Find out how a leading AdTech M&A firm drove growth in 2016
There are a lot of exciting and fast growing companies that work out of the CIC — the co-working space our agency calls home — and being around them every day made us curious: What were these companies doing to spur such impressive growth?
In this five-part series, you’ll learn directly from Boston-based business leaders — our neighbors — about what they do, what tactics they used in 2016 to cultivate growth, and their plans for massive success in 2017.
To kick off the series, we interviewed Emily Leinbach, Head of Marketing at Progress Partners, a boutique M&A advisory firm based in CIC Boston. In this interview, Emily told us how hiring a dedicated marketing leader is leading to more consistent results.
This is part 1 of 5 of our CIC Growth Series, featuring Emily Leinbach, Head of Marketing at Progress Partners. Check out part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of the series.
Give us the elevator pitch for Progress Partners.
Progress Partners is a boutique investment and M&A advisory firm for growth stage companies in Internet and Digital Media technology, specializing in advertising, marketing, television/broadcasting, and SaaS.
We also have Progress Ventures, which is a venture fund that works with companies in the same industries.
Last year, we established Progress Connect, a yearly conference that brings together luminaries from the media, marketing, and technology industries to build connections, share knowledge, and engage with panels of industry experts.
What did you do in 2016 to drive growth?
Hiring a head of marketing in August 2016 was an indication that Progress Partners wanted to take their brand name to the next level through increased brand exposure and awareness. Before I joined the team, there was no dedicated marketing person here. Our directors and analysts supported various marketing efforts, but there wasn’t a consistent approach to marketing.
The first key step we took to drive growth was modernizing our website. We wanted to legitimize the brand by making sure our new website was more polished. That meant more focused content, clearly defined value propositions, noticeable CTAs, and easy navigation. The messaging was especially important here: Finance in general tends to be pretty conservative in its messaging, but because we’re speaking to innovative, “younger” tech companies, we had to ensure that our voice connected with them.
From there, it was about making sure we had consistency in the messaging, tone, and delivery schedule of our quarterly emails. Really, it was about getting consistent in all aspects of delivery across all of our channels.
What will you do in 2017 to continue growing?
That leads to our major focus for 2017: content creation. We’re looking to content and inbound marketing to drive growth this year by producing content that’s targeted to specific audiences. With articles produced by our internal experts, we want to distribute our content through our website, email, social channels. In our industry, being a trusted voice is very important.
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Want to learn how other CIC members are growing their businesses? Check out the rest of our CIC Growth Series here:
- Part 2: Lauren Abda, Founder at Branchfood
- Part 3: Richard Fries, Executive Director at MassBike
- Part 4: Haowei Zhang, CEO and Cofounder at Waylens
- Part 5: Shayna Wilczynski, Senior Marketing Specialist at BookingBug
Ideometry is a full-service marketing agency located in Boston helping awesome companies and organizations amplify their growth strategies.
