B2B Marketing challenged the agency, Protocol, to run its martech operations on just £500 for a year. Madly, they accepted. Here’s what its director, Justin Hall, learned from it all.
When Justin Hall, director of Protocol spoke about marketing automation at B2B Marketing’s recent martech conference, Get Stacked, the room was full to the brim. That’s because he told everyone how he ran his company’s marketing automation efforts for an entire year on the shoestring budget of just £500.
Protocol was at an early stage in its martech adoption. The five-year-old agency is fairly well-established but it hadn’t done much marketing. So when Joel Harrison, editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing posed the challenge of running it with just £500, they accepted.
“We set up as a start-up. We got a bunch of clients and expanded quickly but we never turned the spotlight on ourselves. We took on the challenge to prove a point,” says Justin.
A small budget is a great way to question what martech you really need and what is just clogging up your time and emptying your pockets. It got Protocol’s director asking some serious questions.
“Are marketers over-engineering their marketing automation?” questions Justin. “Our goal was to see what we really needed. What is the bare minimum you need in terms of time, tech and talent with just 500 quid?”
The essentials
During its project, Protocol worked off the basis it had five essential things:
- A laptop
- WiFi connection
- Google Docs/Microsoft Office
- A website (although Justin says this isn’t necessarily essential)
- Some time.
“The B2B marketing team has all of these expensive Macs and licences; we decided to just have a laptop and wifi connection instead.”
Choosing a platform
Protocol needed to choose a marketing automation platform for their project. This meant finding a platform that firstly met their use-case and secondly was in their budget. “It’s a tricky one,” admits Justin. “The best platforms are usually the most expensive. The platforms with the least features tend to be the most cost effective.”
To decide, Protocol pinpointed where in the purchasing journey its marketing automation needed to target. It chose the early stages, when prospects were discovering, considering and justifying.
From there it broke down the objectives it would like to achieve with this target audience and what that required from the marketing automation platform. “We focused on basic gated content, profiling data and basic nurture. It’s usually the simple stuff that companies start out with,” explains Justin.
The agency then compared how well various platforms could meet the capabilities it’d outlined and how they fared on functionality, learnability and affordability. Protocol chose Mailchimp, which scored 100% in all affordability categories. This took a £275 chunk out of the budget.
Cleaning data
Unlike most companies that went down the route of ‘legitimate interest’ following GDPR, Protocol took the opportunity to clean its data. “We made the decision last year to delete all our prospect data. So we decided to start our marketing again,” says Justin.
This cleared out those who weren’t relevant prospects to the company. It also helped Protocol understand what those who truly wanted to hear from Protocol wished to know. It’s had a really positive impact on the agency’s click-through rates. “Those rates are routinely 80-90% because we cleaned our data; everyone is subscribed and they want to hear from us,” explains Justin.
Content creation
Protocol knew the content piece of its new marketing automation needed to be both attractive and relevant in order to make its budget effective. “We’re not a creative agency, but what we see looking at research since GDPR is that in 2019 your content needs to be ten times more compelling, original and effective than what you were doing a year or two ago,” says Justin.
The content needed some tools in order to be both attractive and relevant. This could be broken into three stages: research, development, and design.
- Tools for the initial research stage of content creation were free – music to anyone’s ears.
Google Docs £0: Of course Google is an obvious choice, but beyond this Protocol used the free version of Google Docs for staff to share content ideas and work together.
Answer the Public £0: Protocol also used Answer the Public – a free site that searches the most asked questions on Google around key words. “If you’re not using it, you should be,” says Justin. “It’s great, you can take any topic and research trends, ideas, and questions.”
- Next was the development stage, which meant creating content that would be compatible with its WordPress website. This was also next to no cost.
Google Fonts £0: Protocol found a variety of fonts that could be downloaded from Google Fonts. These are also compatible with WordPress websites.
Unsplash £0: Rather than paying expensive licence fees for iStock and Getty, Protocol signed up to Unsplash. “It’s our favourite photography site, everything on there is free,” explains Justin. “It’s licence-free so you don’t have to attribute anyone.”
Nounproject £20 (per annum): For access to icons, Protocol signed up to Nounproject. This site gives access to a variety of downloadable icons to use in content on and offline. There’s a free version but the pro version allows you to download thousands of icons in PNG or SVG format.
- Professional designers are almost auto-tuned to using the Adobe Suite, but there are other cheaper options if you have time to research.
Affinity Designer £48.99 (one off): After some hefty searching, Protocol came across Affinity Designer. This is essentially the budget version of Adobe Suite rolled into one app, says Justin.
“It goes to show you that you don’t really need a lot if you have good inspiration, ideas and research.”
The website
The objective of Protocol’s £500 marketing automation programme was to profile data and nurture leads. To achieve this, the marketing automation programme directed interested prospects to the website, which has links to gated research and content. Protocol therefore had to use content tools to create value and prepare the website with hidden fields and to trigger key words.
“We do something that we try to get our clients to do. We try to take an agile approach by capturing data behind the scenes,” explains Justin.
It’s a risky move for Protocol to give away its secret sauce, but so far it has paid off. “Everything that our analysts use for our clients, everyone can assess,” says Justin.
The results
It took two Protocol staff six weeks to complete the £500 challenge (fitting in with their other responsibilities). The total costs amounted to £343.79 for the year leaving £156.21.
- MailChimp 2.5k contacts: £274.80
- Affinity Designer (one-off): £48.99
- Nounproject (per annum): £20
- Google Fonts: £0
- UnSplash: £0
- Google Docs: £0
- Answer the Public: £0
Protocol’s marketing automation programme not only shows it’s possible to do MA on a budget, it proves that you don’t have to throw lots of money at tech in order to reap healthy ROI. “Before we did this we honestly got about two or three prospect leads a quarter because it was all referrals. Now we’re getting about three to five solid leads a week. This has had a massive impact,” says Justin.
Every pound spent on this project gave a return of about £350. But now Justin faces a new problem. “When I show it to my clients, they also all want it!” he jests.
The key takeaway:Keep it agile, simple and get the basics right. What matters is focusing on the basic data points and getting good content.
