Creating an agile plan to drive growth through global disruption.
Situation
A global professional services firm entered 2020 with a comprehensive, centralized marketing plan for the EMEA region. The strategy was set, with budgets and campaigns allocated across events, content, and lead generation. The plan, built for a stable market, relied heavily upon in-person events as a core pillar of the marketing strategy. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this centralized strategy became obsolete overnight, threatening the entire year’s growth targets for the region.
Challenge
The core challenge was two-fold: the sudden impossibility of executing the event pillar of the plan, and the need to account for vastly different economic and public health situations across EMEA countries. With a reduced annual budget, we had to rapidly shift all marketing activities online while moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to creating hyper-relevant, localized campaigns for Europe and Middle Eastern markets.
Solution
We led a complete strategic overhaul, transitioning the entire EMEA marketing plan to a digital-first, agile model. This involved repurposing the event budget into a robust content and virtual event program, and creating a flexible campaign framework. This framework provided global alignment on core messaging while allowing local marketers to quickly adapt and deploy campaigns tailored to their specific market conditions. This not only sustained lead generation, but ultimately exceeded our annual target despite the global crisis.