Mapping client and lead data to support a telecoms go-to-market strategy
A fast-growth business in a highly competitive market
Welsh telecoms company Ogi needed a way to understand their business clients and inform their Business Sales and Marketing Strategy.
The business marketing team were keen to understand the type of clients they were attracting and converting; they had some assumptions but wanted to be able to tell the full story.
Mapping the marketing story
Glew was asked to produce a set of geo-maps and dashboards as part of an ongoing Insights project for Ogi. Business Marketing Manager for Ogi Martyn Bicknell said:
“Ogi’s business model as a network builder is to connect communities and businesses to their next gen full fibre network across south Wales. We were looking to map our customer and lead data to provide a valuable view of our progress and penetration and inform our next move. We were keen to visualise the data to help us identify high potential areas for sales efforts and have an easier way to explain the marketing narrative than data alone could”.
Analysing market strengths and opportunities
As key indicators of broadband need, industry and business size were the most useful parameters by which to segment Ogi’s business audience, but when interrogating the data it quickly became apparent that inconsistency that would prevent reliable analysis.
With over 50 variants of industry against each of the businesses and some variations in the way business size and geographical location were recorded, the first task was to simplify the categories and clean up the data.
“We did some work to recategorise and synthesise industry, size band and geographical categories to support easier segmentation,” explained Martyn. “SIC codes didn’t work for us, so this in turn kicked off a review of our whole data capture process and the way we manage and share insights between teams.”
With a consistent and more comprehensive dataset, Glew was able to present the data creatively to help tell the story. Glew used an interactive Power BI report to visualise the spread of clients and leads by geographical region, industry and business size. These could be filtered by different variables, like campaign source and postcode, to allow Ogi to slice the view by the aspects of most interest.
Then, by overlaying ONS business counts, we were able to compare Ogi’s strength sectors in relation to the wider market, allowing us to estimate the scale of growth in that sector.
By aggregating the data at a local authority level, but mapping at postcode level, we were also able to make granular observations to support the identification of event and campaign hotspots.
As well as being able to confirm the potential in Ogi’s target personas had assumptions about – for example in the Creative and Financial and Professional Services sectors, the mapping identified additional sectors of growth potential, like food & drink, tourism and hospitality and construction which Ogi had started to build a strong client base in. Martyn said:
“The mapping identified key verticals that informed our B2B account-based marketing campaign down to account selection, and the visualisation helped improve segmentation strategies and targeting.”
Securing buy-in and value with data visualisation
“Glew’s work significantly enhanced our understanding of commercial trends and customer behaviour through detailed mapping. The innovative data analysis and visualisation was instrumental in driving strategic decisions. In addition, Glew’s professionalism and dedication ensured high-quality results. The mapping helped secure buy-in from senior management to focus our targeting strategy at specific verticals where we saw the greatest opportunity. From this an account-based marketing strategy was adopted to focus on key targets.”
While it was time-consuming initially, the data cleansing process also changed Ogi’s data capture processes, saving time in the long run and allowing them to derive greater value from the data.
“We now have a manageable and consistent way to categorise business industries and sizes to help segment them for more targeted campaigns. In addition, our data purchase process is more efficient and targeted; by being able to select more specific geographical areas and industries to draw down data, we are saving money on irrelevant records.”
There have also been improvements to communication and cross-team working:
“Having a target audience for our campaigns has given us the opportunity to provide real focus across sales and marketing teams from building ICP, targeting messaging around pain points, increased expertise, efficient resource allocation to how we align with different partners, events, and build stronger relationships.”
Overlaying data for added insights
Ogi is now trialling a version of the maps in Glew’s new data-mapping service, Glenda, and exploring ways to overlay broadband data for greater competitor insights and integrate the report into Ogi’s wider data infrastructure.
“This development with Glenda would provide real-time insights for location-based marketing strategies and sales resource allocation, which will allow us to respond promptly to changes and opportunities as well as identify regional trends, preferences, and market gaps, making it more efficient and focussed and helping us track performance,” said Martyn.