Bourbon Creative

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Senior Marketing and Communications Manager of Cognizant Netcentric

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We're Adobe Experience Cloud experts, helping brands transform their customer experiences by leveraging Adobe solutions and other cutting edge technologies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Bourbon Creative to accomplish?

• Connect us with talented writers and designers
• Support us in our content marketing goals
• Step in when we needed support in other marketing areas

SOLUTION

How did you find Bourbon Creative?

Referral

Why did you select Bourbon Creative over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Bourbon Creative were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Over the years, Bourbon's team has supported us with producing, managing, coordinating and optimizing our brand's content. From blogs, to website copy, to video scripts, to client success cases and SEO strategy, their project managers have integrated themselves into our teams and been an incredible proactive help. Some notable achievements:

• accelerating and scaling our content production, contributing to social media copy
• scaling our thought leadership and expanding our conversion-oriented landing pages
• supporting our SEO optimization efforts with key insights and recommendations tailored to our brand needs. 

Furthermore, one of their PMs stepped in during a parental leave to support with a specific internal communications tasks on a monthly basis.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Over the years, Bourbon has helped us publish hundreds of blogs, two dozen whitepapers contributing to our MQL targets, several dozen customer success cases. On a qualitative level, their project managers and the network of writers and creatives they collaborate with have enabled us to scale and accelerate our marketing efforts across the board. This kind of reliable, high quality, proactive partnership enables the larger marketing team to simply achieve more.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Their project management is excellent. Over the years I've worked with several and each have been dedicated, proactive, diligent and highly organized. Bourbon selects talented project managers that genuinely care about their customers' success and go the extra mile to deliver. We have also appreciated their flexibility over the years to adjust their services with our business needs.

What was your primary form of communication with Bourbon Creative?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The quality of service, flexibility and dedication is impression and unique. We've developed a genuine partnership based on trust, and Bourbon Creative's team is incredibly professional and invested in helping their customers' succeed.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Bourbon Creative could have done differently?

Whenever we've had to change or adjust our ways of working or scope of services, Bourbon has been very accommodating, understanding and flexible. We've always had open communications for improvements on both sides - how we as clients can adjust and they as vendors can adjust and improve, together.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Sales and Marketing of Suitaprest

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Suitaprest is the leading provider of mortgage-backed loans to individuals and businesses in the Spanish market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Bourbon Creative to accomplish?

• Create a clear SEO strategy that hits the pre-defined objectives in terms of leads
• Improve tech SEO health following the revamp of their website (tech, design, content)
• Assist in the revamp of their website as a trusted SEO partner & expert to ensure a successful re-launch

SOLUTION

How did you find Bourbon Creative?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Bourbon Creative over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

What was the size of Bourbon Creative’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We needed a trusted SEO and content partner to help us with developing a data-based content strategy focused on generating relevant inbound leads (according to our pre-defined criteria) as well as ensuring a successful revamp of our website.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Improved SEO Site Health from 82% to 98%. Fixed and removed over 830 SEO tech issues, including resolving all major SEO tech errors (255 in total)

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Excellent project management. Clear, concise, and timely.

What was your primary form of communication with Bourbon Creative?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I was impressed with their deep expertise and focus on data-driven solutions. At the same time, the ability to explain everything in layman's terms and transparency of the process.

Are there any areas for improvement or something  Bourbon Creative could have done differently?

Nothing I can think of.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a manager at a small SaaS company. We provide a cloud solution to broadcasting companies, monitoring streaming from the backend it doesn’t break.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Bourbon Creative?

We’d set up a branch in a new country, and we needed a partner to help us with digital marketing.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Bourbon helps us with digital marketing. They’ve sketched out a strategy that entails designing and building a digital content solution that includes blogs, whitepapers, and case studies.

Initially, we sat down with them and gave them access to industry content, and we brought in a writer. We sat down with Bourbon and the writer to discuss the topics we wanted to be the leaders in and what voice we wanted to be known for. For example, we wanted to push the conversation on quality of service. 

From that discussion, we built an archive of subjects that we wanted to discuss in our blog. The Bourbon team manages the whole process, creating a conversation with the writer that leads to an article. 

There is an ongoing debate between Bourbon, the writer, and us about who is going to write about what, when, and how. Bourbon determines a calendar for how, when, and what to publish. 

After a topic has been decided, Bourbon talks with the writer further, then the writer produces something, and Bourbon edits it. Once it’s ready, Bourbon puts the content on our website according to the calendar. 

Additionally, there was a period during the COVID-19 pandemic when they also functioned as our full marketing provider while we were doing an audit internally. They were still producing and publishing digital content during this time, but they also looked at our SEO. They examined our position in the digital marketplace to determine where we needed to concentrate our efforts. The team was doing visuals for us, looking at our hashtags, and looking at every element of our digital footprint.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with three people from Bourbon, including the operations director, a teammate who takes care of visual development, and an editor.

How did you come to work with Bourbon Creative?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, our companies were in the same co-working spaces. We chose Bourbon because they’re a very engaging group of individuals and really nice people.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent between €50,000–€100,00 (approximately $56,900–$113,900 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2018, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since working with Bourbon, we’ve had a more refined blog and better content. The quality of our LinkedIn posts has improved, and we’re more consistent in our articles. Additionally, they’ve helped us be more systematic in posting on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Bourbon has helped us sharpen our approach to digital marketing. At the outset, they made us more aware of how important digital marketing is in the current landscape. 

How did Bourbon Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re great at project management. They’re super good at making sure we’re on point, which comes down to their operations director. 

There was a period when our senior members were overworked, and the Bourbon team recognized this and consistently supported us to meet our deadlines — they were always reminding us to be on time. 

We’ve used various apps for collaboration, which have changed throughout our engagement. We initially used Trello, and then we moved on to other apps. Their team has recommended other apps that we’ve used and discarded because they didn’t fit our environment. Though we’ve been inconsistent as we adapt, the Bourbon team has always been consistent. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m really impressed by Bourbon’s phenomenal project management. When we first started working with them, they also made a point of learning about our market; they went off to read and taught themselves. Plus, they’re a really nice group of people who are good at what they do.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve the content and quality of their writers. We’re a tiny niche in our market, so what we write about is for a very small reader base of perhaps 100,000 people. Our content creators have to know the market really well. 

The people they found to write our content didn’t know the market, so we found a writer within our industry. That’s not really their problem, though. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that Bourbon understands your specific market and that they find some content creators, writers, and visual designers who really understand your market.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder of Minty Digital. We're an SEO and Google Ads Agency operating from Barcelona with clients around the world.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Bourbon Creative, and what were your goals?

SEO support

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

As we scaled we needed more support with our campaigns. We heard about Bourbon Creative through a friend and after a brief chat we thought that they would be a good fit to help offer Whitelabel support to our clients.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and campaigns.

Bourbon helped us with content creation and planning for a number of our clients. This would usually consist of:

- In-depth content analysis of what our clients already had

- A look into their competitors and ways we can get ahead

- keyword research and post planning

- Writing the content

- Uploading the content to the CMS It also included some asset creation such as infographics and PDFS.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We mainly worked with Clemens, but there were a number of other team members who would support when needed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Combined our marketing efforts have helped our clients increase online traffic, keyword rankings, and of course sales! We even won an SEO award last year for a campaign that Bourbon helped support with.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We mainly communicated through Slack. The team is always responsive and gets back to us within a few hours max.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Quality of work and attention to detail. In fast-paced agency environments, this trait is usually lost!

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Not that I can think of, overall very happy with service

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the content manager for an electric vehicle charging manufacturer based in Spain. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Bourbon Creative?

We wanted an agency that could support us in creating good and strong educational content based on our theme of vehicle charging. At the same time, the content should be translated since we were a global company working in seven languages. This was a prerequisite for what we wanted in the relationship. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

To start a task, we would provide Bourbon Creative with a brief of what we wanted. Then, they’d write the content. For instance, if we wanted them to write an article, we’d provide them a brief. They’d then write the article in English and send it to us for approval. If it was approved, their in-house translation team would translate the content into seven languages.

What is the team composition?

We mainly worked with Clemens (Director of Operations). We communicated with him every week, and he assigned the tasks to his team. 

How did you come to work with Bourbon Creative?

Bourbon Creative was hired by the previous content manager of our company before me. We chose them because we wanted a reliable company that could support and deal with our requests quickly. 

We didn’t want to hire a big corporate agency that wouldn’t spend much time on us because we weren’t doing an article a day; we only did a couple of articles a month. Luckily, Bourbon Creative was boutique enough to handle what we were doing, so we hired them. 

How much have you invested with them?

Our budget was around €12,000 (approximately $14,000 USD) per month. We spent €2,000 (approximately $2,400 USD) a month for content creation, while the translation cost about €8,000–€10,000 (approximately $9,000–$12,000 USD) a month. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our contract lasted from September 2019–June 2021. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In the last 6–7 months, our organic audience grew by an average of 30% across our 17 blog sites. Much of that growth was due to the work we were doing with Bourbon Creative. 

Overall, Bourbon Creative was great at helping us become more multicultural in terms of content creation. On top of that, we leaned on them to check not just our marketing materials but also many other things. They truly helped us speak to our audience directly using their own language. 

How did Bourbon Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

To manage the project, we had weekly Zoom meetings and a Slack workspace, where we liaised daily through quick messages. During our weekly round-ups, we’d usually go over the status of what we’d been doing. Meanwhile, Clemens was organized and truly polite. He and his team always dealt with whatever we threw at them. This was one of the things that we enjoyed the most in our relationship with Bourbon Creative.

Moreover, nothing was ever too much trouble for them. Things moved quite fast in our company, and we had tight deadlines. Fortunately, the Bourbon Creative team was reliable whenever we asked for help. We felt that they were an extension of our internal team, and it was a nice feeling. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They always went out of their way to deliver what we asked. They were always on time and organized, and that was partly because they weren’t a huge agency. Given that, we had a close relationship; they took care of us, which was really nice. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

We didn’t have anything negative to say about the quality of Bourbon Creative’s work, but they could be bigger. We were growing exponentially by the minute. In fact, we were twice as big as they were just six months ago. Given that, the demands of our marketing team increased tenfold, and we needed a bigger agency that could do more things in-house, so we had to terminate our contract with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Bourbon Creative has a great ability to communicate, so you'll get the most out of the relationship as long as you give clear directions and briefs. They’re also good at hitting deadlines as long as you’re clear on when things need to be delivered and reviewed. This will work to your benefit. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a content marketer at Unnax, a Spanish financial services company. We help businesses to perform identity verification. We also help clients access their accounts, move their money, and produce payments in a smart way.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Bourbon Creative?

The main goal of our marketing department was to democratize open banking and help business leaders understand why and how innovative financial technologies could drive business success. Since our old blog was very outdated, we needed help in creating meaningful content for our blogs, download resources, and email campaigns. Additionally, we wanted to convert more visitors into qualified leads. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Bourbon Creative writes articles for our blogs in English and Spanish. They also create e-books, guides, and white papers for us. Furthermore, the team designs our advertising pieces. They don’t just do the copywriting for us — they also help us to develop a better content marketing strategy.

What is the team composition?

The director of operations handles all our communication needs. We also collaborate with their English writer, Spanish writer, and graphic designer. 

How did you come to work with Bourbon Creative?

Years ago, we were looking to update our blog because all the content was very outdated. We looked for an agency that had financial knowledge. On top of that, we wanted to partner with a company that could write really well. We did an online search and asked for recommendations from several people. Eventually, we found Bourbon Creative.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent €2,000 (approximately $2,400 USD) a month. Sometimes we spend a little more when we request graphic designs or internal campaigns.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2019, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In the last year, we’ve had 14 new keywords that entered the top 10 in Google Search. Moreover, we have 20% more web traffic from organic searches, and we have around 700 new contexts from our reports and guide that Bourbon Creative has written.

How did Bourbon Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

Bourbon Creative’s project management is very good. We've had a good conversation about what our goals are and what we want to achieve. At the end of the project, if there are things we need to change or fix, they’re more than happy to help us. We use the Google Suite to communicate, and our relationship has been very good.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I appreciate the advice they give us on how to improve our services. Bourbon Creative has really good writers, and the quality of their work is very good. It’s hard to find an agency that’s focused on financial services. Overall, the team understands what we’re trying to achieve with every single piece we do.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything specific because everything has been very good.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a good kickoff, so that their writers can understand what your goals are. Be open to good communication and discussion about the content.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Group Head of Marketing at TechBuddy, a leading tech support company in Europe.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Bourbon Creative?

We wanted to position our brand as a thought leader in its category, and activate our clients through interesting content for both our English and German blog.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I have been working with Bourbon for a previous project, and have been delighted by their service.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

After a kick-off meeting, Bourbon provided us with a keyword research, a competitor analysis, and a suggestion for topics, that we could quickly rank for.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

They've assigned a Project Manager that handled all the communication with us. Apart from that, various writers and SEO experts have been working in the background.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Monthly blog traffic grew +55% in 3 months, and we secured several placements in the top 20 search results, among them 3 articles ranking #1.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We defined clear procedures, as well as style guides to follow, which made it very easy for us to work together.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

It's hard to find good writers, and Bourbon has very talented people on their team! Apart from their high-quality outputs, we appreciated the complete services they offered, from project management to writing, to analyzing, and drawing conclusions, Bourbon helps with everything.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Maybe provide dashboards for easier monitoring, instead of sending reports.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO. We are a B2B SaaS company offering security solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Bourbon Creative?

We wanted to create content for our inbound marketing and raise our organic traffic. We didn’t have any marketers in-house. They are mainly helping us with content creation. They are also helping us with media outreach.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I had worked with Bourbon in the past and, while I tested other competitors, they were the best we found.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

During the kickoff, we identified keywords and key topics to cover for our audience. Since then we've been building, refining and maintaining these topics on a monthly basis.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Up to 4, incl. Account Manager, 2 writer and a Designer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We've been very happy with our increased digital presence, as seen in organic traffic growth (x40), and new inbound leads.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very efficient, even when at times our team was too slow for the agreed schedule, they've always managed to speed things up.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The great relationship they've built with their clients is impressive.