Innovative Business Solutions' VP of sales and strategic partnerships shares tips for effectively growing your SMB marketing machine.
In this installment of our SMB Marketing blog series, I had the pleasure of talking with Shane Fugazy, vice president of sales and strategic partnerships at Innovative Business Solutions. When Shane participated in our Partner Marketing Roundtable, he really impressed us with his organization’s marketing acumen, and he agreed to share more of his insights around building a marketing machine within an SMB.
Muscarella: Tell us a little bit about your marketing team. Do you have a dedicated staff?
Fugazy: We originally started with an outsourced marketing group but today have a great internal marketing team of two—our marketing manager and a marketing associate who helps us a lot with our content creation and graphic design across our website and marketing materials. We made the move when we realized that we have the most success handling the daily execution of marketing tasks—like newsletter and content creation—internally. And some of our best ideas come from Jed Kenzy, one of our managing partners and a founder.
For other partners who read this and are thinking about outsourced versus in-house marketing teams, where do you think that tipping point was regarding when it was time to switch?
I’d say it comes down to growth and the size of the organization. We’ve added nine new people since the beginning of the pandemic. In years past we didn’t have enough work to hire a dedicated resource. Quite frankly, we’ve lost a few resources because of this in the past. We would hire someone and just not have enough work for them. Nobody wants to be bored at work.
For partners who are smaller or just getting started in marketing, I would highly recommend using an agency. An agency brings in such a wealth of knowledge, ideas and expertise, including content creation, design, creative writing, SEO, and analytics on SEM—really a full strategic vision. Specifically, an agency that knows the indirect channel and understands your business is best. For companies getting started in marketing, the cost is reasonable. It’s usually less than a full-time employee, and you get a full staff of experts in their fields rather than just one employee. When the marketing effort gets to be about half to three-quarters of a full-time employee, you should really consider bringing the department in-house.
On the roundtable call, you said that you were using HubSpot. What made you move to a full marketing automation tool?
Much like other partners who are getting started, we first used Constant Contact or Mailchimp—simple email automation. We dabbled with other tools as well—$25 per month for one, $100 per month for another—but none gave us everything we wanted.
We had been looking for something to integrate our technology stacks. As the company grew, we found ourselves positioned like many other companies using disparate systems. And, as we got bigger, it became very challenging. Then we looked at our own innovation side in the cable industry with CableFinder.net, where we are also consolidating multiple systems for the cable companies.
The real benefit to us is that HubSpot collapses our technology stacks. We can take our CRM and integrate it into our commissioning platform, our website and CableFinder.net.
We can also now tell where our communications are effective. Anything that you can open, click, read or click through, we can track all the way down to which spiffs they’re clicking on so that we can target market to them afterward.
For example, we can send an invitation to a webinar to learn more about a specific carrier, such as Cox Business. We recently did one promoting a webinar “masterclass” training session on RapidScale. We brought in RapidScale experts to talk to our community about what RapidScale does, what technologies it has, and how to sell and support it. And with HubSpot, we can directly correlate webinar results with quotes, leads, and sales orders.
It’s really all about making good decisions around where you should spend your dollars.
How have these tools helped your sales and marketing strategies?
They have given us structure and automation. We can plan. So rather than every month simply sending out a newsletter and forwarding the spiffs as they come out, it enables us to consolidate click information and link back to landing pages. That allows us to put a strategy and plan into place rather than simply forwarding emails. Our marketing calendar is now a hub of activity (HubSpot) and sales success rather than just a schedule of actions. We can track actual engagement rather than just open rates. This allows us to gauge our partners’ interests and tailor information that they find relevant to their business. Click on Page 2 to continue reading…
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February 01, 2022 at 07:01PM
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How to Build an SMB Marketing Machine - Channel Futures
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