Group Marketing's Programme of Operations

GROUP MARKETING'S PROGRAMME OF OPERATIONS

WHAT IS MARKETING DOING BEHIND THE SCENES?

AND WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR YOUR BUISNESS DEVELOPMENT?

AS A MARKETING TEAM

We pride ourselves on our proactive approach to strategic marketing initiatives through everything we do and put our offices and our clients at the heart of all our efforts. But it dawned on us, have we been transparent enough? Do our managers know what goes on behind the scenes?

We’ve put together our Programme of Operations, so we can illustrate to you all, what exactly your marketing team is doing for you, and also outline some exciting tailormade initiatives that we can do together!

First up, here’s an overview of the Marketing Department and our key strategies that are our focus in building client acquisition!

Our Head of Marketing, oversees all marketing activities and is the master of strategy currently taking a break- but back next year!

Group Project Manager, our Marketing OG, Business Development wizard and article expert

Marketing Executive, in charge of all thing’s social strategy, content writing and creative lead

Together, we make a powerful marketing department!

Marketing Executive, our CMS super star and data manipulation master

Charlotte Bridget

Rebecca Hristina

SO, WHAT ARE THE KEY MARKETING STRATEGIES WE PUT IN PLACE TO ACQUIRE NEW MARKETING QUALIFIED LEADS?

Let's have a look in more detail...

WEBSITES

Our Dixcart websites, particularly our star player, dixcart com, is our biggest piece of the puzzle in our audience’s journey, from observer to prospect That is why we focus so much of our resources into making sure our sites are optimised, user-friendly and have clear messaging

There are many aspects of website management that we implement on a daily basis to keep the sites running smoothly, and with the new addition of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) we can take our website strategy up a notch, as we gain even more insightful data on the traffic and performance of our digital presence. If you ever want to see some of this data, let us know!

WHATARETHEKEYACTIVITIES?

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation: this is the key to users finding our sites organically and determines how we ‘rank’ online We make sure that our sites have optimised content with the use of long and short keywords, phrases and meta descriptions, not just on our article pages but throughout all pages. (More on SEO later!)

Formatting - Formatting plays a pivotal part of a website Not only does it improve the user journey by giving them clear direction whilst they are browsing, but it has functionality too For example following protocol on headings and copy improves crawlability in the sites, which boosts ranking significantly

Lead Generation - ultimately, growing our database is at the heart of everything we do We manage clear Calls to Action (CTAs) in order to take users through our marketing funnel Through the use of contact forms, registration forms and easy CTA’s such as email links, we make sure these are easily accessible at every step of the journey

Valuable Thought Leadership Content - not only through our articles (more on Publications coming), but through the use of free PDF brochures, guides and tables which assist the engagement of our articles and add value to other pages such as our offices/people

Lastly, Credibility - We drive exposure to all Dixcart Offices and jurisdictions and feature licensing details where applicable By regularly posting new content, updating our websites, and including outbound links to other sites, we are continuously building our credibility and reputation This tells search engines that we are a quality data source, which in turn, helps boost our search engine ranking

READYFORDOUBLEDATA?

The data we gather from our sites influences our key website strategy

GA4 includes enhanced data collection plus more detailed user-level data and, excitingly, cross-device tracking It also has advanced analysis and reporting capabilities, and automatic event tracking, meaning we can find a metric that is important to us, and create an event By choosing the dimensions carefully, we can utilise user-level reports What a time to be alive!

And let’s not forget, our icing on the cake, HubSpot! We now have optimal opportunity to improve our user journeys, by giving them appropriate tags and walk them through our marketing funnel to become a Sales Qualified Lead This is only just scratching the surface of how marketing is starting to utilise HubSpot to up our game Keep reading for more!

Turkish Pilav

SOCIAL MEDIA

Since the start of this year, we ’ ve developed and implemented a pretty impressive social media strategy, which works in synergy with the rest of Dixcart’s key marketing activities, boosting Dixcart’s digital presence.

But how do we do it, and how do we measure success? Our most valuable social tool… LinkedIn. We know that our clients (“followers”) are at the correct level of engagement on LinkedIn and are in the appropriate ‘buying stage’ to reach them, with the aim of guiding them down the ‘marketing funnel’ (we’ll get to that later!).

Our Social Media Strategy has Four main pillars to success.

• Drive Traffic

• Boost Valuable Engagement

• Brand Awareness

• Legitimacy in the Market Place

WE WOULD ADD A TRAFFIC

PUN BUT IT MIGHT DRIVE YOU CRAZY

The first key pillar to our social strategy is to drive traffic to our website Dixcart adds fresh content to the website very regularly By optimising our content writing and leveraging all that LinkedIn has to offer, we are able to drive valuable footfall to those allimportant articles you carefully curate every month

Our motivation is to rank higher as an ‘authoritative voice’ on Google and other search engines, with the ultimate aim of growing the number of enquiries received via the website as a direct result of Social Media marketing

How does content writing have a direct impact on our traffic? Well, take a look for yourselves

Sounds engaging, doesn’t it!? We aim to get the right mix of information without giving the game away – giving them just enough information to whet their interests but leave them wanting more and to engage in a call to action

ENGAGEMENT, BUT MAKE IT VALUABLE

To gain valuable engagement, is to create valuable impressions, but how do we do that? Content, content, and more content.

OUR POSTING PROMISE IS CONSISTENT, CREATIVE AND TRUSTWORTHY.

We post a varied weekly content schedule, but not only is it expertly curated, there is a large amount of data and thought that goes into building our schedule, and one that is constantly evolving, as does the way people spend their time online It is paramount we are continually evolving with them

We share personal, behind-the-scenes content that not only boosts team engagement but emphasises Dixcart’s group approach

Recognise our new term: #TeamTuesday? Maybe you ’ ve already been featured! We can see via our analytics that these posts receive the highest amount of engagement each week By tagging colleagues and producing content that is more likely to encourage shares and engagement, we are able to initiate a new emotion in our followers and speak to them directly

You see, your engagement matters to us As a company page on LinkedIn, not a personal one, we cannot individually reach out to our target followers to reach them, without the use of ads, so the most valuable organic engagement is not only with our current followers but with you When you interact with Dixcart, it pushes our posts into the feeds of all your connections and then ultimately your connection’s connections – see the ripple effect!?

Thought leadership, we make sure we optimise your thought-leadership pieces every way we can Every month each article that is published in the previous Dixcart monthly mailer is then carefully crafted into a thought leadership post Let’s talk airmiles. We know that in our industry, face to face meetings play a pivotal role in business development, relationship nurturing and ultimately has a tremendous impact on the pipeline. But how can social media make an impact?

W H A T ' S I N A N A M E ?

Howdowemeasureoursuccess?

This content allows us to tap into those second-hand connections to gain followers for Dixcart whilst also raising awareness and generating client meetings for managers There have been many occasions where client meetings have been implemented as a direct impact from a Dixcart LinkedIn Post

Not just inclusive to social media, brand awareness plays a crucial part of our content creation and our digital presence Our goal is to strategically implement collateral and tone, to raise brand recognition to the point that followers know by design that it is Dixcart content before they read more Now how powerful is that?

We’ve implemented a fresh approach to the new collateral, and in turn have been creating varied but highly branded promotional material which is shown through infographics and video content

Well,howlongisapieceofstring?Wehavetheanalyticstobackupourstrategyandthedatathatallowsus tomeaningfullypivotourefforts.Wecanimplementcontenttestingandseewhatsticks,buttheproofreally isinthepudding!

We’vehadreallifereviewsfrommanyofyou,that’scomefromyourclientsandindustryprofessionals.And withtheintroductionofHubSpotthisyear,wehaveanimpressiveamountofdataanalysisatourfingertipsIf wecanseewhereourclientsarecomingfrom,andunderstandtheirmotivations,thenwecanencourage themintotheperfectbuyingpositionforyouall

YOU'VE GOT MAIL

You’ve seen our newsletters and our hot news mailers, but what do we do behind the scenes to get to this stage, and what have we got planned, to evolve our email marketing strategy to go even further?

Dixcart is unique, therefore our email communication is unique! We make sure our readers can tailor what information they receive from us, which they can change whenever they want This enables us to cut out the noise and stay relevant for each of our contacts and clients

But this doesn’t mean we send out multiple emails every month, we have a better way, Introducing ‘Smart Content’.

Without boring you with the techy details, each block of content we add to our newsletters includes something called “smart rules”, which in simple terms means we give the piece of content a label, which relates to the topics our clients have said they are interested in pretty clever right?

HERE’S OUR CURRENT MONTHLY EMAIL PROCESSES:

User Registers via our Website. (On average, organically 10 per month)

We can see by our organic monthly acquisition figures, our database is growing On top of our organic engagement, which comes from; direct marketing efforts towards our Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media activity and of course our wonderful managers, we have the opportunity, multiple times a year, to start campaigning, Email marketing plays a fundamental part of each campaign, more on that later!

They are automatically added to HubSpot as a ‘Marketing Contact’ They automatically start receiving our Marketing Emails

User sends enquiry from a website form.

They are enrolled on HubSpot as a Marketing Contact under legitimate interest They receive a welcome email letting them know they have been subscribed. They automatically start receiving our Marketing Emails

A named user reads one of our Articles posted via Mondaq. (On average 52 per month) Client is added by a manager on HubSpot.

We import their data onto HubSpot, monthly They receive a Welcome mailer to choose their preferences (topics) They automatically start to receive our Marketing Emails

Manager sets the contact as a Marketing Contact Client is then automatically enrolled to receive our Marketing Emails As well as a Manager responding directly to the enquiry

BUT HOW DO WE MEASURE AND ADJUST OUR CONTENT ACCORDINGLY?

The key performance metrics we measure are:

Open Rate – The amount of people who have seen the email in their inbox and have clicked to open it

Click Rate – Any Clicks from within the email, this could be to an article or, on the header, footer, an image, even the unsubscribe

Click-Through Rate – this is what matters to us; this is the rate of clicks that have clicked on a link that has caused them to move from our email and go to enter our website/call to actions (CTA)

Unsubscribe Rate – as simple as it sounds, fundamentally we monitor this, as if this rate climbs, we know we ’ re doing something wrong!

EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!

OUR STAR CONTENT, WHICH IS AT THE HEART OF ALL OUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES, ARE OUR INFORMATION NOTES.

You’ll have seen the word Mondaq floating around, and will have potentially seen Dixcart’s profile, but do you know how we use this platform to leverage our place in the market and boost our exposure to potential new clients?

WHAT’S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES?

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Every time we add an article to the website, it’s not just a copy and paste exercise There are many factors we need to consider, and the most import factor is exposure, and how we optimise each article as much as we organically can, to make sure it ranks as high possible

That’s where SEO comes in Search Engine Optimisation, in simple terms, is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results

Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content, a good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to our website

How does it work? Big search engines use crawlers, sometimes also called bots or spiders, to gather information about all the content they can find on the internet The Crawler starts from the webpage and follows internal links to pages within that site as well as external link The content on those pages, plus the context of the links it has followed, help the crawler understand what each page is about and how it’s semantically connected to all the other pages within the search engine database (their index)

There are a lot of factors that go into search engine algorithms, and they are constantly evolving Here are our main optimisations we put into practice on our article pages to help their exposure and ranking

Article amendments - when we are sent your articles to proof check, we always have SEO in mind This can translate into structuring, using the correct keywords and using them consistently and frequently We also make sure your heading is engaging and to the point!

Focus Key phrase – The aim is to decide on one keyword and ensure it is present throughout the article a minimum of 10 times, but most importantly it needs to feature in the opening paragraph. The rest of the key words mentioned need to be written into the copy multiple times and be present in the title and meta description.

SEO title - Usually the title of the article, this sits as the link on a google search and must contain your chosen focus Key Phrase.

Meta Description - This sits under the SEO title and should also contain your focus key phrase and additional key words; this is a snippet written to make the user want to read more and entice them. For optimisation this needs to ideally be below 155 characters.

Slug - The Slug is simply the text that falls after the domain URL on the website, for example www.example.com/this-is-the-slug. It is particularly important that the above and the slug are all talking beautifully to each other. Remember the Crawlers from earlier, this is what they’ll look for, to make sure the content they are investigating is relevant.

Mondaq - when we send an article to Mondaq, we also detail who the article should be targeting we specify the jurisdiction, industry Mondaq should promote each article to

Mondaq also push our articles on their LinkedIn platform and their Twitter platform and regularly hold their own thought leadership awards, perhaps you ’ ve seen them featured on #teamtuesdays?

We gain a lot of insights from Mondaq. We have total reads on articles and highlights, such as top jurisdiction, access to insider knowledge, such as what individual in which jurisdiction and industry is most interested in – all of which we feed back when we suggest new article topics to our managers

Smart content - Lastly, smart content in our newsletters Remember how we use smart rules to put different articles into topic categories within our newsletters? By doing this we are boosting valuable impressions, making sure that the right individual is seeing the perfect piece of content tailored for them, which ultimately turns into some hot new prospects!

DRUM ROLL PLEASE

CAMPAIGNS, THE MAIN EVENT!

So, campaigns? What are they and how do we utilise them to their full advantage?

We combine all our marketing efforts, from website and social, to Mondaq and our articles, into strategic campaigns, all working together to promote our services We curate specific content for each form of marketing that follows our desired theme Our campaign will have one general theme, and one target audience, and will look to engage with those individuals across multiple platforms, when they are at different buying stages

Whenever we plan to run a new campaign, you’ll know first, but there are months of planning that will go into executing a meaningful campaign

Campaign Landing page that sits on our website See this as an interactive homepage specifically for a campaign We feature CTA’s, snippets of information and internal links all packaged into one heavily branded, visual package

Corresponding social media campaign. This will be a tightly themed schedule with campaign graphics, specifically designed for each platform The use of social ads will boost our content to a specific target audience Through engaging and inciteful content, we aim to encourage our target to reach out and follow our CTA’s

Email marketing also plays a part in any digital campaign Imagine a snippet of that landing page, formulated into a mailer to entice our clients to a CTA It’s important to note campaigns aren’t just about client acquisition but are about raising brand awareness and nurturing the relationships we already have with contacts Perhaps a campaign could be the last piece of the puzzle in the individual’s buying decision; that little push they needed to cement them into our pipeline

Enter HubSpot…

Gone are the days where marketers had to individually pull data from each activity and manipulate them together in order to measure their campaign data.

Using HubSpot as our marketing ally, we can track our campaigns as one, which means we can follow engagement from each activity, all the way through onto how our clients are sitting in HubSpot. How neat is that?

INTRODUCING... HUBSPOT MARKETING HUB

You’ve all had a lot of communication from us about HubSpot in the last few months, and we are so pleased with the roll out of the sales hub, and that you ’ re all excited with the capacities and the opportunities for business development growth.

But what you haven’t heard much about is our Marketing Hub, which has been our motivator since setting it all up for you. The capabilities the Marketing Hub offers are revolutionary, and we think it’s about time we let you in on it - no gate keeping here!

The Marketing Hub sits alongside the Sales Hub. It allows us to manage all our marketing tools and data under one roof, instead of juggling different platforms for managing and tracking our marketing efforts.

This section within HubSpot will allow the Marketing Department to grow traffic, convert more visitors, determine/prioritise/automate marketing communications more appropriately, run more inbound marketing campaigns, and streamline reporting to track KPIs and ROI more effectively. It will also enable us to focus on contact retention and appropriate follow-up, so contacts do not fall through the net.

WHAT ARE OUR KEY FEATURES?

PERSONAS we can identify our ideal contacts/prospects and create persona profiles based on real data, as well as educated speculation about demographic information, motivations, goals, and challenges

CUSTOMER JOURNEY based on personas, we can segment contacts by which category they fall under (for example: Professional Intermediary) to ensure their ‘customer journey’ with Dixcart is relevant to them

LIFESTYLE STAGES these track which stage of the lifecycle the contact or prospect is with Dixcart, or where they should be with Dixcart (whether they are at Marketing Qualified level or Sales Qualified level) this helps us identify where they are in our funnel and what steps we need to take.

We now have INTUITIVE LEAD CAPTURE FORMS on the websites: ensuring we capture information that is relevant to the individual contact/prospect and assigns them a ‘ persona ’ , based on this knowledge, in the background.

LEAD NURTURINGAND CONTACT SEGMENTATION we can ensure the contact/prospect is receiving marketing that is relevant and of interest to them

SOPHISTICATED ANALYTICAL REPORTING for tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Return on Investment (ROI) on specific marketing activities/campaigns

Now you know our key features, perhaps it’s about time we let you in on our holy grail, our Marketing Funnel, and show you our exact process in how we will aim to convert our Marketing Qualified Leads into a Sales Qualified lead to hand over to you!

OUR MARKETING FUNNEL

This year, with the development of all our key marketing initiatives under our umbrella, it’s pushed us to look at our Marketing Funnel

With the introduction of HubSpot, Lifestyle Stages and Campaign strategies, we have developed an in-depth, heavily strategic funnel that we are pretty proud of T H E A Q U I S I T I O N F U N N E L

TADA!

F U N N E L

They are pretty beautiful aren’t they! Now you can see the journey isn’t stagnant, we are optimising our strategy at every step and attempting to engage each prospect and tune into their buying position!

Contacts either enter the funnel as a Marketing Qualified Lead- which is an individual that’s been engaged by Marketing initiatives or as a Sales Qualified Lead- that means they’ve been added to our database by our managers, and this is where they begin their journey.

The Contact's journey depends on if they become a marketing contact, therefore marketing can continue to engage with them and push them onto the pipeline. If they are a non-marketing contact, that’s when (with the help of us) your BD superpowers come in, these guys need a personal touch!

And if at any stage in the funnel they become unengaged? Well worry not, they don’t get forgotten forever! We are able to segment these unengaged contacts into ‘ reasons ’ , and we will have a specific strategy put in place to re-engage them. We won’t let them get away that easy, some people just need a little more TLC!

CASE STUDY

To illustrate let us put you in a prospect’s shoes and take you through our funnel, are you ready for some role play?

You’re a High-net-worth individual, you ’ ve just started a family and you ’ re starting to think about your future.

You’ve asked a few friends and implemented google searches, a company called Dixcart pops up amongst others, but you have put it on the back burner for now, there’s lots to consider.

You’re scrolling on LinkedIn and come across a post from Dixcart about ‘Protecting Generational Wealth’ it’s part of a Trust in Tomorrow campaign, you feel anxious that you ’ ve not looked into options, now you know you need to start researching.

You click into Dixcart and feel their trustworthy, their team are strongly advocated on their page, and there seems to be many options for me.

Time to check get out legitimacy and head onto their website, you spend some time reading certain articles to extend your research and decide it’s a good idea to register

PING, you receive your first Dixcart newsletter, lots of insightful content, you decide to make an enquiry with them

You’re introduced to a Dixcart manager, they’re very attentive and arrange a virtual meeting with them to discuss your options

A few weeks later, you receive a personal email from the same Dixcart manager, letting you know they are visiting your location and asking to meet, you reply and set up a face-to-face meeting You’re well on the way to being a client of Dixcart.

This was their journey through the funnel…

Contact was engaged on both social and website content through targeting

Through clever content writing we were able to tap into their need for setting up a family office, using the AMO technique

Contact followed a CTA on our website and became a Marketing Contact

Receives email marketing communications which pushes them to make an enquiry.

They’ve now become a Sales Qualified Lead

They’re introduced to the relevant office and the office has then assigned them with the tag ‘End Client’ and given them an interested service tag of ‘Trusts’

They’ve had a follow up call with their Contact Owner and have discussed their options and received a proposal. As a final push, they then receive a personalised email from the Manager, with travel dates, and an invitation for a face-to-face meeting

Closed Won! (Dixcart Manager does a happy dance)

AND BREATHE...

Now, if you ’ ve made it this far, I’m very proud of you and think it’s time for a treat!

Your lovely marketing department know how hard you all work in your business development, and we want to give you all a personal piece of our marketing magic to support your efforts.

Over the last quarter, we ’ ve developed a Marketing Menu of Initiatives. That’s right an actual menu!

Now we ’ ve whet your strategic appetite, are you ready to order your next marketing initiative?