How we work.
We are an extension of your product development team and your digital marketing team. If you don’t have either, we work with you as your Product Owner or your Marketing Lead.
If you are building digital capabilities for the first time, don’t just hire a senior leader and expect miracles.
Most established companies with immense resources tend to depend heavily on either a newly-hired senior leader or their existing agency to drive their digital efforts. Rarely will either of those lead to considerable success. Depending on the scale of the business, a new senior leader may soon find that he is lacking support to make it happen. On the other hand, agency incentives are frequently not in line with business needs.
Would you really pay an employee more if he spends more company money? Then why do the same with a marketing agency?
To have a realistic shot at success, you should work with us to build your capabilities in digital — even if you do hire a senior leader. We will work with the senior leader to establish the digital strategy, identify hiring needs, and start achieving business goals while the internal teams are still being created.
Whether you are using us in product or marketing, we will spend the first week or so understanding your concept, your business, and your team. We will assess the level of support you will need and design a plan for how closely we will work together.
Product design and development:
We will help you build an MVP or refine your existing technology product, be it an e-commerce website or a SaaS platform.
Typically, we work with specific members of your team as well as a limited number of external stakeholders to drive a Design Sprint. This sprint typically takes one to two weeks, and requires the involvement of a cross-functional team, a product champion, and a sign-off authority.
Through the Sprint, the facilitator will help guide the team assess the key problem to solve, determine feasible solutions, and the best way to productize the solution. The facilitator will also refine the target customer for the product, help determine positioning messages, and influence the user experience. The outcome of this exercise is typically a workable low-res mockup that the Product team can refine over the next few weeks. If you need technological support to help build the final product, we will be happy to aid there.
Digital marketing strategy-design and execution.
We will help you define your marketing strategy and goals, and handhold you through execution until your team is ready to take over.
Similar to the product design sprint, we will initially work with your key commercial stakeholders, CXOs, and founders to identify the key goals and metrics to achieve. Based on this understanding, our experts will create a marketing plan that can help you achieve those goals.
Typically, a marketing plan will initially include a healthy mix of search, social, and SEO, and will be refined over time as consumer behavior and conversion data gets collected. Our team of data analysts, designers, and marketers will analyze incoming information over the next few weeks/months to help refine the plan.
If you have an existing marketing team, our experts can also help upskill your team in managing various aspects of digital marketing for the future.
But why Product and Marketing together?
In digital, Product and Marketing should always go together to have the right impact. Let’s take the example of an e-commerce website: if your conversion rates (i.e., proportion of people coming to the website that actually make a purchase) are lower than you want, your marketing agency might think they need to simply refine the advertising audience until it improves. That is true to an extent. However, if it takes 10 mins for users to fill in the checkout form, they are less likely to complete the purchase. Refining the audience will do little if the product (your e-commerce website) is not prepared.
Your product — the e-commerce website or the Saas platform — needs to keep up with marketing efforts. You wouldn’t call 500 customers to your retail store if you had no clerks to man the till, would you?
We will conduct, and train your team in conducting, A/B tests, split tests, and audience behavior analysis on your website to make sure your marketing dollars are not wasted.
What next?
Want help launching your next big product? Or simply want to set up a high-performance marketing team within your company? Reach us at sn@sapsonic.com or through our website: www.sapsonic.com.
Originally published at sapsonic.com on February 5, 2018.
