The Progress Sitefinity marketing team was recently named a finalist by Chief Marketer in their 2020 Pro Awards.
The whole goal of Sitefinity is to enable digital agencies, web developers and internal IT teams to develop personalized digital experiences that enable people like me (a marketer) to deliver relevant content through the channels they choose.
But on the flipside, there is an entirely other side to marketing than just the digital side of the house—in-person marketing.
In a short period of time (before the COVID-19 pandemic) our team, which included a cross-functional team across the company, put together an amazing digital and in-person experience so anyone who saw our ads or attended one of our events could Experience Sitefinity. We rented out bars and poolside cabanas, had feet on the street (wearing light-up backpacks and slap bracelets), chalk messages on sidewalks, an airplane flyover and so much more. On the digital side, we had personalized webpages based on location, social media ads and campaigns, banners on other Progress.com properties and location-based ads, just to name a few.
And for good measure we threw in some fun giveaways for people who attended one of our in-person events.
I’m sure your next question is, what are the results? When awareness is an objective, measuring success can be tricky but we were able to track:
- 2.7 million impressions via IP targeting of event attendees
- 1.6 million impressions on Twitter via our #ExperienceSitefinity branded hashtag with a 775% year-over-year increase in Twitter engagement
- 30% YoY increase in generated leads
What Did We Do Next?
We took another chance and entered the Chief Marketer Pro Awards—which are largest awards program recognizing excellence in promotion marketing.
The category we’ve been nominated in is for Disruptive Marketing which looks at the “freshest and most disruptive ideas.” The judges will be looking at “branding, content, promotional displays and environments that made jaws drop and eyes pop” as well as the ability to have succeeded in reaching out and effectively promoting to the target audience.
On Sept. 2, I’ll be watching, along with the rest of the team from Progress, to see if we’ve won. If you want to watch along with us, save your seat.
Working on this for Sitefinity was a memorable experience—one that all marketers should strive to deliver. Take a look #ExperienceSitefinity for yourself and see what you can imagine, the sky’s the limit … literally.
Susan Koutalakis
Susan Koutalakis has more than a decade of marketing, public relations agency and corporate communications experience, specifically in building and executing public relations, analyst relations, social media, product launches, webinar, customer reference and online marketing programs. Previously, she’s worked for both emerging and established companies with a focus on areas such as application development, mobile, interactive and social media, SaaS, marketing, and eCommerce technologies.