Case Study: Siemens DISW + AWS “Create Without Limits” Campaign

Siemens DISW + AWS

Case Study: Siemens DISW + AWS “Create Without Limits” Campaign

Siemens Digital Industries Software (DISW) and Amazon Web Service (AWS) sought to drive awareness and demand for their joint offering — Siemens Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS), powered by AWS — by leveraging Siemens’ industrial reputation and AWS’s cloud reputation.  

The program needed to promote awareness, clarity, differentiation, and preference, so that the companies’ customers and prospects would not only know about their newly expanded partnership but would also take action to buy into it. 

Solution

The target audience included decision-makers who were tentative to confident on the benefits of cloud. (Some of these individuals would be considering cloud and others would have already adopted it.) These decision-makers spanned businesses of all scales and industries, across the Americas, EMEA (excluding Russia), and APAC (excluding mainland China). A secondary audience included academics, associations, and government agencies.

InVision kicked off the project with a visioning session that brought together leaders from both Siemens and AWS. During this session, the parties articulated their individual business goals, aligned on priorities for the campaign, and clarified what they perceived to be the partnership’s differentiators. During this initial phase, InVision also audited Siemens’ and AWS’s respective go-to-market strategies, ensuring the campaign messaging would ring true to each company’s unique brand.

From there, a customer survey exposed audiences’ existing perceptions of Siemens and AWS, as well as their biggest digitalization priorities: access to data, flexible solutions, and on-demand scalability. Follow-up interviews with specialized stakeholders at Siemens and AWS allowed InVision to dive deeper into how the partnership could deliver on these customer priorities — as well as to uncover the sellers’ mindset at both companies, since enabling the sales teams would be crucial to achieving the desired results.

Perhaps most critically, InVision performed a competitive analysis that revealed the white space for this campaign: To differentiate themselves, Siemens and AWS would lean into the human story of possibility, rather than the technical story of how things work.  

It was that insight that informed the creative platform of “Create without limits.”

“Create without limits” invites audiences to push the limits of what’s possible, confident that — in partnership with Siemens and AWS — there will be nothing to hamper their manufacturing innovation or hinder their digital future.  

Together, Siemens and AWS allow manufacturers to access their data with no restraints, whether at home, on the factory floor, in an office or working remote. They allow organizations to personalize with no restrictions, so every solution can meet their specific requirements. And they help them scale with no boundaries and little to no downtime. It all translates into enabling organizations to create without limits.  

Campaign execution included a microsite, event interstitials, multi-channel video content, an e-book, a white paper, and case studies. It also included promoted ads on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as out-of-home advertising designed to serve key sub-sections of the target audience. Out-of-home ads were placed in the Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, and Orlando airports, as well as on the Las Vegas strip.    

Additionally, sales enablement deliverables helped Siemens break through the noise of AWS’s thousands of other partnerships. AWS sellers received a Field Ready Kit with briefs for each Siemens solution and an overview of the partnership and its unique position in the market. Siemens sellers received a First Call Sales Deck, playbook, and battlecard to help them lead effective pitches and handle potential objections.   

Results

Together, these assets successfully increased awareness of and demand for Siemens Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS), powered by AWS. Indeed, after just six months of the campaign in market, all metrics easily bested benchmarks.   

Demand gen was measured through partnership revenue, total wins, and marketing opportunity pipeline. In the campaign’s first eight months, there were 15,000+ unique visitors to the microsite. And while specific sales data cannot be shared publicly, the numbers exceeded goals by a considerable margin.

Awareness was measured through content consumption on social media and out-of-home advertising impressions. The campaign generated 22 million out-of-home impressions (15.9% over goal) and achieved social media click-through rates of 2.60% (benchmark: 1.34%) and video completion rates of 37.4% on Facebook and 56.34% on LinkedIn (benchmarks: 11.65% and 21.04%, respectively).  

A testament to the mutual success of this partnership, AWS recognized Siemens with two Partner of the Year awards in November 2022.