THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING
CIOAdvisor Apac
×
CIO Advisor APAC Weekly Brief
Be first to read the latest tech news, Industry Leader's Insights, and CIO interviews of medium and large enterprises exclusively from CIO Advisor APAC
StraightArrow: Digital Marketers Create For The World
Haraya Del Rosario-Gust, CEOAs marketers rethink their approach to building their funnels and managing the variables that affect their flywheels, they have turned to digital platforms more and more. There’s a huge need to connect with customers and prospective customers online as the world “shelters in place” and many people either avoid travel or are just not able to. Thankfully, the majority of these people have established new online shopping routines that make them accessible to digital marketers more than ever before and it has become obvious that the pandemic has created new opportunities that may have actually more than replaced those that it has taken away.
Companies of all sizes are stepping up their digital marketing game. They are closing gaps in their conversion cycles and using marketing automation platforms to amplify and scale their efforts. Among SMEs, the Hubspot Marketing Automation Platform has grown in popularity and has become a favourite growth suite over the years.
Hubspot is a digital marketer’s dream machine in that it’s an IT platform built with the digital marketer in mind. It has methodically rooted out the technical complexity that has become the hallmark of other marketing automation platforms to allow any digital marketer to learn how to use it almost instinctively. It has also built an ecosystem of resources, partners, users and brand advocates - tribes, if you will - that make the level of support for Hubspot users both broad and deep.
It’s this ecosystem of Hubspot - a community that speaks the same inbound marketing language - that allows for the most strategic relationships to form and take advantage of all the traffic converging online. Creative designers are creating compelling and interactive assets, IT experts are developing apps to extend Hubspot’s capabilities into specific processes and niches, digital marketing strategists and think tanks are providing golden insight into customer behavior using hard data and a creative process outsourcing company, StraightArrow, is acting as the creative and digital marketing muscle for Hubspot users around the world.
As a tiered partner of Hubspot, StraightArrow has been assisting digital marketing agencies and corporate marketing teams in the US, the UK and Australia for many years. Haraya Del Rosario Gust, CEO of StraightArrow, explains the company’s role in the Hubspot ecosystem with an analogy, “Hubspot is a supercar, and corporate marketing teams and digital agencies are like determined, adventurous travellers who know exactly where to go but don’t necessarily know how to, or want to, drive the supercar they own. In this scene, StraightArrow is the supercar driver. Our clients can absolutely and quite easily learn how to drive their supercars but they have more valuable things to do so they tell us where to go, clarify their marketing vision and plans, and we drive Hubspot for them.”
How it all started?
StraightArrow was established in 2010 as a dedicated creative studio for a specific US brand that needed to penetrate the Philippine market. After winning a couple of local and international awards for effective communication, it started getting projects from other clients.
Our Tagline “Create For The World” Is All About Helping Our Clients Realize Their Strategic Goals By Executing These Strategies For Them
“We just fell in love with Hubspot. Hubspot allowed us to build our marketing flywheel!” shares Haraya.
StraightArrow began using HubSpot in 2013 to connect with like-minded digital marketers within their target markets from their offices in the Philippines. With the help of Hubspot, it organically grew from a team of 2 designers in 2010 to 250 creatives in early 2020.
“After experiencing Hubspot’s magic, we became raving fans and decided to help other companies use Hubspot to assist them in building their businesses. Since then, we have been developing processes and workflows to help corporate marketing teams and digital agencies automate their marketing on Hubspot,” adds Haraya.
An Extension of your Business!
Today, customer experience data is widely and immediately available to marketing strategists, helping them create and recreate strategies that are significantly more effective. However, this real-time access to data is a double-edged sword. Data is driving strategies to constantly evolve, creating three major challenges for digital marketers: capacity gaps in in-house teams, inconsistencies in branding from working with multiple 3rd party teams diluting brand equity, and cost inefficiencies from filling-in capacity gaps with solutions from multiple sources. StraightArrow addresses these challenges by providing its clients with creative and digital marketing skills across a broad range of specializations, delivering support through a process-oriented approach to ensure consistency and scalability, and effectively functioning as its clients’ brands “checkpoint”. It is structured to make creative skills available across a broad range of disciplines - design, creative technology, digital marketing, data processing and analytics - to fill the gaps in their clients’ capabilities, helping them set-up and run their marketing processes across various marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot.
“Our tagline “Create for the World” is all about helping our clients realize their strategic goals by executing these strategies for them. So if our clients have a great design idea, we can do the actual design for them. If they have a digital marketing campaign they’d like to run on Hubspot, we can run the campaign for them,” explains Haraya.
The company’s most successful and most valuable relationships are with corporate marketing teams and digital agencies that have a deep understanding of their markets and are able to develop strong marketing strategies but need a reliable, flexible and scalable resource for executing these strategies. Put simply, StraightArrow’s top-notch creative and digital marketing teams function as an extension of its clients’ own teams, acting as their creative muscle. The result of its partnership with the right clients is brand integrity, economies of scale, and almost unlimited creative capacity.
Driving Results with a Client-Driven Approach
One of the main reasons why StraightArrow is the partner of choice for many digital marketers is because of its focus on “jobs-to-be-done”. “We have designed our services and business models around helping clients get their jobs done,” says Haraya.
The company strongly believes in the philosophy of late Prof. Clay Christensen: Clients don’t buy products or services. They “hire” products or services to get their jobs done. With this in mind, StraightArrow always asks themselves two questions while engaging with clients: What are our clients trying to do? How can we help them get these jobs done better, faster, more cost-efficiently?
This client-centricity - its focus on what clients are trying to get done - is StraightArrow’s true north. At the end of the day, as an outsourced provider, the company’s success is tied to the success of its clients.
Take Imagine Homes Management as an example. Imagine Homes Management is a real estate company that helps home sellers and renters win with the best real estate experience: a fast and painless way to sell a home and a home rental that feels like home ownership. They had a compelling mission that they were focused on achieving with a lean team.
The company started engaging StraightArrow in early 2018 to help with social media tasks such as posting ads on Facebook and responding to inbound leads. As their business grew and their need for marketing support increased, they leveraged StraightArrow more and more. The management team at Imagine Homes worked closely with StraightArrow to define objectives, priorities and workflows. Over time, processes flowed seamlessly across the 2 companies and enough team members from StraightArrow began supporting Imagine Homes that a team dedicated to supporting the company was formed organically. This team is now composed of a core of 5 dedicated creatives and digital marketers, and project-based support throughout the year.
In 2020, with most of Imagine Homes Management’s marketing processes documented and with lead generation campaigns pilot-tested and proven successful, the company migrated its marketing processes to Hubspot. Borrowing a quote from Issy Sharp, founder of the Four Seasons Hotels, they are now able to “Systemize the predictable…” so they can continue to “... Humanize the exceptional.”
Another example of how companies leverage StraightArrow to get their jobs done is the case of GrainPro, a leading global company that aims to contribute to reducing world hunger and poverty. The company develops drying, storage and transport solutions that help reduce food losses and improve food quality without the use of chemicals.
GrainPro needed help in sharing their story with the right audiences. They had a clear go-to-market strategy using content pillars to communicate their message. StraightArrow translated this go-to-market strategy into an inbound marketing strategy, working with GrainPro to prioritize mission-critical tasks that needed to be done in the 1st 90 days.
With the end goal of marketing automation in mind, StraightArrow built GrainPro’s launchpad website in 2018. Adapting Growth-Driven Design, GrainPro’s team at StraightArrow started optimizing each phase of the inbound marketing process: attract, convert, close and delight. In less than 6 months, the number of sessions on GrainPro’s website increased by almost 150% and the number of users increased by 300%.
With many successful case studies such as these and an ever-growing base of referenceable clients around the world, StraightArrow has carved a strong presence in both the digital marketing and outsourcing industries. For digital marketers in corporate marketing, digital agencies and SME’s who have needed to focus their precious time and energy on strategy and customer experience, StraightArrow has been a blessing. With a partner like StraightArrow, organizations gain an enabling experience that provides reliable and flexible - almost “burstable” creative capacity. All-in-all, when companies wish to maximize the return on their investment in their marketing to achieve the best possible results, engaging StraightArrow makes so much strategic sense.
This client-centricity - its focus on what clients are trying to get done - is StraightArrow’s true north. At the end of the day, as an outsourced provider, the company’s success is tied to the success of its clients.
Take Imagine Homes Management as an example. Imagine Homes Management is a real estate company that helps home sellers and renters win with the best real estate experience: a fast and painless way to sell a home and a home rental that feels like home ownership. They had a compelling mission that they were focused on achieving with a lean team.
The company started engaging StraightArrow in early 2018 to help with social media tasks such as posting ads on Facebook and responding to inbound leads. As their business grew and their need for marketing support increased, they leveraged StraightArrow more and more. The management team at Imagine Homes worked closely with StraightArrow to define objectives, priorities and workflows. Over time, processes flowed seamlessly across the 2 companies and enough team members from StraightArrow began supporting Imagine Homes that a team dedicated to supporting the company was formed organically. This team is now composed of a core of 5 dedicated creatives and digital marketers, and project-based support throughout the year.
In 2020, with most of Imagine Homes Management’s marketing processes documented and with lead generation campaigns pilot-tested and proven successful, the company migrated its marketing processes to Hubspot. Borrowing a quote from Issy Sharp, founder of the Four Seasons Hotels, they are now able to “Systemize the predictable…” so they can continue to “... Humanize the exceptional.”
Another example of how companies leverage StraightArrow to get their jobs done is the case of GrainPro, a leading global company that aims to contribute to reducing world hunger and poverty. The company develops drying, storage and transport solutions that help reduce food losses and improve food quality without the use of chemicals.
GrainPro needed help in sharing their story with the right audiences. They had a clear go-to-market strategy using content pillars to communicate their message. StraightArrow translated this go-to-market strategy into an inbound marketing strategy, working with GrainPro to prioritize mission-critical tasks that needed to be done in the 1st 90 days.
With the end goal of marketing automation in mind, StraightArrow built GrainPro’s launchpad website in 2018. Adapting Growth-Driven Design, GrainPro’s team at StraightArrow started optimizing each phase of the inbound marketing process: attract, convert, close and delight. In less than 6 months, the number of sessions on GrainPro’s website increased by almost 150% and the number of users increased by 300%.
With many successful case studies such as these and an ever-growing base of referenceable clients around the world, StraightArrow has carved a strong presence in both the digital marketing and outsourcing industries. For digital marketers in corporate marketing, digital agencies and SME’s who have needed to focus their precious time and energy on strategy and customer experience, StraightArrow has been a blessing. With a partner like StraightArrow, organizations gain an enabling experience that provides reliable and flexible - almost “burstable” creative capacity. All-in-all, when companies wish to maximize the return on their investment in their marketing to achieve the best possible results, engaging StraightArrow makes so much strategic sense.
Follow StraightArrow on :