Identifying An Effective Solution
ReachFive was founded in 2014 to help customers to connect among any touchpoint, and soon became a trusted industry choice for CIAM. As the company expanded, so did their challenges with website management. ReachFive's website was hard-coded by the internal product team, and marketing was unable to make simple changes. Their lack of control over the company's online presence gave them a static website that hindered the ability to generate leads.
In particular, relying on the internal IT team to make simple changes caused a lot of organizational friction, as Sorayah Banomyong, CMO At ReachFive explains, "When I joined the company, we had a hardcoded we had no control of our website. Any modification needed to be done by IT, and we found it very frustrating, especially when trying to run marketing campaigns.
In 2019, Sorayah began to search for a solution that would meet their needs. Most importantly, the marketing team needed a platform that was easy to use. "Usability was our most important criteria. It was super important that our marketing team could leverage the CMS without needing knowledge of HTML and CSS. While we have some knowledge on web development, we wouldn't have the bandwidth to be editing code every day. We wanted a WYSIWYG website where we could drag and drop to make changes, and not have the need to go into the code itself." explained Sorayah.
ReachFive also looked at different CMS options, including WordPress and other enterprise-grade solutions. "We wanted a CMS that was reasonably priced, and we couldn't afford some of the other expensive-grade solutions. Our website isn't complicated, and we only had to migrate about 20 pages. It didn't make sense to invest in something we wouldn't use.
While Sorayah needed to gain control of the website, she also realized that it would be an excellent opportunity to centralize ReachFive's disparate tools. "In the beginning, we were only looking at CMS solutions, but we also needed to centralize our marketing tools. We were using Mailchimp for email, but we wanted to implement more sophisticated marketing automation. These tools also did not integrate with our Salesforce CRM. We looked for options that could offer more than a CMS, and that's how we found HubSpot. HubSpot combined marketing automation and CMS management, which was perfect.
ReachFive made the decision and began their HubSpot Journey in April 2019 with a combination of Marketing Hub Professional and Content Hub Professional.
Taking Back Control
ReachFive's found their HubSpot implementation painless, and the team were delighted with how quick the process was. "We were delighted with the responsiveness of the team as we didn't want to have an interruption with our old website," says Sorayah.
However, soon after implementation, ReachFive realized that there was so much more it could do with CMS Hub, and sought the help of HubSpot Solutions partner, Markentive, to achieve their goals. "While phase one of our journey with HubSpot went well, we knew that we would need some help for phase two. That was when we contacted Markentive. We held a kickoff meeting to present our needs and Markentive came back with a step-by-step plan explaining how they would solve them. They also clearly defined what they would provide in terms of templates and features.
The project with Markentive began in October 2019, and the new website went live in January 2020, taking a total of just under three months. During this time, ReachFive and Markentive worked closely to ensure the project stayed on track, as Charline Mesnard, Marketing Manager at Reach Five explains," We found Trello very useful to remain aligned with Markentive. We were up to date every day on the website work. They also provided a GANTT chart showing exact timelines which we reviewed at meetings." When the website went live, Sorayah was delighted with how it helped them with lead generation efforts. "On top of this, ReachFive needed a website that built credibility in the enterprise space, so having a beautiful design was key." On top of this, Sorayah was thankful for the additional insight they gained by working with Markentive. "The consulting quality was fantastic. Markentive also was able to provide us with a host of best practices that would ensure we could achieve our goals. I was surprised by how much detail went into designing the user experience. Our website is very well thought out and solves for the needs of different visitors. It is easy to navigate and very well thought out for each persona. I believe this is a strong differentiator this year when it comes to our growth.
It was also crucial that ReachFive's website would scale. The company has big ambitions, and the marketing team needed a CMS that would be able to adapt to its ever-growing needs. "Our objective is to invest in our digital strategies heavily and focus on ABM in the future. We also have a different type of audience/personas, and we are constantly expanding the target groups. We needed a CMS that would be able to not only serve our short term needs, but would enable us to expand to E-Commerce and B2C, and with CMS Hub, we can do that. Our previous website was not taking into account any persona or vertical. Now, we use smart content that adapts the website to our different personas, and we can easily add more in the future. We have solution pages which are tailored to each persona and hope to orchestrate more sophisticated customer journeys with personalized content in the future."
The most significant change that ReachFive has noticed is the speed and agility of the team to execute campaigns that will generate more business. By adopting the CMS Hub, ReachFive's marketing team has taken back control of their online presence, increased productivity and reduced their reliance on developers. "The IT department is not involved at all now. I think that is one of the key successes of the project. The marketing team fully owns our website, and they are fully autonomous." The increase in control has also meant that marketing can get back to focusing on more important activities, like lead generation. It was super important for us not to have to code anything within the CMS and working with Markentive to ensure this happened was great. Now, we update the website daily and continuously optimize the website. It's on-going, but we can update the site in real-time, and we are super proactive in terms of how we are managing our brand", explains Sorayah.
Deploying Plans For The Future
Since switching to CMS Hub, ReachFive has taken back control of its website and opened up a whole new opportunity for growth. The marketing team is now empowered to focus on lead generation and spends less time on website management.
Looking to the future, Sorayah wants to focus on driving international growth and reducing the reliance on traditional tactics. "In 2020, we are launching in the UK, and we must have the enterprise website for the UK audience. It's critical to have a beautiful website that also has personalized content. On top of that, we want to drive more organic inbound traffic to the website. We don't want to have to rely on expensive field marketing activities such as events to grow. We prefer to focus much more on digital initiatives. We have a strong knowledge of our TAM, and our database is qualified. What we need now is a platform to better engage with our audience."
On top of this, ReachFive wants to enhance its marketing automation plays for each market to create a more tailored experience for each persona. "We play on working with Markentive to implement more advanced marketing automation activities. Our core strategy is to rely on account-based marketing. We want to emphasize our capacity to design and execute personalized journeys that solve for different buyer's needs. We are going to rely on different mechanisms, like automation, SEO, Paid Search, depending on what our audience wants.
With the HubSpot platform firmly in place, ReachFive now believes that it can focus on the activities that will make the most significant impact for the business, as Sorayah explains, "Right now, there is nothing I would change from our new website. There are many features in Marketing Hub like smart content which we want to leverage while continually optimizing the website. We are very satisfied, and I wouldn't go to another tool we might love the autonomy that my team has. The website we have now is far beyond our expectations.
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