities without knowing how to qualify them first. This was wasting time and resources and meant customers who were brought on board weren’t always the best fit for the brand.

Messaging was also poorly defined and inconsistent. None of this was helping AzteQ achieve its goals. It was clear that this lack of clarity needed correcting for the business to successfully drive business growth, and so they sought the help of EC-PR.

Design

While AzteQ had visionary leadership, senior expertise and a firm commitment to doubling in size over two years, it lacked a clear and defined market offering. Our solution was to get to the root of the company’s values and outline a communication strategy to help form the narrative moving forward.

Campaign delivery

• Messaging Lab workshops
• Value proposition
• Communication strategy
• Stakeholder engagement
• Media Lens

Messaging Lab workshops

Creating a clear communication strategy was at the heart of our design. To do this, we facilitated two Messaging Lab workshops. The outcomes of the workshops allowed us to answer the following questions about AzteQ:

1. What is your value proposition?
2. Who are your target customers?
3. What is your positioning statement?
4. What are your key messages?
5. Which industries do you prioritise?

Value proposition

AzteQ operates in a highly competitive space. It was clear to us from the beginning that a value proposition was needed to inform prospects why they should choose to work with AzteQ over a competitor.

Although AzteQ might not have immediately recognised it, they did have a unique approach. This was their people-first method which was a key differentiator in the industry. We helped the company to articulate this USP (unique selling point) through a method statement.

This collaboration between EC-PR and AzteQ resulted in a tangible outcome; AzteQ CUBe — the people-first framework for digital transformation.

Stakeholder engagement

Compiling a communication strategy cannot be an isolated exercise. Customers/stakeholders must be brought into the equation. That’s why we interviewed a cross section of AzteQ customers, asking them for their feedback. This feedback helped shape the company’s priorities and refine the communication strategy.

Communications in action

Once complete, the new communication strategy was used to brief the branding agency and the web designer. This ensured all marketing was cohesive and that messaging was consistent.

Media Lens

Now we had a comprehensive communication strategy in place, it was time to put it to best use, by using it to inform the next steps in the marketing programme — the PR. We carried out a Media Lens exercise which determined the topics AzteQ could talk about to gain most media attention.

Distinction

AzteQ called the results of our work ‘transformational’ for their business, commenting that a return on investment was seen in a matter of months.

The company cited 14 discrete benefits they’d enjoyed since our work was completed. Among these were being more visible and highly valued in their marketplace; a renewed understanding of who their target customer was, which saved them time and resources; more interested prospects; an aligned leadership team; and more engaged employees.