We’re going open

Some of you may have noticed our current G-cloud success series. At first, we felt that it would be best to keep the majority (and in our minds the most valuable) content behind a registration wall...

We tested it and after much debate internally, we realised we got it wrong!

How wrong we were became even more evident when we found out that G-Cloud 9 is announced for March 7th. Too many articles and not enough time!

 

So in keeping with our core Advice Cloud values of Honesty, Openness & Transparency, considering that speed is of the essence and we are striving towards agile we’ve decided to make this freely available to all. No registration wall, no sign ups, no marketing emails from us, nothing. The content will be released regularly but probably not weekly as that’s becoming something of a chore (and a bore tbh)…

 

As always one of the major questions from this little experiment we asked ourselves was: what have we learned? In hopes this will help some of you with your marketing campaigns here it is our top 3 (for now)

 

• ALWAYS stay true to your organisational values and voice! – even when it is very tempting to stray don’t do it! We tried to use this campaign to further build our database. It was a nice idea at the time – getting some new contacts, automating some of our communications to free up precious staff time… However, it directly contradicts our values as a company so not worth it! We also won’t be calling our content a think piece any more…. After testing the term for a few weeks we found it doesn’t completely connect with our voice: witty, friendly and expert. Might cover the last but doesn’t chime with the first two and makes us sound too corporate. Start with 3 words that describe your organisation and make sure all communication follows all three.

 

• Consider the bigger picture – It is very easy to get lost in the goals set by an individual campaign and lose sight of the bigger picture. Somehow, despite having a very clear marketing strategy, the finish line became G-Cloud 9. Yes registration gave us some quick leads and potential G-Cloud 9 clients but if we are building our brand as experts in the field, the content should be public. The more people read it, the better for our branding! Leads will come as a result of this. And yes perhaps not all of them in time for G-Cloud 9 but does it really matter?

 

• Strive to be agile – the word agile is becoming a bit of a buzz word, so not our favourite, but if you can apply at least some of the principles in your campaigns you should! Now we’re not saying we run a completely agile marketing department here but we are moving towards it. This experiment has served to cement the need for it as well! Our campaign was already tight enough, but when they hit us with the new March 7th date, all hell broke loose. Time to change and test and re-test again.

 

We would appreciate your feedback still so please do keep that coming… We are sure things will change as we go.

 

Watch this space for the first guide. Coming out soon!

Onwards and upwards to G-Cloud 9!

 

P.S Yes the pic is indeed of our Marketing Exec. Emina Demiri-Watson.