Success Story: The brand transformation of a telco into a digital transformation company

TM One is the business-to-business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), the largest telecommunications provider in Malaysia.

Similarly to many traditional telcos, TM One was known for being a connectivity provider. However, it needed to improve its brand perception as a trusted partner to deliver complex IT solutions such as Cloud and Cybersecurity, mainly among enterprises. This was imperative to support TM One’s growth strategy beyond connectivity.

Puan Azida Mohamed Burhan, General Manager of Marketing at TM One, knew that TM One had to rethink its communications and go-to-market strategy.

She says, “Customers are seeing us as a connectivity provider. We are beyond connectivity. The challenge that we have is how can we make our customers see that we are indeed an end-to-end digital services company. The other challenge is also for TM One to understand the vertical needs and wants of each decision-maker as well, such as what are the CTOs’ requirements and what are the CEOs’ requirements.”

To help TM One  understand its customers better and formulate a new communications and content strategy, GetIT used C-MAP, or communication map, a holistic B2B communication planning framework.

Discovery

The discovery module of C-MAP includes desk research and workshops with the client team to document the market dynamics of each product or solution, analyse the competitors’ positioning, and most importantly, get an in-depth understanding of the target audience from firmographics to individual persona sketches.

Anol Bhattacharya, CEO of GetIT explains that, “We spent quite a bit of time together with the TM One marketing team in the discovery phase. I have to say that one of the things Puan and her team did very well, which is not very common in my experience, is not rushing  through the discovery phase. Not only did we conduct desk research on target industries, competitors and top accounts, we also spent time with analysts from IDC to plan the right go to market strategy, based on the research they have done.”

“From this we found out that every vertical had their own needs. While every vertical needs cyber security or cloud or digital transformation, every vertical has a very vertical specific need for these solutions.”

Strategy

In the strategy or the planning phase insights from the discovery phase are used to plan out the content strategy, or the content journey for prospects, decide on a media strategy based on media consumption patterns, as well as the positioning and tonality of our messaging.

“Once we have  defined our target personas, who we are talking to, with empathy, understanding what their organisational as well as personal aspirations and fears are, we created detailed persona sketches and mapped content to their buying journey, this is how we derive the content strategy,” says Anol.

Furthermore, he says, “It is very important how B2B tech or telco companies help customers to buy. In terms of content proliferation where everyone wants to position themselves as a thought leader, I think the TM One leadership team, especially the marketing leadership team under Puan Azida, has really helped us to show empathy in our content strategy planning.”

Idea

Through a series of brand workshops with internal stakeholders during the discovery phase, the right positioning for TM One was formulated and a new tagline was conceptualised. 

Taking Transformation Forward clearly states TM One’s intention of taking leadership of transformation for both Malaysian enterprises and government, beyond being a connectivity provider.

Taking Transformation Forward was told through the story of infinite possibilities brought about by technologies such as analytics, AI, IOT and how TM One brings together the power of connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity and smart services to realise their digital aspirations. 

Activation

The activation phase, where the tire hits the road, is a constant iterative process of measuring what matters, and optimising different variables to reach the optimal mix of marketing and business goals.

“We not only rolled out the Taking Transformation Forward campaign, which is I believe is an absolutely brilliant summary of TM One’s ethos but launched  TM One’s cybersecurity solution, CYDEC and cloud solution, Cloud Alpha but the first it was important to fix the zero point of interaction, the website,” says Anol.

He adds that, “The website content was personalised by industry. Someone coming from the healthcare industry, would be served a catalogue of content, or a combination of content which caters to them. That really helps to show our understanding of the industry, as well as the technology context specific to their industry.”

Decision-makers would then be nurtured with content such as eBooks, infographics,  factsheets, newsletters, articles and webinars personalised for their industry throughout their buying journey.

Optimisation

To measure and improve the performance of all campaigns, a custom dashboard was built to connect data from media campaigns with TM One’s website and CRM tool, Pardot, giving a real-time view on: 

• Prospect’s profiles
• Number of leads 
• The best performing media channels 
• Cost Per Conversion
• Contract value from leads generated

Puan Azida explains that, “We measure brand effectiveness with a Brand Health Tracker report and revenue KPIs quarter by quarter. We are seeing increments in terms of the performance and it is on the upward trend.”

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