XLEDGER

The Future CFO: a thought leadership and media relations campaign to engage finance decision-makers

530

CFOs surveyed

105

marketing qualified leads generated

37%

open rate

speaking opportunities secured

This was a heavily targeted and integrated campaign with specific KPIs for driving marketing qualified leads. An extensive range of tactics, underpinned by thought leadership, enabled us to reach a broad audience by achieving high levels of trade and vertical coverage, with a strong call-to-action.

Greg Halse
Associate Director at AMBITIOUS

Executed the ‘Future CFO’ campaign, utilising thought leadership and media relations to engage finance decision-makers.

INSIGHT

Headquartered in Bristol, Xledger UK is a cloud-based accounting software solution provider for mid-market organisations. It helps over 10,000 organisations in over 60 countries, digitise, streamline, and bring automated solutions to their finances.

Xledger was looking to grow its brand awareness and gain further traction with mid-market organisations
It’s communications goal was to ultimately sell and integrate more of its finance software into businesses across the country.

To meet these objectives, Xledger appointed AMBITIOUS to deliver strategic PR support to:

Build an asset to drive brand awareness that was relevant to each target audience across a variety of sectors and would resonate with finance decision-makers.
Create a campaign that had longevity and could be utilised throughout the business for sales and marketing.

Audience

Finance & IT decision makers within mid-market organisations in the following key vertical markets:
Energy
Charity
Education
Hospitality
Venues

IDEAS

With in-depth experience of integrated PR campaigns, AMBITIOUS knew that a piece of ‘hero’ thought leadership would be the driving force of the campaign would fuel a range of paid, earned, shared and owned PR tactics.

Utilising the team’s knowledge of the finance sector, plus media monitoring tools. AMBITIOUS identified key discussion topics within the industry that Xledger could become a leading voice on, and that would resonate with IT and Finance decision makers in their target sectors.
The overarching topic decided on was ‘The Future CFO’ and what that would look like in businesses in the years to come.
A research project was commissioned to ask 529 CFOs and finance decision makers in Xledger’s key sectors their thoughts on how the role is changing.
The data provided a vast amount of information to create a 4,000 word white paper report on the evolving role of a CFO, the challenges they face and what this means for senior leaders.
The narrative created an opportunity to promote the message that Xledger’s automated cloud-based finance software could be the perfect solution for struggling, time poor CFOs and finance departments.
We deployed an integrated content approach, promoting the report via tailored social media assets and press materials specific to each sector.
Tailored press releases with sector-specific data for the Energy, Charity, Education, Utility, and Venues l media sectors were produced.

The campaign also drew on AMBITIOUS’ experience in financial sector communications, aligning technical subject matter with the needs and language of senior finance professionals.

IMPACT

Through this activity, AMBITIOUS achieved:

31 pieces of earned media coverage
13x hits in the business press
18x hits in sector specific media

Outputs: 

Announcements in each of Xleger’s key verticals – Energy, Charity, Education, Utility, and Venues – ensured it was visible to each segment of its target audience.
4x speaking opportunities were secured for senior Xledger staff following the report outreach.

Outcomes: 

Audience reach through media coverage of 7 million
Overall, the report can be traced back to 105 marketing qualified leads.

Outtakes: 

When used as a marketing asset, the Future CFO report received a 37% open rate, with an average engagement of 56 people on campaign social assets.
There was also a qualitative uptick in prospect conversations when utlising the report as Sales collateral.
In addition, a strong level of attendance was secured for Xledger’s ‘Future CFO Webinar’.

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