OpenMarket’s 
content-driven transformation

Back to front

OpenMarket wasn’t always the badass, global, customer experience provider that it is today.

In fact, OpenMarket originally built their business as an SMS delivery vendor selling to IT people. Their content was technical, their buyers were technical, and the business itself was a bit… back-office.

We could see from day one that OpenMarket had a much bigger story to tell: all about helping the world’s biggest brands strengthen their customer relationships via mobile messaging. They were under-playing their strategic value and hiding some really smart, inspiring solutions.

So we helped OpenMarket pivot from back office to front office, selling higher up the food chain to people who really care about customer experience.

But that meant repositioning the whole business. And that would mean things like:

• Getting the company to look and feel like a CX expert talking to CX experts.
• Turning a technical story into a story about surprising and delighting customers.
• Starting with ‘why’ —the reasons Open Market does what it does.
• Giving them a striking, modern new brand, website and content library.
• Competing for mindshare in the crowded customer experience space – by identifying right segments and giving each one the information they need.

No pressure…

The big idea

This was a super-close collaboration between Velocity and the amazing OpenMarket team – and we nailed it. In six months. We started with a new Galvanizing Story called the Empathetic Interaction. A story about being there for people when they need it, and surprising them when they least expect it. (We write about galvanizing stories in this blog series).

The story became the foundation for a global campaign, a comprehensive positioning project, new messaging, a new brand and logo, a new website and an ambitious content program (including interactive tools, videos and ebooks). We also set up audience-centric marketing automation for the first time, to make sure OpenMarket’s content investment would generate demonstrable returns.

And things went pretty darn well. The project contributed more than 10 million dollars to the pipeline, increased organic traffic by 48%, increased average time spent on the website by 182%, and led to OpenMarket tripling their average deal size. Win, win, win, win.

Here’s a quick tour:

A clear, sharp brand

A comprehensive re-positioning project – with a new brand, story and tone of voice, that took OpenMarket from exclusively technical conversations into customer experience conversations.

Boy did all that pay off. The branding, website and content allowed OpenMarket to move out of the back office and into its rightful sweet spot straight away – the C-suite and customer operations teams across healthcare, travel, hospitality, retail, finance, and logistics industries.

And the automation implementation gave James -the marketing director who led the launch- the evidence he needed to prove the strategy’s ROI – which got him a massive promotion. (Woo-hoo!)

Today, marketing contributes 60% to OpenMarket’s pipeline, and every day we’re pushing out more of it. So if £10,577,643 in six months sounds impressive, imagine that figure five years from now. We’ll keep you posted.

The company needed to pivot from telling a technical story to a powerful business case for the biggest enterprises. Not only did we change the legacy messaging of the company in three months, but we created an evangelism for great customer interactions instead of technical capability. The content and new brand story are fantastic, and it was great to partner with an agency that could deploy rapidly at scale.

James Cox
Senior Global Marketing Director
OpenMarket