By Michelle Sims, Head of Operations
In the UK alone, almost 40,000 marketing professionals lost their job in 2020. A further 37% found themselves burdened with pay cuts or placed on furlough. Yet, ironically, 2020 was the year when businesses needed to drastically update their marketing strategies. Digital shops replaced physical ones, and marketing teams had to be more creative than ever before.
As a result of the lockdown, our consumer behaviour irreversibly changed. Most B2B customers now read between three and five company blogs online, before they’ll even think about talking to a salesperson. While some get through as many as seven before they’ll consider reaching out. To survive, over two thirds of B2B businesses relied on their online content much more heavily in 2020 than previous years.
So surely, getting the best marketing and sales teams has never been so important? That’s why, as we scale-up our tech business, it’s the first place we’re looking to allocate funds.
Our marketing strategy to attract 485+ new customers
As a young business, we prospered on word-of-mouth recommendations and strong networking. We let the product speak for itself. And this approach, to date, was all that was needed. We’re a profitable company after all, increasing revenue from £170,000 in 2018 to £1.65 million today.
But as we’ve started to break new ground, it’s clear that we need experienced marketing professionals to help us reach new customers. We’re aiming to jump from 15 to 500.
To get there, we’ve devised a bullet-proof three-point strategy:
Discover the best-suited distribution platforms
Where we position ourselves matters enormously. It has a direct impact on our customer relationships and profitability, and we’re keen to make the most of new opportunities. For example, one of our partners IBM famously boosted sales by an incredible 400% when it first adopted a social media sales platform. We need to do the same.
That’s why we’ll be employing experts to help us find our perfect place in the market. Today social media platforms – especially LinkedIn – remain the most popular hubs for B2B customers to discover and explore new content, followed by emails and collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. To remain competitive and thrive, we need to be where our potential customers are, and stay front-of-mind in the best-suited locations.
Apply leading Search Engine Optimisation practices
To attract new business, our website must rank highly on Google, Ecosia or any other search engine for our key search terms. After all, 67% of all clicks go to the top five results – and more than half go to the very first result on the page. When our customers search for “automating contact centres”, “better customer experience” or “speed-up compliance”, our website must feature organically in the top three results to remain competitive.
Using our scale-up funds to employ SEO experts will make our products and services more visible to customers. We’ll optimise our entire website, to ensure that it reaches the right people. And we’ll publish regular strategic blogs too. 72% of marketers agree that content creation – such as blogging - is the most effective way to enhance search engine result positions. We’ll leverage these techniques to gain more exposure to potential customers.
Publish high-value content and blogs
Blogging is so much more than just an effective SEO strategy, it’s an excellent opportunity to engage with customers and demonstrate expertise. One study even finds that companies who blog enjoy 55% more traffic to their site. And importantly, nearly 60% of these businesses say that a blog post directly led to a new customer.
Our business, TrustPortal, creates innovative firm-wide technology, across any industry. We have plenty of engaging and interesting insights to share. Having a regular supply of high-skilled and engaging content will stand us apart from competition and help bring in new clientele.
Marketing to scale-up at pace and boost profitability
Some people think that “marketing” is synonymous with “advertising” or “promoting” – but this is an expensive mistake to make.
Marketing is the whole process of bringing a process to the market and focusing on it throughout its entire lifecycle. The product’s development price, promotion, placement and more all lies in the hands of the marketing team. They can make or break it. As business founders, we understand how important it is to get it right. And we know that with the right people, both our customers and shareholders will benefit.
Get involved
Here at TrustPortal, we’ll be using our funding round to channel resources into marketing, to achieve our aim of increasing our customer numbers from 15 to 500. We believe that with the right marketing experts at the helm, and support to our resllers and customers, this is more than achievable.
If you’d like to be a part of the journey, the funding round is now open on CrowdCube. With your investment, we can supercharge our already-profitable tech company and scale-up exponentially.
On Oct 7th 2020, Blue Prism launched Service Assist, their new product for Automating Next Generation Contact Centers with an AI-Powered Digital Workforce that Transforms Customer Experiences. And its powered by TrustPortal!
In a unique collaboration, TrustPortal is providing the core solution behind Service Assist, helping Blue Prism customers transform front-office and end-to-end processes. TrustPortal has a unique architecture and simplicity that allows Service Assist to be 10% of the cost of traditional digitisation and automation approaches
See the announcement and video here:
TrustPortal and Blue Prism have been featured in a new Digital Bulletin feature, describing how TrustPortal was key to transformation of Telefonica's front-office.
As the biggest company in Spain, their requirements were extreme including typically handling 100,000 calls per day and some days up to 250,000.
Yet the transformation undertaken by Telefonica using Trustportal and Blue Prism delivered significant operational improvements, as described by Javier Magdalena Pinilla, Telefónica Spain’s Director of Simplification and Robotisation
“We needed to let our people help our customers, to talk with them, and assure the quality of our services,” says Magdalena. “We automated around 70% of the tasks that these people were doing on a day-by-day basis, and the result of that is that we reduced the time taken by between 30 and 50%. “The people that are working with these tools have told us that their work is better than before, so we are very happy with the programme.”
https://www.digitalbulletin.com/casestudies/technology/2020/october/telefonica/scaling-new-heights/
