Canonical has been a leading player in the IT industry ever since its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, returned from his trip to the International Space Station and asked himself the very profound question - what the hell do I do now?! His answer was Ubuntu - a user-friendly version of Debian Linux that, at least for a while, threatened the dominance of Microsoft Windows on the corporate desktop.

Mark’s original vision of Ubuntu evolved quickly as he began to apply his engineering expertise to solve the challenges of modern scale-out IT infrastructures. At the heart of his strategy were OpenStack and Docker - which is where I came in.

Canonical’s storytelling capabilities are legendary in the IT operations eco-system. Few organizations can break down the complex messaging challenges that datacenter technologies represent and tell their story with authority and authenticity. IT engineers love Ubuntu because they feel that they co-own the brand.

The company already had a significant presence at international tradeshows. Still, it had never converted interest in its thought-leadership content into a high volume of quality inbound leads. My job as Director of Cloud Marketing was to augment their already formidable in-house content generation capabilities with a dedicated team of writers who could produce insightful, premium content with reliable cadence.

I aimed to build a portfolio of content - both topical and evergreen - whose consumption told us something about the reader’s readiness to engage with the company in a commercial discussion.

Marketo already existed within the organization, but the leads it contained lacked any meaningful segmentation. This platform needed to be cleaned out and restructured to ensure that we knew both attribution and how many other campaigns a lead had interacted within their journey through our funnel. This work enabled us to build an accurate scoring model to identify the hottest leads from ubuntu.com’s millions of monthly visitors.

Added to our inbound efforts was instilling much-needed discipline into our current events and PR/AR activities. Events became more than a storytelling opportunity. They became lead conversion factories! And our team also worked closely with the US and UK based agencies to significantly increase our visibility in the tech media and, crucially, the analyst community.

The result was that by 2017, the Canonical Cloud Marketing team grew the marketing-generated pipeline by +240% more than the previous financial year.

MWC2016 driving ROI from multi-million dollar investment into a booth at one of Europe’s largest technology shows.