Case study: DeltaXignia

When experts loved the product but decision-makers couldn’t see why it mattered: how clearer marketing changed their minds.

DeltaXignia develops deeply technical software that is now embedded in major products and helps some of the world’s leading organisations manage and compare complex, safety-critical documents. They were increasingly running into challenges, particularly with larger organisations, where senior decision-makers couldn’t see the true value of the DeltaXignia software and so pushed towards building the capability in-house.

As they planned a new website, it became clear that they first needed to articulate, clearly and compellingly, the unique value their product delivers to customers. We began there, drawing out that proposition, and went on to create sector-specific marketing and detailed customer case studies that repositioned the software from something customers might consider building themselves into a dependable capability that gets their own products to market faster.

The sales and marketing challenge

DeltaXignia is complex software that is selected and used by developers and other specialists. Their old website content supported that audience and was prominent in their search results.

However, the Marketing Director recognised the need to engage with senior decision-makers earlier in the sales process and asked me to help plan the new website and their marketing literature to ensure the value to those individuals was clear and prominent.

To capture the real business value of DeltaXignia, I started by exploring the business contexts in which customers were using their products. Their own team understood the technical implementations well but had never explored the commercial reasons behind each purchase.

I spoke to some of their best customers, structuring the conversations to cover the wider business context, the commercial and technical challenges they needed to address and the benefits that they are now achieving.

Gaining fresh insights directly from customers

Our products are complex and intangible, but your marketing makes them understandable while drawing out their full value. Your case studies cut through the complexity, telling an engaging story and conveying the benefits that we delivered, clearly and convincingly.
Bridget Mason, Director of Marketing, DeltaXignia

Drawing out the unique business value

From these conversations it became clear that customers choose to invest in DeltaXignia products because they take all the risk out of a technically challenging and potentially very time-consuming area of development. Their software provides an important capability to customers, but one which is too niche to justify their own developers learning about the complexity and intricacies just to re-invent the wheel.

I set this out through a hierarchy of messages, from the top-level risk-reduction and time to market, down to the specific capabilities, documentation and support services which underpin different customer use cases.

With the new website project, I worked with their web agency from the earliest planning stages, to make sure that the nuanced needs of different buyers were understood. We considered the different buyer journeys and established the structure and flow needed through the site, as well as planning content for the very different needs and interests.

I wrote all the texts for the main website pages and also helped review existing website content, which continued to serve a critical purpose with technical buyers.

Building on the insights from conversations with their customers, I wrote new detailed customer case studies. Each of these focuses on the business challenges and opportunities, clearly demonstrating the ROI from a senior decisionmaker’s perspective. We also ensured that the case studies include enough technical detail to differentiate DeltaXignia from other approaches that prospective customers might consider.

New website and case studies

Writing customer case studies for software developers, DeltaXignia

Foundations for in-house marketing

The propositions and content which I created provided a strong foundation for DeltaXignia to run their own day to day marketing, with a strong emphasis on online activity, as well as traditional promotions and exhibiting at industry events.

I continued to work with DeltaXignia for several years, creating key content and industry-specific propositions that complemented their in-house capability until they were ready to do it all themselves.