Challenge
New Relic underwent a dramatic simplification of their product portfolio from eleven SKUs to just three powerful products in on unified platform: New Relic One. OBJECTIVES The “Observability for All” campaign had to first reach a niche and savvy group of developers, often adverse to digital retargeting, and then authentically communicate the new brand value.
Solution
In order to reach the niche marketing adverse audience, we had to create a media plan that was hyper-focused on channel platforms that developer communities spend their time. A strong focus of this campaign was to appeal to New Relic’s current customers as well as competitor’s customers. This audience was identified as developers, Site Reliability Engineers and IT Operations professionals. As this audience group is typically averse to digital targeting, the strategy that was developed from initial research and insights that found this particular audience group prefers to connect with brands on their own terms. This led to a focus on authentic engagement and value supplied. A major tenet of the strategy was a renewed commitment to developers at a grassroots level by providing a robust free tier to encourage usage and adoption. This was paralleled in media through native communities to support educational resources and drive lead generation. With New Relic migrating many of their offerings to open-source licenses, engagement with a broader developer community was vital. As such, the campaign found its audience through underutilized channels like Reddit, YouTube and podcasts. Video storytelling was leveraged for brand awareness, with the campaign launch predominantly focused on platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, video display ads and Connected TV. Social media was heavily relied upon as those platforms are built for engagement, including Twitter and Reddit for their conversational tone, and LinkedIn for contextual alignment and targeting capabilities. Initially introduced as a test platform, Reddit performance proved the most efficient at generating new sign-ups and now a priority platform for organic efforts and other international regions for New Relic. The campaign aligned with traditional, developer focused publishers that act primarily as forums and discussions, as well as resources to be aligned with relevant content such as partnering with a Code Project, a member of the Developer Media family. A prominent homepage unit, built custom to demonstrate usability, led to a customer landing page with a product deep-dive. Programmatic was predominately utilized to bring new qualified customers into the funnel by running branding channels while maximizing site visitation and conversions. New Relic targeted users across various touchpoints and measured the impact of each touchpoint holistically, delivering ads across Display, CTV, Audio, Online Video and High Impact. Audio humanized the brand and engaged with industry experts and skeptics. These placements focused on building relationships with few but mighty influencers to build trust such as AWS, ‘Screaming in the Cloud,’ Serverless Chats and a custom interview with AMP Digest. Data analytics monitored a wide assortment of performance metric to pivot based on real-time performance. Audience segmentation became more evolved through intent targeting as we moved from brand awareness to lead generation.
Results
“Observability for All” launched New Relic into their next chapter through inventive targeting practices and authentically connecting with their customer base.
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