NBT (Next Big Thing)

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a privately-held software company. We sell enterprise software that requires in-person engagement with the prospect. Our core market is typically in the Middle East.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with NBT (Next Big Thing)?

We travel to our core market to meet people in person and interact with their C-level staff. When COVID-19 started, we couldn’t go anywhere, so we needed an additional strategy to reach our potential clients.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve made a 360 digital journey with NBT, which has included updating the website, creating blogs and gated content, running LinkedIn ads, SEO optimization, and so on. Basically, they’ve taken over our digital marketing. We provide the content, and they do everything for us. We have a monthly digital plan that tackles all the areas of digital marketing, which is crucial for us because we’re a small company that requires efficiency. The plan includes two blogs, 8–10 posts for social media, 12 different ads, among other things.

We already had a website in place, but NBT has changed a lot of things. They’ve created landing pages, gated content, reference videos with customers, and more. It used to be very basic, and now it helps to generate organic leads.

Initially, we spent three months explaining our business, value proposition, and target market because they couldn’t optimize things without understanding the business. From that, we sat down and optimized our buyer persona with them. We also proposed keywords for SEO, and NBT did some research on our competitors’ keywords to see how active they were. Additionally, they fixed a lot of errors on the website that reduced our Google ranking.

Now, we have several LinkedIn ads for different products and track everything through Hubspot. We have complete transparency on the conversion rates, which they’re optimizing as well. 

Overall, they’ve helped us build and execute a solid digital strategy. NBT has handled it all, which has a massive value for a small company like ours.

What is the team composition?

They have three people dedicated to us, but there are other teams behind them. It includes a performance team for SEO optimization. There’s also a team of content creators that do research, write blogs, and send us different articles so we can provide feedback. The blogs go through 2–3 iterations with me before we publish them.

How did you come to work with NBT (Next Big Thing)?

My co-founder knew them or heard about them somehow. However, we mainly reached out to them due to the pandemic — we couldn’t reach customers the same way we did before. We met them in person, handed them brochures, and presented our products on the premises. Since that couldn’t happen anymore, we quickly hired someone because we knew that the pandemic wasn’t a short thing.

How much have you invested with them?

They have a credit system in place. We buy a certain amount of credits, and each task is worth a certain number of credits. With the Hubspot fee included, we pay around $4,000–$5,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2020, and we’re still working together. We’re actually increasing our engagement with them because our company is growing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We could’ve implemented this digital transformation before the pandemic, but we didn’t believe that it would work better than what we were doing. In reality, we have a wider reach now. Customers come to us looking for solutions, so it actually works better than meeting customers in person.

We’re getting leads from people in C-level positions that we had never engaged offline before. For example, we’d tried to meet the head of credit at a bank in Saudi Arabia and had traveled there several times just to meet him. With the LinkedIn ads with engaging content, he clicked on the ad and came to us already informed. We wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of that without NBT.

Also, we’ve seen a lot of organic growth on our website thanks to their SEO work. We have around 8,000 views per quarter, whereas before, we only had a few hundred. Additionally, the number constantly goes up.

How did NBT (Next Big Thing) perform from a project management standpoint?

We typically meet deadlines with them. We only use HubSpot for project and campaign management, and we use it for pipeline management inside our company.

On the other hand, we use Slack to communicate with them. We have a weekly call to go over campaign performances, lead generation results, and so on.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Two things stand out. First, they focus on startups because startups have a different momentum in the market. Secondly, they provide everything we need to have a robust digital footprint thanks to their 360 approach. We don’t need to hire other people; we can do everything we need all in one place. Also, NBT constantly works to optimize and refine things.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think there’s anything they need to improve. We’re very happy with them. They have young but experienced and motivated people. Whenever we’re not happy with something — particularly with the blog — we just let them know, and they go back and rewrite it, focusing on different things. Also, their English is excellent.

All in all, I wouldn’t say a bad thing about them. They don’t know our customers’ problems as well as we do, so we can’t expect them to have the same experience as us. They’re doing exceptionally well, and that’s why we’re still engaged with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take the time to explain your business to them and build a strategy together. When we hired them, it was a six-month engagement, and we spent three of those six months introducing them to our business, building out the digital strategy, and refining our buyer persona. We still use all that information for our blogs and campaigns.

The next three months were used to see the results of that initial work. We got our first leads from LinkedIn ads very shortly, which we didn’t expect.