Life as an inbound marketing agency: 2016 in review

Well, 2016 was a pretty big year for us as a Manchester inbound marketing agency. We grew in size fivefold, won multiple awards and had a lot of food and beer in random places across the world. We even visited the bar from Cheers (bucket list – tick).

However, not all of this came easily. There have been a huge number of changes to my area of marketing expertise (biddable media) as well as changes to the world at large. But that’s life! Luckily we have adapted, evolved and sometimes even exceeded expectations.

The times are changing, outbound is outdated and in some cases, can be potentially dangerous for your brand financially and in a reputational sense. With inbound, you can get the best from your leads. Read our blog 'How to create the ultimate inbound marketing strategy' for more information.

The new biddable media model

In 2016, biddable media saw the further expansion of big data, the further (further) rise of content marketing, Google’s mobile-first strategy and the mass adoption of video formats. These have all had a massive impact. However, as an inbound marketing agency, the biggest change for us came from video adoption and an increase in content marketing.

We have a great content team, and we want to make content the basis for our activity as an inbound marketing agency. We can then accelerate that content with biddable and growth hacking techniques. So we developed an approach which brought these two strands of marketing strategy together.

We built strong personas, layered targeting, created great content and then used biddable to maximise exposure. This approach took traditional biddable methods and used the inbound methodology to create something entirely new, which is yielding fantastic results so far.

Video moments

Video has always been big - just look at TV! - but 2016 was the year when micro and live video took off in the marketing world. There’s been a biddable push for these formats, which can be seen across the board, with increased relevance scores and preferential positioning on newsfeeds for video content.

Many companies were hesitant to adopt video, especially live video, quite understandably (there’s always one liability who wants to live stream the team night out…) We found that video has become a great tool across biddable, lead nurturing, after care and even client reports. By adopting this format across many parts of the company, we have expanded the team’s expertise and best practice. Going into 2017, video is now a major part of our plans.

Externalities can really f**k your accounts 

I think we can all agree that 2016 was full of surprises for the entire world. Many of these events directly impacted our campaigns and the office in general.

We had the death of Bowie, Rickman and Cohen, which just bummed everyone out in our inbound marketing agency (but made us thankful that Attenborough was still producing amazing TV).

In a much realer sense though, Brexit and the Trump election threw us into disarray for short periods. We work in financial sectors, and the three days after the Brexit result saw our CPLs more than triple and volume plummet. Similarly, with the Trump election we saw interest in a range of our investment clients drop and traffic for sin stocks (oil shares, munitions companies, etc.) jump up.

Regardless of your thoughts on politics, this taught us one clear lesson. Externalities can throw a curve ball into your processes.

We have a multichannel approach, so we don’t silo biddable activity. Instead, we use all available channels to create a process that works best for the client. This meant that when things were going haywire in the wider market, we could pull back on certain areas and increase others.

This meant that within three days we able to bring things back under control. We did however realise that this approach is the most effective for several reasons. Mainly, because it not only allows you to push performance in good times, but in bad times it gives you the flexibility to react as required.

What we achieved as a Manchester inbound marketing agency

Despite all this change and external trauma, we were able to pull off some pretty impressive campaigns and work with a range of clients. We provided a 290% profit (yes profit) margin to an art investment house. We also helped an  investment sales floor to expand their team threefold by providing them with an ROAS of over 300%. We even worked with companies breaking into Asia and America, and helped tp grow some consolidating strong positions within the national markets.

In summary, for us 2016 was full of surprises, and we are still a new inbound marketing agency, growing our way into the marketing industry. But by adapting to these challenges and changing our processes, we managed to achieve some pretty impressive results.

If you want to talk to an inbound marketing agency in Manchester, why not give us a call (after Christmas is probably your best bet, once all the mince pies and sausages wrapped in bacon have gone down a bit!)

The times are changing, outbound is outdated and in some cases, can be potentially dangerous for your brand financially and in a reputational sense. With inbound, you can get the best from your leads. Read our blog 'How to create the ultimate inbound marketing strategy' for more information.