I want to take you on our journey of aggressive Marketing Transformation.
Let me start by confessing that we got it wrong for so long, and in the process pissed hundreds of thousands of dollars out the window. Marketing efforts that had no meaningful impact to the top line and certainly produced no tangible ROI. It pains me to think about what we could have done with the money we wasted over the years. How much pleasure the directors would have received if we’d taken the money and gifted it to our staff as a loyalty bonus. That certainly would have reaped a greater return and consumed significantly less energy.
I want to share with you, our journey so far, and then continue to share our experiences as we cross each bridge and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead, knowing what we now know.
The journey so far has been short – in fact only 5 months, but action packed nevertheless and incredibly energizing for the entire business.
So to set the scene – We all know the definition of insanity…. which really did define our Marketing efforts over recent years – Insane.
We are an IT Services company made up of entrepreneurs, leaders and techo’s. Smart enough, agile and really into delighting our clients. Our technical team is brilliant, and at the core we run a great business. But what do we know about Marketing? Isn’t that something another highly specialised team worries about? Hard to measure, impossible to manage to great outcomes and way too difficult to quantify the results – yet along the way costing you a bomb.
For five years we have been operating under the assumption that tried, tested and traditional marketing methods were the smart money. Isn’t that what everyone else in our space was doing, and succeeding at? As a small business we even invested in dedicated, experienced Marketing folks to take charge of our marketing strategy and execution.
So what did our marketing look like over the four years – in hind sight, honestly not much. We had an ok, but rudimentary, static web presence; we developed a brand image (that is pretty cool actually); we attempted to produce and distribute e-newsletters to our clients (failing miserably as we are not content writers); we attended a few industry events and managed to secure some PR along the way. That about sums up how we managed to spend our money.
And each year on reflection, we wondered what we could have done differently to attribute more leads to our marketing efforts. We scratched our heads, shook our doubts away, and stayed the course.
In July 2015 we had an OMG experience that was the catalyst for us embarking on an immense and rapid marketing transformation program. Without this OMG experience, I am convinced we would still be stuck in the old way of thinking and continuing to make poor marketing investments. Thankfully (and I mean that quite genuinely), we are now out of the blocks and heavily vested in a massive change process.
What made us come to this realisation, and what did we do next? Read on to find out.
