Bank J.Van Breda&C° and the inbound and agile marketing methodologies

Step 1: Starting the collaboration

We developed our partnership on the basis of the understanding of their goals. In order to improve their marketing processes, we would do the following:

• Implement the inbound methodology.
• Guide them to independent use of HubSpot Marketing.
• Implement the blog and landing pages on HubSpot CMS, and advise on the potential migration of the website on HubSpot CMS.
• Support with integrations.
• Support with a GDPR compliant marketing set up with the collaboration of their legal department.
• Guide them towards implementing an agile methodology, to go from a yearly planned marketing plan to a monthly planning that would enable them to be more reactive.

Step 2: Defining the scope of a campaign within the inbound methodology

In order to go from a traditional and offline marketing methodology to a more online marketing approach, we implemented an inbound methodology at Bank J.Van Breda&C°.

Doing inbound marketing is all about attracting the customer, letting them come to you when they are feeling a need. If you want to do marketing actions that your audience will love and respond to, the inbound methodology is the way to go.

An inbound marketing strategy is based on:  

• The understanding of whom you are talking to. 
• The creation of the right content
• Delivering this content in the right place and at the right time.

To implement this methodology at our customers in general, and to Bank J.Van Breda&C° in particular, we take the role of coaches. We guided the bank's marketing team in adopting the methodology and the tools. As they already had an efficient marketing team. Our goal was not to do everything for them but to show them how to do it. For that, we did one first campaign with them. 

The campaign that we did was targeting Brussels lawyers and entrepreneurs. At the start of a good marketing campaign, it is important to understand to whom you will target it. That's why starting from two of their personas (mentioned before) we did a workshop to understand their Buyer's journey. This helped to understand the persona and to determine the elements that the campaign should be about. 

Step 3: Launching the first campaign

With those elements, the marketing team created a campaign plan and the content for it. Afterward, we guided them into the creation of the assets in HubSpot.

By designing, preparing, and launching a campaign together, they had the opportunity to get their hands on HubSpot. Guided by us, the marketing team created the elements of the campaign in HubSpot. Since we created full conversion paths, we were able to show them in detail how to use different HubSpot tools. 

This campaign had two sets of results: 

1) After running this campaign, they got 2% conversions on a document download and 51 sales appointments. 

2) At the end of the project, the team was fully up to speed and began to use HubSpot to manage their marketing activities. 

Step 4: Implementing Agile methodology

After implementing the inbound methodology, Bank J.Van Breda&C° wanted to begin working in a more agile way. Why? Because they were coming from a marketing strategy that was defined one year and a half in advance. A strategy that lacked flexibility. In a world that moves fast, and certain events can impact the business very quickly, they wanted to use an approach that would enable them to react fast. The Agile methodology enables you to do that.

They already had a lot of Agile elements implemented, however they wanted our help to go even further in this direction. We started by mapping their current processes to the scrum methodology. This helped us make suggestions to adapt it to the principles of Agile. We also recommended applying some more Agile principles like:

• Doing a daily standup centered around the project, where everyone can say what they did yesterday, what their plan is for today, and if there are any blocking issues. 
• Working in sprints: divide the work and follow up on the work in biweekly iterations. Every two weeks, they should meet and select the tasks to execute and plan for the two weeks to come (sprint planning meeting). At the same time look back on what has been done and what did not work well (sprint review meeting). 
• We mapped also this methodology to Teamwork, which they started using to manage their marketing activities in an agile way.

The proposition was well received and they began implementing quickly.

Challenges of the project

The biggest challenge that we encountered during this project was context-related. We are used to conducting technical projects remotely, however, for projects related to the methodology, we value the human touch. This is something that we had to overcome. We went onsite only two or three times during the marketing onboarding. The rest had to be done remotely. 

We also encountered structural challenges inherent to the bank. We interacted with many different stakeholders that had different opinions on the same topics. We did everything in our power to implement the solution that the marketing team needed and succeeded.

The takeaways for Bank J.Van Breda&C°

By listening to the needs of the bank, we implemented an inbound methodology, HubSpot, and an agile marketing methodology. Being a HubSpot Solutions Partner is not only about proposing a tool but even more about implementing a methodology. This is what we believe in and, thanks to that, we brought value to Bank J.Van Breda&C°.

Good support during our start with HubSpot
Elixir guided us through all the different steps in order to launch HubSpot. We had a lot of confidence in their approach and their experience.
Sarah Waegemans

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