Blog

Day 0: The start of the software quest

Every good quest starts with a strong desire or need. My partner who is a consultant had a great wish to purchase software to backup his client's Google workspace environment. It was an unnecessarily inefficient, tiresome, and expensive process for both parties. (I would love to hear your thoughts on how you would optimize the below customer journey. As it was not a terribly bad experience but just a complete waste of everyone's time and resources. ) I have documented below the entire process step-by-step. It is a great exercise for any organization to reflect on the journey a customer goes through and how the experience ways up. I would recommend if possible someone to do a ' mystery shop' on your behalf.  It's amazing what insights you can get from reviewing a sales process. 

Recently, I conducted some research on the demo experience for one of my clients. They were looking for a "mystery shop" for their demo process from a marketing point of view. So I thought it would be interesting to do this with a number of other Saas organizations to see what the market is like and how the competition stacked up. I chose some well-known Saas brands including, Salesforce, PandaDoc & Hubspot. You can also find a list of other popular CRM tools here for more examples, many of which have demo flows."

The results were very surprising. In the end, none of them provided, in my opinion, a world-class customer experience, however, I got a lot ideas and insights from the process so I thought I would share my learnings with you here on the blog.

We regularly get questions from our clients about web development, website migrations and website redesigns. It is a very important - and often very scary part of their marketing activities. The main cause of all the fear around these projects are:

• They tend to cost a lot of resources
• They take a lot of time to complete
• It is hard to get a good result that works for everyone

It is often difficult to understand where to start when you are a faced with a web design or redesign project. There are many different approaches that you can use and a huge amount of options, possibilities and the complexities that arise when you think about redesigning and implementing your business website. It is tricky to translate design choices that make good marketing sense to the right technical implementations. We often get questions about how to use Growth Driven Design to drive better value, so we decided to write a bit of an introduction to explain what Growth Driven Design is and how it compares to traditional web design methods.

What Is Growth Driven Design, and What Can I Use It For?

Traditional web design projects are typically time-consuming, costly, and are often delivered long after the estimated deadlines. With a conventional design strategy, the website will typically receive major updates after at least one to two years. These methods are clearly outdated since the business will not fully maximize the lead generation and performance of their website. 

Growth driven design is a web design methodology that was developed to make the process of redesigning a website more clear, more affordable and to drive a higher quality result. It's been gaining popularity over the years and fits well with other modern digital marketing principles such as Inbound Marketing.  

Video marketing will continue to be a top performer in 2020, helping to drive more engagement and brand recall  than any other content format on social media. It is a key component of a holistic Inbound approach to your marketing. Video can help support not only awareness but also consideration and decision making campaigns as well.  Quality of course plays a key factor here and you need to ensure that you are producing top notch video content in order to succeed. 

The Service Hub is Hubspot's new Customer Service Software that helps your organisation focus on creating a better customer experience. In today's world, customers have shorter attention spans and higher expectations. They want more control over the process and often opt for a of a self-service solution. Wanting to do things in their own way and in their own time. 

You are possibly wondering what linear algebra has to do with social media. Let me explain. I listened to Dharmesh Shah introduce the concept of what he called “vector alignment” while attending the Inbound17 event. He came up with this idea based on a conversation he had previously with Elon Musk. This concept is very simple yet most organisations find it difficult to implement or worse overlook it completely as a priority.

There is a big buzz around ABM or Account based marketing at the moment. Lots of clients are asking about best practices, how to implement or transition to ABM. I thought maybe there was something I was missing. Had I overlooked a transformative new marketing strategy? Then I got slightly paranoid and starting asking others about it, but they came back with what I already knew. Then I thought I would do some extra research. There was so much interest, there must be something to it, right?

The first time I attended Inbound, Hubspot sent me to help with some workshops and onsite trainings. The whole event went by in a flash. I was running from meeting to meeting catching up with colleagues and clients both day and night.

One of the hardest parts of working in marketing is keeping your skills up to date. I have made this slightly easier for you by listing several recomended learning resources in this post. This is reflected in the latest State of Inbound Report where 19% said training was the company's top challenge. Most of us spend time implementing, planning and executing campaigns. Leaving little room to brush up or expand your skill set. However, this is a dangerous tactic if you want to grow your career and become a successful T Shaped marketer (see Buffer's or Moz's diagram below).

Inbound is an increasingly popular approach that organisations are using to attract customers. For some on the outside looking in, it can be difficult to know where to start with Inbound marketing. Content offers, blogging, personas, social, email? The list goes on.  You might have seen companies being successful with Inbound but you often don't see the whole journey from the begining. Success doesn't magically happen with Inbound. You need substantial effort, the right tools, resources and process in place to really be sucessful.