Rabbit & Pork

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m currently the digital marketing manager at the London Stock Exchange Group. I lead our in-house marketing team for all things SEO and organic search-related.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Rabbit & Pork?

Before we were acquired by the London Stock Exchange Group, we were looking at new innovative channels to reach our audience and spread our brand and market. It was around the time that the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and everyone moved to work from home — because of that, we wanted to find a creative way to reach our customers.

We had been working with Rabbit & Pork’s partner agency, and they mentioned an opportunity to work in voice search, which Rabbit & Pork are experts of.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve been working with Rabbit & Pork to launch a couple of voice apps on Alexa and Google. They basically led the way from ideation to execution, so that means they helped us come up with the idea and figure out how to make it work. They worked with our internal teams and had in-house developers do all of the coding — they even hosted the platform for us on AWS. 

The first phase was when we launched something called The Flash Briefing, which was an audio news element. Then, over the next few months, we started building the prototype and went through a series of testing internally. We did functional and UX testing to make sure everything worked properly.

What is the team composition?

They had a couple of people changed, but overall, we work with three core people. There’s John (Managing Director & Founder), an account manager, and a developer on the account.

How did you come to work with Rabbit & Pork?

We were with their partner agency, so we’ve been sort of working with John before. I believe my manager has a relationship with the agency going back a long time. They’ve spoken to us about voice search a couple of times, and it was clear that they were the experts in that field. Not many people in that field really know what they were doing, so that’s why we decided to go with them.

How much have you invested with them?

I believe we’ve spent about $100,000–$250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership started in March 2020, and we’re still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

A lot of the feedback that came back when we launched the app in January of this year was qualitative, and they’ve all been great. We’ve had a few thousand engagements on our apps, with 600 people who enabled it. That itself has an API of around 10,000 companies in the database — that took quite a lot of work with the API to make that happen.

How did Rabbit & Pork perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re pretty great in that respect. Steff (Business Director) managed everything and helped us stay on track with weekly meetings and agendas. For my company, we use all of Microsoft 365 tools internally, and I use Trello with them to keep on top of stuff.

We talk frequently, have weekly emails, and we even gave them access to our internal systems, so they’re on our Microsoft Teams.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The main thing I’d highlight is that they’re really good at both strategy and execution. They can really dig in and understand the why of what you’re trying to do and then implement it. Rabbit & Pork don’t just come in and build the thing for you, they’ll actually help you come up with the ideas and figure out how to make them happen.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any constructive feedback on their work, but the only thing I would say is that the voice smart speaker space is still in its early days, so it’s not necessarily for every company just yet. If anyone is questioning it, that would be the one thing to just bear in mind, so make sure to figure out the right voice for your company.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I definitely have trust in Rabbit & Pork, so make sure that everyone in your company is bought into the idea. There’s a lot of stuff you need to go through to make the idea work, so make sure you do good testing as well.

In addition, you need a little bit of patience because of the new technology, so these things take time. However, John and the team are there to support you all the way through.