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The Campaign

Repositioning an established player as an innovative market leader

Sage helps businesses of all sizes manage everything from money to people – whether they’re a start-up, scale-up or enterprise. It works with three million customers across 23 countries every day and aims to free them from the burden of admin, so they can spend more time running their businesses. It does this through Sage Business Cloud, a platform comprised of Accounting, Financials, Enterprise Management, People & Payroll and Payments & Banking solutions.

As a long-established player in the market, Sage was already known to media and business leaders. Therefore, its main challenge was to reposition itself as a modern, innovative brand in order to reach the next generation of customers.

The Results

Raising awareness

We helped to successfully raise the profile of Sage Business Cloud in the UK throughout the campaign. The average number of monthly Google searches increased by 50% in the second half of 2018, rising from an average of 1,000 a month to 1,500 a month.

Industry recognition

Sage was recognised in several industry awards, most notably winning Accountancy Software Provider of the Year at the British Small Business Awards. It was also shortlisted for FinTech Solution of the Year at the UK Cloud Awards and Cloud-Based Technology of 2018 at the Construction Computing Awards.

Message penetration

Coverage was generated for Sage in multiple top tier technology and business publications, including Techradar Pro, IT Pro, Computer Weekly, AccountingWeb, Personnel Today and Computer Business Review. These alone generated a total reach of nearly 14,000,000, helping to increase brand awareness by getting the right message in front of the right people.

Leading the conversation

With 108 pieces of coverage generated across 13 different verticals, we ensure that Sage had a consistent voice in industry discussions. This included 51 thought leadership articles, 16 briefings (including MicroScope, CRN and AccountingWEB) and four pieces of newsjacking coverage.

Our primary objectives were to build awareness of Sage Business Cloud with UK media and reposition Sage as an innovative expert in cloud-hosted business data and management. We were also tasked with positioning Sage Business Cloud as the easy access solution to improved intelligence, productivity and ROI across a selection of business functions.

The campaign was divided into UK media relations and global content creation, with our target audiences covering multiple verticals and business sizes. This required a complex, multi-component strategy that had to be carefully planned and managed from start to finish.

Our approach centred around thought leadership and regular briefings with trade media, combining Sage’s news pipeline with the wider conversation about ongoing technology issues in the accounting space.

This led to the creation of several mini campaigns through the year, including:

The final elements focused on news hijacking and industry awards. We closely monitored relevant industry news for Sage to comment on and coordinated a comprehensive awards program, drafting and submitting several successful entries throughout the campaign.

These activities helped to secured more than 100 pieces of coverage over the course of the 12-month campaign, ranging from news articles and thought leadership pieces, to case studies, Q&As and industry comments. This coverage spanned top-tier tech trade press and key vertical media, all of which helped to reinforce Sage’s position as the leading provider of cloud business management solutions.

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