The year 2020 surprised us all with a series of unprecedented events that tested our capacity to adapt and thrive among the challenges. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, marketers have been under tremendous pressure to guide their marketing teams AND their sales and customer service teams through the unfamiliar territory. They’ve had to help as many teams as possible and as needed in the company go digital and connect with customers and prospects as the world shelters in place. Along the way, we also saw new challenges such as a tighter and more competitive marketplace. In turn, our clients discovered alternative means to market and tell our stories, and have them reach their intended audiences.
HubSpot User Groups As Source of Stability
HubSpot's Marketing Automation Platform proved to be a popular growth suite for many small to medium companies that were riding these changes. And the Manila HubSpot User Group (HUG) led by StraightArrow Corporation and its sister company GetCre8ive Corporation aimed to address 2020’s challenges and educate its attendees on how to implement a business survival strategy. These quarterly meetups were greatly welcomed by our offshore clients with Philippine-based offices.
HUG’s first event, just before the lockdown began, talked about the importance of SEM when attracting audie0nces in a highly competitive marketplace. The second HUG event, which was done on Zoom for the first time, showed us the vast potential of video marketing for its capability to entertain, inform, and build relationships. For the third HUG event, we learned more about content marketing as a tool for storytelling and how storytelling can provide a lot of value, influence, and relevance when targeted to the right audience. The fourth and last of the HUG events in 2020 talked about the rise of chatbots and how to come up with a strategy that will improve the customers’ journey.
An Extension of Clients’ Business
For us, the lessons from HUG 2020 were spot on with StraightArrow’s mission to “Create for the World.” As a tiered partner, we have been assisting digital marketing agencies and corporate marketing teams in the US, the UK and Australia for many years. Our team has helped our digital marketer clients drive the supercar that is the HubSpot marketing automation software (MAS).
Using available customer experience data and the learnings from HUG Meetups, we have supported clients across a broad range of specializations in digital marketing (SEO, Paid Search, Paid and Organic Social Media, Email Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization and Data Analytics), in design and in web development.
Our clients appreciate our process orientation, advising them on how to adjust the steps for how they launch campaigns or how they take day-to-day sales or service tasks online.
This provides a few benefits:
- ensuring consistency and scalability
- functioning as the brand's checkpoint, and
- identifying and filling client gaps related to skill sets or bandwidth.
This, in turn, allows us to share the expertise of our team members in a flexible, almost burstable capacity.
From there, we were able to help our clients realize their goals by executing these strategies for them. Our most successful relationships have been with corporate marketing teams and digital agencies that have a deep understanding of their markets and communities.
We are amazed at how these clients were able to develop strong marketing strategies around those insights, especially as the pandemic required them to pivot.
A Jobs-To-Be Done Approach
We strongly believe in the philosophy of the late Prof. Clay Christensen: Clients don't buy products or services. They "hire" products or services to get their jobs done. And this pole-star has been one of the keys to the success of our relationships with digital marketer clients.
When engaging with them on projects or retainers last year, we've often asked the following questions:
- What is your team trying to get done?
- And what are your customers trying to get done?
- How can we help you do this better, faster and more cost-efficiently while considering health and safety protocols?
As we wait for things to unfold in 2021, we can only hope that things get better on a global scale. For now, we hold onto this hope by equipping ourselves with the tools that can help us continue to thrive as an individual and as a community.
To see some of the key insights from HUG 2020, you may download the following recorded graphics created by GetCre8ive:
If you'd like to learn more about leveraging HubSpot in the new normal, feel free to reach out to a HubSpot Consultant from our team.
We'll be happy to understand your jobs to be done and provide advice on how best to approach them.
Comments