Curamando hunts for trophy companies

Curamando hunts for trophy companies with NORNORM

The client case in short

Curamando, Keybroker and Animal (all part of ARC) have together been core enablers in launching IKEA’s circular office furniture startup NORNORM. The ARC companies established and built NORNORM’s customer acquisition capability, marketing strategy as well as web and media platforms. A particularly successful initiative was to target and sign up trophy companies as early adopter clients using Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is a strategic marketing approach where organisations target and communicate with individual prospects or customer accounts. To streamline marketing resources, companies were listed, prioritised and individually targeted with communication and value offerings adapted to industry, company size and role.

For NORNORM, the prioritisation was to target selected ”trophies”: forefront companies considered inspirational within their industries, a difficult task that would require both ingenuity in media targeting, eye-catching creatives and a skilled outbound sales team to follow up on marketing leads.

Introduction

Why buy office furniture when you can subscribe to them? The IKEA backed startup NORNORM disrupts the market for office furniture by introducing FaaS (Furniture as a Service) enabling cost-effective, stylish interior design that can be changed with the needs of the business. Together with ARC, NORNORM has launched in several European markets.

Background

The combination of a new brand and a new type of business model means that there are few existing consumer behaviours to use for targeting and optimising low funnel marketing. A well-known brand or established existing product can work with SEO and SEM to build visibility on relevant search keywords, identify relevant social media clusters and work with retargeting/lookalikes on existing traffic. In contrast, as the awareness of new brands and novel products is generally low, very few users search for novel brand names or innovative novel products. For example, search volumes for “office furniture” are high – driven by consumers looking to improve their home office set up – but the searches for “office furniture subscription” are a handful at best. Therefore, in NORNORM’s case, growth had to be driven by building brand and concept awareness – not by optimising based on scarce data and non-existing behaviour.

Additionally, being a new brand requires effective trust-building for people to sign up and invest in the effort of initiating a sales process, often involving multiple stakeholders. As it often is in B2B, multiple changes to the office set up have multiple decision-makers, both formal (CEO, CFO, Facility managers, HR, office management) as well as informal (founders, CSR, task forces). With a high profile, complex product offering like NORNORM’s full office design on subscription, a significantly higher engagement from multiple stakeholders is needed to initiate a sales process. While established brands are struggling to get enough time and attention from B2B stakeholders, the challenge is even greater for a new brand.

Solution: Go hunting for trophy companies!

Create interest and trustworthiness using the brand equity of innovative and forefront brands currently trending in media and news. A trophy company as a client can build a solid case and act as a beacon for additional companies to also try the service.

Curamando set up a team with the task to monitor media and create customised campaigns, targeting companies with trending office-related news. For example, Spotify’s remote work policy, Klarna’s 1bn funding, Netflix’s starting a Scandinavian hub and Uber’s construction of a new headquarter in Amsterdam.

The cross-functional team set up a customised digital campaign, taking a communicative spin on the news topic and publishing it within 24h. We targeted the trophy company on social media, combined with broader industry targeting, and finally, the campaign creatives were used in broad, prospecting campaigns.

Focusing on one single company at a time enabled NORNORM to tailor the communication to meet their exact current needs and build almost personal connections through clever use of targeting and social media. The ambition was to get the trophy company to feel courted and flattered, to encourage employees to talk about the campaign and spread the word in-house.

 

NORNORM results

Five international trophy companies were targeted on social media. Four of the trophy companies have requested proposals, and three have already signed the first deal.

”As a new innovative circular brand, it’s critical for us to secure real deals with the world’s most admired and influential companies. They are role models for successful companies across the world and if we can earn their trust then it serves us a very good argument for our service. ARC’s creative and fast-paced ABM marketing execution has so far resulted in three such deals which is a testament to both NORNORM’s offering and ARC’s marketing shrewdness.”

Jonas Kjellberg, Chairman and Founder of NORNORM

Prospecting campaigns using trophy company communication generated 3.4x more site engagement and 4.9x more lead sign-ups than digital brand campaigns communicating their own brand and product.

Key success factors

  • Relevance and timing – use trophy companies press releases relating to NORNORMs product to form communication and timing of the campaign.
  • Cross-functional marketing team allow for less than 24 hours from press release/news to live campaign with customised creatives and landing pages.
  • Outbound sales onboard with the activities and plan, to tag into follow up and contacting companies visiting the site.
  • Layered campaign tactics – targeting the trophy company, the industry and also using site data to optimise performance in broad prospecting campaigns. The cost per contact and lead will be high targeting the core audience, but the broader targeting will stand for more cost-efficient traffic and additional leads.
  • Patience! While some trophy leads signed up directly on-site, most require patience, high frequency and outbound sales to reach out.

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