Scheduling software leader HotSchedules went into 2018 ready to focus on growing their audience through account-based marketing. With Demand Frontier’s help, they’re successfully learning how to structure their account-based marketing campaigns and better understand their customers’ needs.
Which marketing investments are you prioritizing in 2018?
“We have a couple priorities in 2018. First of all in campaigns focused on audiences. We’re definitely going to move from product-centered campaigns to audience-centered, so we are excited about that. The second one is around account-based marketing, so as we get more personal with our customers and meeting them where they are we can count account based marketing is going to be a big opportunity for us.”
What are the biggest challenges to executing your marketing vision and plan this year?
“I think a lot of the challenges come from being able to meet customers where they are and part of that is being able to do that at scale, so number one is knowing your customers a little bit better, understanding where they are in their journey and meeting them there. After that is shifting our culture from individual and small campaigns to wide-scale, audience-centered campaigns and the third challenge kind of becomes scaling, but we are looking forward to a great 2018.”
How is marketing technology helping your marketing efforts?
“Actually we just got that, we were looking at kind of three points when we do our marketing strategies; one is people, two is process and the third is technology and specifically the third is technology because we think the first two are way more important. So we really concentrate a lot of time on that, we definitely got the right team in place, the right partners, and then the technology that supports it underneath is kind of an ingredient but not really the main portion.
So the main challenges we have on technology adoption are number one understand what we can see within that and then you know, getting the teams within the marketing camp using it and using it at scale. I think the second part is extending our kind of scope of technology beyond just marketing and thinking about it holistically; how do we do more things with technology across the sales and marketing funnel so we really are putting ourselves in a position to serve the customer across the entire buying cycle.”
How is Demand Frontier supporting your marketing goals?
“So Demand Frontier has been a fantastic partner to help us better understand our own processes and customers. I think when you look at a partner we end up looking for someone that understands our end customers versus just us and they certainly have the background with that in our industry. The second thing is I think they have made good use of turn from our requirements to how they can deliver. Now the third part I think is that the delivery is really reliable so we are pretty excited about the future ahead.
Demand Frontier specifically helped us on how we structure our campaigns both in terms of being audience-centric, getting the message right, and using the words that the customer speaks and addresses the problems they have. They’ve been a great partner, some guidance from our side has definitely been involved but they have really stepped up and leaned in and actually helped us to almost define and design how we run those campaigns. I think there’s other areas they support in terms of design thinking beyond the running of the campaigns and then we are just leaning into how to get into analytics with Demand Frontier. So we are excited moving them more from a production house to helping us steer the business.”
– Michael Blood, Director of Demand Creation and Integrated Marketing, HotSchedules.
