EDUCATE, ENTERTAIN, ENGAGE: WRITING THE BOOK ON LEAD GENERATION

CRAFTING THE CONTENT STRATEGY

This campaign was the first opportunity to articulate Agilysys’s new positioning as the provider of high return hospitality. With that in mind, we started with a deep dive into Agilysys’s ideal customer profile to understand buyers’ pain points and identifiers. Pairing those challenges with the company’s value proposition and differentiators, we looked for themes and topics the company was uniquely qualified to address.

For any marketing campaign, the first hurdle is how to break through. Prospects are busy, attention spans are short, and everyone’s inbox is already overflowing with marketing messages.

Our approach was to do things differently – offer content that educates and entertains, rather than a sales pitch. Then, deliver it in a format that today is unexpected and unusual: A printed book.

We also partnered with Steve Curtin, author of the bestselling Delight Your Customers and a globally recognized expert on customer service leadership, to elevate and add authority to our content.

DEFINING HOSPITALITY EXCELLENCE

Together with Agilysys’s marketing team and Curtin, we brainstormed a total of 21 tenets for hospitality professionals, derived from Curtin’s research and tied to the technology provider’s solutions. These served as the foundation for our content.

We also incorporated seven short segments specific to Agilysys’s technology and their benefits. While the 21 tenets were written as technology-agnostic advice and thought leadership, these solution-focused snippets were tied directly to an offering.

The result was a lively mix of thought leadership on what it means to deliver high return hospitality, plus actionable tips and advice, interspersed with understated promotion of Agilysys’s solutions and their benefits. Each topic was written as a two-page section that could be digested in a couple of minutes, and each was accompanied by New Yorker-style cartoons that poked fun at the quirks and quandaries of the hospitality industry.

THE BOOK & BEYOND

Branded the Agilysys Little Black Book of High Return Hospitality, our small hardcover was designed to fit in the hand and travel easily. It became a central part of the hospitality innovator’s annual user conference, where more than 400 copies were distributed to operators and hospitality professionals.

To our delight, the novelty of this approach was well received, with many attendees sharing pictures of their copy of The Little Black Book on social media.

Arketi’s “Rule of 7” holds that any effective piece of B2B content can be converted into at least seven assets – it’s just a question of thinking big enough! Reuse, repurpose and recycle your content to reach your audience – whatever their preferred channel or format.

For example, The Little Black Book, which was initially a standalone print piece, became the cornerstone of a broader digital marketing campaign. Reformatted and paired with email copy and landing pages, The Little Black Book drove two marketing campaigns targeting property managers in the UK and hotel operators in North America. Together, the campaigns reached well over 4,000 high-value prospects and garnered impressive results. Open rates for the promotions were 64% above the average open rates for previous campaigns, content downloads were 2.5 times other offerings, and first-touch meetings set with market development managers were double other approaches.