INNOVATE were honoured to be recognised with the Cisco Marketing Excellence Award at the Cisco Ireland FY’20 Partner Awards in early 2021. The award was presented to INNOVATE due to its success in marketing Cisco products and services to both existing and new customers.
As a leading Cloud Managed Service Provider, partnering with world class technology companies like Cisco is important to enable us to better serve our customers. When combining Cisco’s innovative technology with the expertise of our technical team we can help our customers drive real change in their organisation. Cisco technology enables us deliver solutions in security, unified communications, WAN and wireless, allowing our customers better collaborate with their clients and partners.
A primary marketing goal in 2020 for INNOVATE was to further strengthen our partnership with Cisco and present the best possible solutions to our customers. We shared our vision for the year with Cisco and took feedback from them to ensure our approach complimented theirs.
Early in 2020 we created an explainer animation with Cisco which featured and promoted both our MSP services and our partnership with Cisco. We found this was effective in explaining the value we could deliver.
Once the pandemic hit Ireland in March, we knew we had to adapt to our customers’ new reality and act quickly. Security became a priority as organisations moved to remote working. Therefore, we pivoted our campaigns to address the changing needs of our audience. “Defend against threats wherever users go” focused on Cisco’s key security products of Duo, Umbrella, Meraki Firewall and AnyConnect. We created both online and offline marketing campaigns around these Cisco products and our associated services. We used national broadcasting platforms such as RTE News and The Irish Times for online marketing and print. This campaign was aligned with Cisco’s “Secure my Remote Workforce” approach.
Overall, having a consistent message around our partnership and the strength of our managed service combined with Cisco technology has helped us create leads for our sales team and shown us how both brands can compliment each other in the marketplace. We won a number of managed services contracts as a direct result of our campaigns and modernised those organisations through the introduction of Cisco technologies.
In 2020, we listened to what our customers were looking for, we took feedback from our colleagues in sales, technical and professional services and thought about the issues that our current and potential customers were trying to solve. We worked proactively with Cisco and that made a real difference in the effectiveness of our approach.
“INNOVATE were awarded the Cisco Marketing Excellence Award as testament to their hard work and quick thinking in the past year. They continue to show their strength as a partner in marketing Cisco products and solutions to meet their customer needs and enabling a remote workforce.” Tom Long, Head of Major Accounts at Cisco Ireland
Given our expertise with unified communications and Cisco’s leadership in cloud communications, it became clear that the Webex Suite was a solution we wanted to add to our portfolio. In support of our go to market we have shifted our marketing focus to deliver that message to the market. Continuing to present the best solutions for our customers is a top priority for 2021 and our marketing and communication’s strategy underpins that
