Expanding Mitsubishi Electric’s market share in Europe.

While Mitsubishi Electric is a household name and has been a player in the data centre space for decades, awareness across Europe was low. With data centre needs accelerating across the continent, this was a huge growth opportunity. The challenge was two-fold: raise awareness of its cooling, power, and monitoring solutions and leverage Mitsubishi Electric’s brand equity to position it as a credible, end-to-end provider within the industry.

A two-year brand awareness and demand generation campaign was mapped out, splitting activity between four target countries – Spain and Italy, then the UK and Germany. The strategy was to stagger efforts so we could iterate based on performance. The first year was dedicated to awareness messaging. This was followed by a year of content syndication with Data Center Dynamics (DCD) – the world’s largest data centre publication.

For each year, we had a different value proposition: ‘Together, we can build better’, for the awareness stream, followed by: ‘Powering possibilities’ for the authority building phase. To align both stages, we led with the same four research-led industry drivers: performance, reliability, scalability and sustainability. These also acted as our content pillars for the series of high-value assets. Following extensive content gap analysis, we developed a content plan for a broadcast episode, two editorials, four opinion pieces, two whitepapers, and one interview. Due to market trends, sustainability was the lead theme, but all the pillars were covered in the content.

When we launched this project, there was a general lack of awareness amongst operators and hyperscalers that Mitsubishi Electric was even operating in the data centre industry. Two years into our growth strategy and there are some powerful performance stats to prove the ROI of our approach. After building a base level of awareness, we’ve nurtured our audience with retargeting activity that adds value – delivering content that helps data centre teams effectively respond to accelerating demand.

At the time of writing, the campaign is still running but the assets that have been published are smashing targets. Comparing our assets’ performance against Data Center Dynamics’ industry targets, every asset has outperformed in terms of reach – ranging from 27% to 113% above target – all achieved within two to three weeks of publication.

As the primary KPI was awareness, only one asset was created with the intent of earning leads. This has also overdelivered. With a target of 150 leads, to date we’ve already gone 59% above target with 239. What’s more, the performance data is also proving the value of the content we’ve created, with DCD’s ‘engagement minutes’ target being surpassed by a massive 304%.