“Underpinning all effective inbound marketing should be a deep understanding of your clients. Only by speaking directly to their challenges, their experience, and their goals can you hope to encourage them to come to you for help. As an agency I think one of our strengths is our ability to dive deep when it comes to immersing ourselves in client businesses. Particularly when we are working on longer term projects such as Inbound campaigns this really pays off.”

“Continuous Improvement is a powerful technique, especially when applied to websites. Our GDD projects are some of the most satisfying work we do because we get meaningful feedback about what works, and what doesn’t. We also get to work for the same client over an extended period - meaning we get to know them really well. Understanding what our client needs to achieve, working with them to achieve it, and celebrating the successes together really gives our work meaning.”

“Successful campaigns are all about embracing the old and the new. Taking solid principles from the old days of advertising, and applying them to the new audiences and new channels that digital approaches open up to us. Discovering a challenge, coming up with a killer idea, working with the team to put this in front of prospects and then seeing the results come through is exciting. Helping clients to double sales within a year is something special. Knowing (not guessing) that it was our campaign that helped achieve that is lovely.”

“When people think of marketing data they often think of website visits, bounce rates, and dwell times. I seldom worry about these. We have a core principle that we find the metrics that are ‘as close to the money as possible’. If we can use ‘business generated’ as a measure we will. In complex B2B sales however, this can be difficult. So we’ll work with leads generated, account touch points, or deals influenced. This, plus our obsession with always understanding our clients business, ensures that we always report useful numbers, with actionable insights. Analytics should be useful.”

“The user experience work that we deliver is focussed on better meeting the needs of the site user. This very specific focus ensures that our work doesn’t get caught in the ‘bubble’ of the agency/client relationship. It ensures that we keep an eye on the competition, that we study user behaviour, that we question user expectation, and that we respond accordingly. Doing this, guided by the overall marketing plan, ensures that our websites are much more than somewhere to pick up a phone number.”

“In many ways marketing is all about telling the right story to the right people at the right time. Working on content marketing projects really puts the focus on doing exactly that – telling stories that people will discover, will appreciate, and will value. Helping our clients to tell those stories allows me to deep-dive on the technology or service details, and to write about them in the context of the end-customers world. That’s a fun challenge, and is especially satisfying when we can see new leads flowing in through content that I created. “

“Often the first time people see the new branding and design work we do for clients is when they visit the website, so it’s vital that we deliver something with impact. Balancing the demands of user experience, branding impact, SEO, content and functionality can be a challenge. But it’s one of the most fun parts of everything that we do. Especially when we hear that a client is proud to share their new site, and when the numbers prove that our work had impact.”

“The decision to deploy new marketing technology is seldom driven by technology. It is almost always driven by people. How do we best ensure that the potential customers that we bring to the client website take that additional step, and engage with the people in our clients business?

Technology can help facilitate this connection but is rarely a solution in itself. Proper planning, deployment, training, and continuous monitoring are all essential to success. Whether it’s Hubspot, Salesforce, or AEM – technology should likely be part of any B2B marketing plan that aims to generate meaningful results.”