‘Thought leadership transformed our business’

Tessella (now part of Capgemini Engineering) sells high-value, high-complexity AI services to Enterprise IT and R&D buyers in science and engineering sectors.

We created an ongoing strategic thought leadership programme that used joined up, multi-channel content to move senior decisions makers through their buying journey in three stages: (1) stimulating new thinking about business opportunities; (2) engaging them with solutions to their challenges; and (3) building evidence for why they should work with Tessella. The result has been hundreds of high-value leads and sales meetings.

Tessella's highest value opportunities come from C-level and VP-level, so they wanted to start conversations there.

Tessella has a mature inbound marketing function. To reach this audience and move them through the buying cycle, they followed an inbound methodology, adjusted from HubSpot's to focus on high-value B2B audiences:

1. Attract: Provide content that stimulates new thinking, attracting people looking for ideas that support their business goals, and bringing them into the Tessella ecosystem.
2. Engage: Present insights aligned to industry pain points, to engage people looking for solutions to specific challenges.
3. Validate: Build evidence that Tessella can solve difficult challenges, to convert interest into buying decisions.

Creating quality thought leadership

“Inbound marketing is about publishing helpful and interesting content your audience wants to consume” HubSpot Academy, Inbound Marketing Certification Course

The big challenge was creating the right content. This is an audience of smart, senior people. They worry about rapid change in customer demands, technology, supply chains, and rules. They are constantly looking for insights to help them navigate change, and solutions to thorny challenges.

“Content distribution is all about getting your content in front of your audience – not just any audience. You can’t do this properly if you don’t know where they are and what they like to read”: HubSpot: Ultimate Guide to Content Distribution

To ensure content met quality needs, Memetic worked closely with Tessella’s data science experts, sector leads, partners and customers, to identify the key challenges facing their client sectors: principally life sciences, consumer goods and engineering.

We dug into each of these to draw out meaningful and actionable insights into how data science could address these, and aligned these to different stages on the buying cycle. We also explored the best channels to these audiences.

“Because Memetic know what they’re talking about and ask intelligent questions, we have genuinely useful discussions on challenging topics, which identify interesting angles that lead to really valuable thought leadership pieces." Dr Matt Jones, Lead AI Strategist, Tessella (Now Head of Offer Development, Capgemini Engineering)

The programme

Through this process, we designed a programme of content for each sector. 

Each was built around challenge-led whitepapers to ‘Attract’ prospects by offering analysis and insight into big challenges.

Whitepaper themes included: Patient Centric Healthcare; Digitalising R&D in Consumer Goods; and Predicting Energy Demand to Inform Infrastructure Investments.

For each, we created supporting assets: social media posts, LinkedIn ads, landing page text, blogs and videos. We secured articles linking to whitepapers in quality trade media such as Drug Discovery World and The Engineer. Whitepapers were gated to capture leads into Tessella's CRM.

For the 'Engage' phase, we created online articles offering actionable insights into specific challenges. These engaged people looking for specific solutions, whether proactively via google searches or LinkedIn, or as a follow up to our whitepapers. These were made discoverable via LinkedIn, newsletters, search, and email nurture campaigns (some of which followed up with leads from whitepaper downloads).

For the ‘Validate’ stage we created case studies, whilst internal teams developed technical documents. These helped sales teams move leads from knowing they need to act on a challenge, to understanding how Tessella could solve it.

Together, these assets power an ongoing inbound marketing programme that moves senior audiences through the buying cycle. Some specific outcomes include:

• Attract: Whitepaper-led lead gen campaigns – primarily through LinkedIn – generate 100s of qualified high-value leads each year. For example, our AI in Life Sciences whitepaper (click for full case study) generated 60 qualified leads (VP-level and above), and 10 sales meetings, with pharma and biotech companies in its first three months.
• Engage: Articles and whitepapers support social, email and sales activities to nurture those who have already shown an interest. In one anecdote, a global chemicals giant immediate responded and requested a sales meeting, saying the article they received 'projects quality and shows understanding of our challenges'.
• Validate: Although our work focusses more on Attract and Engage, sales teams report that customers are more receptive to sales when they have been through this thought leadership journey. Furthermore, Tessella experts have reported that the process of creating thought leadership helps them develop better sales narratives which have directly helped them close deals (click for full case study).

Julian Fowler, Head of Marketing and Communications at Tessella said:

"This has transformed our business. We are seeing our spend delivering leads for the business, and we can actually measure success”.

“The absolute essential part is that we get the content right. There are a lot of companies putting content out there on AI. We need to ensure what we say is highly valuable. It is vital that the marketing does not stop at the click or download, but continues to demonstrate our expertise when the content is read, so that prospects are impressed by our capabilities.”

“Memetic is a critical partner. They understand our complex business offer, and have become adept at turning our insight into content which is truly valuable to the senior decision makers we want to influence”.