Macon Raine

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of a software as a service (SaaS) for scientific laboratories.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Macon Raine?

We hired them to do lead generation and build liquidity in a three-party marketplace.

What were your goals for this project?

As a startup in the life sciences, I needed a team that could combine digital marketing strategy with an understanding of the broader life science community. We wanted to build awareness of our brand among users and secure new partnerships in the industry.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They were a referral.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

Macon helped us launch several content marketing campaigns that boosted adoption of our platform and increased the visibility of our brand. They also helped manage our social media accounts, create fresh content, and amplify that through the press.

What was the team composition?

We worked with a marketing strategist, a content specialist, a digital technologist, an SEO/SEM specialist, and the managing partner.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We’ve doubled our users in the past year. This increased brand awareness has led to features in leading scientific publications. LinkedIn sponsored ads conversions were up by 20%, while our social following is up by 200% on Facebook and Twitter.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We used several productivity apps, including Asana workflows, Google Team drive, and status reports. These were extremely thorough, useful, and easy to navigate.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were impressed with their creativity, which yielded SEO quick wins.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Their reports came from several sources, which can be a bit overwhelming, but they did a good job keeping us aligned with the analytics. They’re a small team, so they naturally move a bit faster to keep up.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the co-founder of a security company that works with real estate organizations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did you company hire Macon Raine? 

We were initially looking for a company to refine our brand and develop a new website.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted brand refinement and lead generation help.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I’ve known them for years through multiple companies that I've founded. I’ve used them for three successful equity events.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

We gave Macon Raine control of our website. They also manage our SEO, PR, email, and PPC. They are responsible for pretty much everything we do online.

What was the team composition?

Our primary contact is a senior copywriter. I also meet with a graphic designer, web developer, and PPC expert on a regular basis

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Lead volume is up consistently every year. We booked 342 more leads in 2017 than we did in 2016. Our board of directors is very happy with our process.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

For complex projects we use Asana, but most of the day to day is done via email and status reports in Google Docs.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They treat my money like it’s their money. They’re super flexible and they don’t behave like a typical marketing agency. They aren’t out to run the clock. They work fast and smart.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, I don’t think so.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CMO for a company in the technology payment space.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Macon Raine?

We needed outside help to build our department. We wanted to increase our content and assets, analyze product positioning, and readdress our messaging and website. We were facing a lot of startup challenges, and we didn’t have the internal resources to manage them.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Macon Raine’s responsibilities were vast. They helped quite a bit with content and strategy development. For social media marketing, they led content curation, posting, an execution. We also had them work on web design and development early on.

We recently hired internal and other, more specialized, external agencies to take care of some of those other marketing needs. Macon Raine has scaled back a bit but still does development work and product positioning.

What is the team composition?

The team changes as needed, but my main interaction is with the managing partner.

How did you come to work with Macon Raine?

I’d worked with them before, and they were tremendously supportive, so we hired them for this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since the latter half of 2013.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve more than doubled our social community, and some of that is due to Macon Raine. We extended our brand and now have rich content resources available on our website. They also helped build a lot of sales collateral.

How did Macon Raine perform from a project management standpoint?

There aren’t any issues—they manage their projects well. We communicate via email, phone, project management software, and in person. They’re a flexible team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They're creative and extremely supportive of our changing wishes and needs. They'll always give you more than what your scope of work might have considered.

Are there any areas they could improve?

As we grew, they didn't have the level of specialization in some areas that we needed. They're generalists, though, so that’s not their focus.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Maintain clear lines of communication. Come with your ideas as finished as possible.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the social media coordinator for the business school at a top-twenty ranked public university in the United States.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Macon Raine - A B2B Marketing Agency?

Higher education tends to lag behind other industries in deploying effective digital communication strategies. We have yet to establish best practices and sufficient peer benchmarking, so we were looking for a set of guidelines to assess our analytics against a properly designed comparative data set.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to identify key data points for our industry to build an actionable analytic methodology for our digital communication strategy.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I've worked on and off with Macon Raine for over a decade and was confident that they would have the expertise I needed to quickly assess our situation and provide valuable recommendations on how to move forward.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

They provided us with a focused analysis of our current standing in the market and actionable insights that we could employ to gain better control over our ability to strengthen, maintain, and grow from that position.

What was the team composition?

We worked directly with their executive team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Macon Raine helped us accurately assess our position in relation to our peers' institutions and offered specific solutions to implement in order to begin to work on growth and engagement strategies. This year our analysis of the data from the previous 12 months shows that we are well ahead of our peer comparison group in all of the areas that we track.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was seamless and direct. Macon Raine fits perfectly within our MarComm planning cycle and their refined approach allowed us to focus on areas that we needed to improve and move directly into implementation.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Working with consultant groups in the MarComm service industry can be difficult because many professionals default to cliché best practices and lack boots-on-the-ground awareness of real brand challenges. Macon Raine's approach is focused, relevant and based on decades of experience in a multitude of industries. Their well-rounded experiential base and solid methodology made working with them absolutely painless. Everything about our interaction with Macon Raine was positive.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the marketing manager for a small business with a national customer base.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Macon Raine?

My company had a very bare-bones approach to SEO. Our organic approach had decent results, however, a new goal became to optimize for additional keywords and track search result rankings. Since it’s a small company, we didn't have the budget to compete for the major keywords in the industry.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to improve organic search results and get to the first page for our selected keywords.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Many professionals hear "SEO" and decide that it’s something that we need to do without a clear understanding of what the strategy entails and the cost behind it. Macon Raine listened to our requests and helped us modify our approach to one that was more targeted and which fit our business needs while staying within our budget.

Describe the project in detail.

They started off with showing us how expensive the keywords we initially wanted were and helped us identify a better mix for our paid search efforts. As we saw results coming in, we modified our approach to attract more traffic. They also helped us with our content in order to improve our organic results along with meta and image tags.

What was the team composition?

We had a project manager that dealt with me directly. Their principal also sat in on meetings whenever necessary.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any statistics or metrics that speak to the quality of their work and impact of the engagement?

Our search results landed us on the first two pages. Additionally, we also saw where we needed to improve our optimization and what we needed to drop.

How did the Macon Raine perform from a project management standpoint?

They were responsive and provided reports on a monthly basis.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They're real; they're not going to try to sell you on something because you read about it on an Entrepreneur blog. They will identify your problem and find the best approach to get the results you want.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not that I can think of.