Customer Case Study: F5 Networks

F5 Networks is a market leading technology provider in the application delivery sector. With tens of thousands of global customers using their data networking technologies, F5 has an ongoing desire to both understand its customers' product experiences and to incorporate their feedback into its marketing and sales processes.

Specifically, F5 is very interested in reinforcing their market leadership position with hard statistical evidence or "proof points" to illustrate why customers purchase their offerings. The company believes strongly that customer-based marketing efforts are the most effective means of demonstrating F5's operational and financial value to customers.

The Challenge

Like most companies, the marketing team within F5 has relied exclusively on data collection methods including survey tools and research services to gather information from its customers. Once gathered, this data would then be turned into marketing content as a separate process, then finally applied to the initiative for which it was intended. The marketing team at F5 was looking to make this entire process more efficient. They needed to increase the speed and breadth of finished content created to support their outbound programs, but to do so without breaking their existing budgets.

Why F5 Networks Chose TechValidate

F5 Networks identified TechValidate as a means to unify the historically separate processes of customer evidence collection, marketing content creation, and demand generation and lead nurturing. Using TechValidate, the marketing team at F5 can quickly conduct online outreach across multiple product lines, gathering insights directly from its global customer base. Still under total control by the marketing team, this customer feedback is then transformed instantly by TechValidate into targeted content assets that are streamed to appropriate portal pages aligned with F5's industry verticals, geographies and usage cases. F5 can then widely leverage these content pages for:

• Auto-generated content offers for targeted demand generation
• Product and field marketing activities
• Enrichment of existing customer referencing activities
• Dynamic customer content for trade show exhibits

The TechValidate Impact

• Streamline processes for customer data collection, content creation and content presentation in demand generation activities
• Expand available pool of customer evidence for sales teams
• Stretch marketing and research budget dollars
• Reduce time and effort required by marketing teams to meet content goals

F5 Networks recommendations to potential TechValidate customers:

Incorporate TechValidate with your reference program to provide a wider range of customer feedback, all targeted to usage case or industry. This lets you use customer evidence earlier in the sales process, and not wear out your comparatively scarce named references.

The Portals capability of TechValidate is very powerful. Don't overlook it. It lets you generate targeted content pages for any topic and then stream TechValidate content to those pages as they are generated. It saves us a ton of time and energy, especially for market-specific communications efforts.

Comments from Heidi Schreifels, Marketing Manager, F5 Networks

See F5's TechValidate Content

See live examples of what F5 Networks is doing today with TechValidate here:

• F5 Big-IP Research Dashboard
• F5 ARX Research Dashboard