We collaborate with Softcat

Softcat faced several challenges that hindered their ability to effectively communicate their complex offerings and support their sales team.

The primary issues included presenting a multifaceted range of IT infrastructure products and services in a clear manner, differentiating themselves in a competitive market, and ensuring that the website played a supportive role in the sales process rather than being a hindrance.

These challenges resulted in confusing user journeys and a lack of clarity in their brand representation.

To address these challenges, we identified the following main objectives for the website redesign project:

• Create an engaging introduction to Softcat for new customers to grow the contact base.
• Assist sales by promoting Softcat in the best possible way.
• Generate new leads for sales to qualify.
• Support ongoing customer service by being a useful resource to customers.

The product design phase focused on simplifying user journeys and creating a visually engaging site. Rawnet's team embedded themselves in Softcat's culture through workshops and stakeholder interviews to develop key principles guiding the project.

The creative direction aimed to distinguish Softcat from other IT sites, using shapes established from the logo to create a unique, impactful, and vibrant connection. A refreshed colour palette and modernised font were implemented to reflect Softcat's brand direction and culture, while fully responsive design and welcoming images encouraged more browsing and engagement.

Building on the product design, the customer acquisition strategy centred on creating a sales-oriented user experience. This involved simplifying journeys, reducing the number of pages, and integrating resources, news, and insights.

Rawnet overhauled service and solution pages with refined copy and implemented a conversational marketing tool to assist leads on their journey. The team also developed an SEO strategy and set up triggered events for database building, enhancing Softcat's ability to capture and nurture leads.

The technical build focused on creating a scalable platform for the future, moving away from legacy systems. Rawnet integrated Softcat's CRM (Infor CRM) to streamline sales processes and incorporated marketing tools like Drift and Sleeknote to assist customers at specific points in their journey.

The team leveraged Concrete5's flexibility and Cloudfront for performance and security, delivering a fully administrable, fast content management solution. This allowed Softcat's marketing team to create unique landing pages without external costs, providing greater creative freedom.

The website redesign project yielded impressive results, demonstrating significant improvements in user engagement and lead generation.

These outcomes indicate a substantial improvement in the quality of traffic and engagement levels compared to the previous website, validating the effectiveness of Rawnet's partnership with Softcat in transforming their digital presence.

Softcat's challenge was to effectively promote their enhanced Azure services in collaboration with Microsoft while showcasing their expertise as an Azure Expert MSP.

A series of inbound marketing campaigns would help address this challenge by driving targeted traffic to their new Azure content on softcat.com, showcasing Softcat's Azure offerings, and generating leads for their migration services.

To address this, we identified the following key objectives for the inbound LinkedIn campaign:

• Increase brand awareness among unconverted audiences interested in Azure services.
• Generate leads for three new Azure migration services promoted on softcat.com.
• Attract those that are new to Azure and existing customers looking to optimise their public cloud adoption.
• Expand reach by communicating Softcat's core value proposition and messaging to a wider audience via LinkedIn.

The campaigns focused on promoting Softcat's new Azure migration services, aiming to educate both existing and new customers about these offerings. The primary goal was to drive traffic to the new Azure content on Softcat.com and generate leads. The targeted audience included decision-makers and CXOs within particular industries and company sizes.

We collaborated with an additional  branding agency that Softcat partnered with, to create compelling static imagery and video assets for the campaign creatives. This partnership ensured that the visual elements effectively communicated Softcat's value proposition and the messaging resonated with  the targeted audience.

We executed and managed various LinkedIn-focused campaigns over 6-week period time frames. Regular check-ins were held to monitor performance, optimise audiences, and rotate ads as necessary to prevent ad fatigue. Continuous management ensured the campaign remained effective and aligned with our objectives.

To track the campaign's performance, we created detailed reporting dashboards that provided real-time insights to help optimise activity. At the end of the campaign, we compiled a comprehensive final report for internal stakeholders, which included performance data, successes, key learnings, and recommendations to guide for future campaigns.

Through a combination of real-time campaign monitoring, optimisation and collaboration, we saw the results of these campaigns improve over time. Our conjoined efforts helped successfully achieve the objectives we had set out to accomplish through an increase in brand awareness, traffic and lead generation.

To help people drill down into what would be best for their needs, the assessment tool enables the Softcat team to set up the tool by initiative, by partner, or for the Softcat business in general. The overall aim is to reduce the overload of what's on offer, and allow an engaged user to assess what they could really benefit from.

We worked together to implement a new assessment tool within the Concrete5 CMS that allows the Softcat marketing team to have full flexibility on creating assessment tools as desired, without the need for technical intervention. These tools act as an effective lead generation, to accompany initiatives and content that is being pushed out. Users are able to assess and diagnose products and services that match their specific business and technical needs. This personalised approach aimed to enhance customer satisfaction and engagement by providing tailored recommendations.

We determined our objectives as:

• Enhancing the user experience by guiding potential customers to relevant solutions and services tailored to their business and technical circumstances.
• Improving the quality of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) through a more personalised assessment journey.
• Establish initial benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of the new assessment journey.

The design approach for this project emphasised flexibility and future-proofing by building the application as its own C5 package. This decision allows the application to be headless, meaning that both the user interface (UI) and backend (BE) can be replaced or updated independently in the future if needed.

The technical architecture of the project is designed to support robust tracking and analytics capabilities. Google Analytics (GA) events are implemented for each question in the assessment survey process. This setup is crucial for tracking user interactions and identifying points where users may drop off, thereby providing insights into the survey's completion rate and potential areas for improvement. The tracking includes monitoring the use of the Next and Back buttons on each question, allowing for a detailed analysis of how users navigate through the survey.

Integrations play a significant role in the technical framework. Active Campaign is integrated to manage email communications effectively. Email templates are set up within Active Campaign, and the  configuration we have implemented allows CMS users to select emails from a dropdown menu, ensuring a seamless and efficient user experience. All email responses are stored within Active Campaign, maintaining a comprehensive record of user interactions.

Our teams are still diligently working on enhancing the assessment tool and implementing robust tracking and analytics capabilities to ensure that the objectives are fully realised.