Intermedia, a unified communications platform for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), needed to stand out in a sea of “Work from Anywhere” messaging that competitors across industries were using during the onset of the coronavirus shift to remote work.
Role: Creative Director | Creative Strategy, Copy & Design
Agency: Hotwire
Year: 2020
Due to COVID restrictions, companies around the world were forced to quickly pivot to remote workforces overnight. While most industries were brought to a halt, technology companies which enabled remote work inundated the internet with ads promising the ability to work from anywhere. Intermedia needed a brand campaign that would elevate their current messaging and help them rise above larger competitors, answering the needs of SMB owners during this volatile and uncertain time period.
Given the unique circumstance SMB owners were facing, we began by conducting media and competitor audits as well as quantitative and qualitative SMB research to truly understand the needs of this audience and find an opportunity to not only stand out, but connect and engage with them. Our research validated that “working from anywhere” was now table stakes, and SMB owners were primarily worried about setting their business up for long-term success with transformational solutions that would go beyond the pandemic, along with several other very specific pain points, like driving sales remotely. Knowing this, we set off to develop a campaign that would go beyond functional benefits, to human-focused benefits that spoke directly to SMB’s current pain points.
With insights on hand, we developed and activated a brand campaign and thought leadership platform that went beyond table stakes and directly addressed SMB owner’s needs and concerns. Enter “Work Better. From Wherever,” a creative platform that turned problems into solutions that were both functional and emotional. Through a scaleable messaging architecture, the campaign tailored messaging across pain points, use cases, and products with copy like: “Close the Deal. From Wherever. Keep growing your business from wherever with the all-in-one solution that turns every floor into a sales floor.” To further stand out, our creative brought the product benefits to life by showcasing the human interactions that Intermedia enabled, regardless of location.
Not only did our display, paid social, and organic tactics outperform our projections by 271% impressions, but more importantly our messaging struck a chord with this audience resulting in a 115% lift in emotional intensity and 93% lift in activation.