Handing out flyers to random consumers in a race to meet a quota of prospects: It’s a practice that international and Filipino marketers in Metro Manila are all too familiar with - and that some have said goodbye to - at Strictly Inbound: How to Leverage Inbound Marketing in the Philippines.
The gathering was the first HubSpot User Group event in the country, part of the worldwide celebration of Inbound Marketing Week. It was held on March 4, 2015 at The City Club at Alphaland Makati Place, and was hosted by StraightArrow and sister company GetCre8ive. The two organizations invited businesses in the metro to learn more about a revolutionary marketing approach currently making waves all over the world: marketing that is non-intrusive and delightful to customers.
The event began with a round of Human Bingo, where attendees got to know each other and practice marketing P2P – People to People. Managing director Ia del Rosario then took the floor to shed light on the relationship and history of Creative Process Outsourcing company StraightArrow and GetCre8ive. StraightArrow - a HubSpot Gold Partner and Value Added Reseller – started as a small design studio to localize marketing collateral for GetCre8ive, the master delegate of Getty Images in the Philippines, a Certified Reseller of Adobe and a Silver Partner of Autodesk for Media & Entertainment. Eventually, StraightArrow grew to provide creative and inbound marketing services to businesses in the US, UK, Middle East and Australia.
After that, StraightArrow’s Head of Business Development Lila Shearsmith spoke about the inbound marketing methodology. “I don’t find prospects, they find me” was a quote from the presentation that many of the attendees eagerly wished they would be able to say. To help them achieve this, Lila talked about the different stages of inbound marketing: Attracting web visits with relevant blog posts, SEO, and social media; Converting them with content marketing offers, call-to-action buttons, landing pages, and contacts; Closing them into sales with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, closed-loop reporting, lead nurturing through email, and marketing automation; and lastly, Delighting customers with satisfaction surveys, smart calls-to-action, smart text, and social monitoring. Lila also emphasized the importance of creating content that educates customers and solves their pain points as a way to adapt to changes in buying habits.
The marketers in attendance were given the opportunity to raise questions about inbound marketing in the Q&A segment. One attendee asked about Google Analytics and whether it can be used to track leads. Another asked about how progressive profiling works to help with targeting only prospects that fit their company’s buyer persona description. On the other hand, an attendee from a Philippine-based Search Engine Marketing company asked about whether they should train their clients to use inbound marketing software or execute inbound marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients. Regarding this, Ia talked about how StraightArrow’s inbound marketing specialists use the software to strategize and execute on behalf of clients.
Ia then presented StraightArrow as a case study, explaining how its growth is attributed to efforts in the different stages of inbound marketing – efforts to attract, nurture, close and delight clients into signing a Creative Process Outsourcing engagement as far as Sweden, without leaving the confines of the office.
StraightArrow’s senior inbound marketer and HubSpot specialist Czarina Año then took the mic to share her experiences in learning the methodology. Czarina also invited attendees to join the HubSpot User Group on LinkedIn, and to invite other marketers in the Philippines to grow not just their business’s revenues, but also their skills and knowledge sets through inbound marketing training and certifications.
GetCre8ive’s Head of Sales, Sarah Lumang, closed the event and thanked the attendees - the first official members of HUG Manila. Sarah also awarded the Human Bingo winners with limited edition copies of Getty Images’ Creative In Focus 2015 Visual Trends Briefing.
If you're a Marketing student or are part of the marketing team of a business in the Philippines, please do join the HUG Manila Group on LinkedIn. We hope to see you there (and in our next events)!
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