Put It Together: Application Portfolios For Small Business

About four years ago, Emisare, a Greensboro, N.C.-based ad agency, ditched its project management software. The software had grown dysfunctional: it no longer met the needs of the firm, which had adopted an agile approach for its clients.

Instead of planning a campaign in a linear way — with a start and end date, and results evaluated at the end — Emisare develops plans that include everything from guerilla marketing to targeted campaigns to deep storytelling, but whose most important quality is that they evolve based on data points collected from each phase.

“With all the data that is available to us, in real-time, we have the ability to optimize “initiatives” iteratively to maximize performance/returns on an ongoing basis. Obviously, based on the situation, there are limits, but theoretically, marketing should be a living thing rather than a series of linear, termed “campaigns’ that are evaluated for success AFTER they have run,”said Scott Williams, co-founder and president.

That meant adjusting its software approach, too. “Instead of letting the software drive the project management process, we needed to let our process drive the software.”

The company began to look for applications that could be integrated and were best-in-class for very specific functions. Companies are increasingly using a portfolio of well-integrated applications to increase efficiency, and managing the portfolio over time. Kifi is a key element of Emisare’s portfolio, Williams told us.

How important is the right collection of apps, and keeping them winnowed to those your team actually uses? Fifty percent of large organizations (those with $500 million in revenue or more) had more than 500 apps, according to a survey by Harris Interactive, reported on by CIO magazine. More importantly, in a typical organization roughly half of the apps went unused or underused. Small enterprises can face the same kinds of inefficiencies when they decide to adopt an application portfolio approach, so it’s important to take a relentless approach to testing.

Williams adopts only the ones that truly fill a need for his 11-person company. We’re happy to say Kifi supports Emisare’s research, content sharing and collaboration.

Williams, who found Kifi on Product Hunt, said it was Kifi’s ease of use and the intuitive nature of the onboarding process that drew him to use our tools. He’s establishing libraries, including one about Slack Mastery that includes tips on how to use the tool, and sharing them with his team.

Emisare’s portfolio of apps now includes:

• Slack, for communication
• Worklife, for agenda planning
• Breeze, for project planning and calendars
• Google Apps
• MeeKan, for appointment planning
• Evernote, for keeping compiled knowledge
• Kifi, for collaborative knowledge sharing

“Kifi is one of the most polished and well-thought-out things I’ve seen,” Williams said. “It’s like two or three years ago, when Uber came out. It’s not that it provides the same service as taxi’s — it’s the ease of use.”

“That’s what Kifi is — the easy way to share knowledge. I just know it’s going to work.”

Emisare’s agile approach to marketing, supported by its style of app management, works to deliver results to its clients. For instance, in the case of a campaign for the University of North Carolina — Greensboro, a hyper local approach that included involving students, counselors and parents in marketing the school resulted in raising applications by 17% over one year. Among the agency’s tactics was telling the stories of students from particular locales and then using those stories to do focused marketing.

“Everything is living,” says Scott Williams about Emisare’s approach. “You don’t have the ability to plan and go, plan and go review. You have to live in real time.”

Originally published at blog.kifi.com on July 10, 2015.