I was very fortunate to have this course coincide almost perfectly with starting a new job as head of marketing at an early stage tech company. The new job demands deep knowledge of leading Internet marketing practices and this course provided an excellent review and food for thought on a very wide range of strategies to consider applying in our company.

I’ve provided a summary of some of my key takeaways below:

• Using Hootsuite: Something I introduced to my day-to-day work routine basically immediately was using Hootsuite to begin to build my company’s social media presence. My role for the team project was Hootsuite scheduling. I learned how to build a social media content calendar and schedule it in Hootsuite – a tremendously valuable time saver for my recurring posts. I’ve set up a tab in my Hootsuite specifically to track competitors and influencers in the FinTech space. I’m monitoring the strategies of some of the leading companies to determine who is attracting a lot of attention and why.
• Activating people: We had a few discussions about empowering social media influencers to do the talking for you. Julio introduced tools such as Buzzsumo and Klout to help identify the most talked about content on a particular subject (in my case it was FinTech) and determine who the thought leaders and authorities on the subject were. I’ve now identified a network of FinTech thought leaders who I plan to engage over the next few months with the hope that they will eventually share our company’s content. In other words, I plan to act as a bridge influencer for a while until I’ve built up enough content and a big enough following to become a hub influencer.

• Other Tools: One of the most invaluable takeaways was being introduced to some useful tools (Unbounce, Hubspot, MailChimp, E-Marketer, website grader, etc.) that I intend to access on a regular basis in the design and implementation of my company’s Internet marketing strategy. The idea of trying to attract attention and stand out on the Internet amongst countless other companies who are trying to access the same customers seems quite daunting, but I’m starting to get a better appreciation for the suite of tools I can use to help me succeed.

• Inbound Marketing: The inbound marketing module was probably my favourite part of the course. The idea of pulling customers into your business by creating content that’s valuable to them resonates with me, and I think it’s going to resonate with our target market. Producing whitepapers, case studies, videos, infographics, etc. may be time consuming and onerous but I think it’s going to pay off. Julio shared a few check/balance questions that I’ve been using to evaluate the effectiveness of my inbound marketing plans:
  • Am I regularly creating new, share worthy content?
  • Am I optimizing my content for search & social?
  • Am I promoting my content in social media conversations?
  • Am I converting as many visitors into leads & sales as I can?
  • Rules of thumb for social media – Of every 15 social media posts, 10 should be valuable info for the industry; 4 should be our blog posts; 1 should be soft sell (e.g. sign up for webinar)

The Group Project

We ended up with quite an interesting challenge for our group project. Alex’s company, Afterguard, launched a pre-sale campaign in early 2014 with a very strong promotional video and PR push. Unfortunately, the campaign didn’t go as well as planned and the company simultaneously faced a few challenges with its vendors.

The result was that the company had been sitting in limbo for several months waiting for the opportune time to start building a following and hype for its second kick at the can While the company did have a Google AdWords campaign and a modest social media presence, I think the holistic framework we were introduced to in the class provided a good foundation for the company’s next big push.

The company has a few things to figure out before implementing many of the initiatives we set up; however, I’m optimistic that the work we’ve done will better position Alex to run a successful pre-sale campaign once it is ready.

I’m quite excited to apply the strategies I’ve learned in this class to my new company and know that a substantial amount of experimentation will be required to find the right mix. Even if we still need to engage external experts to help us succeed in the customer acquisition phase, I will be much better positioned to manage this process and ask the right questions.