Client: Cloud Sherpas (Altanta)
Agency: Tool Guy PR (Menlo Park, CA)
Campaign: Cloud Sherpas promotes funding and raises profile
Duration: October 25 - November 5
Budget: Approximately $5,000
As Google's largest reseller and systems integrator, Cloud Sherpas helps businesses adopt the Google cloud computing platform and Google Apps. Since its founding in 2008, the company has migrated over 600,000 businesses and institutions from various e-mail platforms to Google's cloud. Agency Tool Guy PR has been working with Cloud Sherpas for the last year.
“We're big believers in PR in general,” says Cloud Sherpas' founder and VP marketing Michael Cohn. “PR is a very organic way to generate SEO, and it's raised our profile in the Google Apps ecosystem, with Google in general, and with potential customers.”
In late October, the team launched a media relations campaign to promote a November 3 announcement of $1.6 million in Series A-1 financing and help generate new business.
Strategy
Because the financing story alone wouldn't generate much media interest, Tool Guy PR founder Kevin Wolf says the strategy was to pitch a broader business story about why companies are moving e-mail to the cloud with Google.
“We used the fundraising event as an opportunity to educate reporters about who we are, what's going on in the market, and why we're growing,” Cohn adds. “[We want] reporters to come back to us as a source later.”
Tactics
Wolf says online tech and business outlets were the priority, given that they are primary sources of information for people in the tech world. A few traditional outlets were targeted as well.
Cloud Sherpas' in-house team also pushed out information on Twitter.
Results
Outlets covering the story included TechCrunch, VentureBeat.com, The New York Times, PC World, and ZDNet. Cloud Sherpas also made CRN's list of the 10 biggest cloud computing stories of 2010. The president of Google's enterprise division tweeted about the fundraising announcement.
Cohn is very pleased, noting that number of forms completed on the website by sales prospects jumped 350% during the week of November 3 compared to the previous week. He adds that 17 lead submissions came in on November 3, up from a daily average of four to five.
Website traffic increased 554.7% on Wednesday, November 3 compared to same day on the previous week, and Cohn reports that many visitors came in from media stories. Overall, November 2010 website visitors increased 182% compared to November 2009 (up from 2,226 to 6,283), and page views increased from 5,146 in 2009 to 32,664.
Future
The team will continue to work together to build momentum with ongoing media outreach.
