# Salween Group

> B2B Content Marketing

### Solution Spotlight: GTM Sprint for Startups

There comes a time in every startup’s journey when they need to dress to impress.&nbsp;


Preparing to raise a Series A round or working toward Series B is about more than just finding product-market fit.


It is also about the perception of your company.&nbsp;You need to punch above your weight.


The Solution Spotlight series highlights some of the bundled solutions we've developed over the years to address specific pain points that face B2B marketers.


Can I trust this company to deliver? Are they legitimate? Will I get fired if I choose their solution? Will I get promoted? Are they a good investment? &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


This is where branding and positioning can help, but the traditional agency "branding" process for later-stage companies can be a massive distraction, and the requirement often comes at a time when it’s the last thing on a Founder’s mind.&nbsp;


The solution? A 90-day go-to-market "sprint" with a team of experts designed to take your brand to the next level and enable your sales teams to close more deals.


How it Works


We go “deep in the weeds” with the Founders and the sales and product teams to nail your latest positioning, clean up your visual identity, website, and social channels, and create and curate buyer enablement content to make sales easier.&nbsp;


A very moving moment in my professional life was when an investor called the work we did with one of his portfolio companies "transformational." That really speaks to our core values of making a difference.— David McKaige, Director of Operations


The goal? To help your startup punch above its weight with a consistent brand visual identity, a simple but well-designed website that speaks to your ICP, an updated LinkedIn profile, and content your prospects will actually find useful along the buyer journey.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


At the same time, our revenue operations team dives deep into your sales process, pipeline, and measurement metrics to ensure your leadership team and investors have the visibility they need to make smart decisions, and that your sales team has repeatable and scalable processes to follow.&nbsp;


All for an investment starting from US$45,500.      


The Process


We start the process with a high-level audit of your brand, your customers and competition, and your existing collaterals and infrastructure.&nbsp;


That allows us to scope a proposal specific to where you are on your brand journey.&nbsp;


We then deep-dive with the Founders and customer-facing teams to distil the essence of your positioning and look at the evolution of your target audience from Early Customer Profile (ECP) to Ideal Customer Profile.&nbsp;


Typical deliverables can include;&nbsp;


Visual Brand Identity Refresh. Some startups nail brand identity from Day 1 with a logo they can live with and defined brand colours and fonts. Some got their logo on Fiverr. Almost all need a visual cleanup. This is not a rebranding exercise but instead refines your existing visual identity to engender trust through consistent brand application.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Website Refresh. Your website is your most important marketing asset. Clean design and clear copy that speaks to your customer is the goal. This process puts the website in the hands of marketing and sales operations, ready for agile iteration.


Social Profile Refresh. LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B marketing and recruiting. Your Company page profile and Founder's page profile will reflect your updated positioning.&nbsp;


Buyer Enablement Content. Content and copy on your website that helps buyers through informative and prescriptive information. This is lower funnel, closer-to-revenue content.&nbsp;


Sales Enablement Content. The on-brand decks and brochures your sales team needs to do their job and educate prospects on the benefits of your solution.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Revenue Operations Audit. We will look at what resources you have in your marketing and sales operations toolkit and what processes you have to support your growth. We'll make recommendations based on our experience working with revenue teams at venture-funded firms from Seed to Series D and beyond.&nbsp;&nbsp;


What You Get


At the end of the GTM Sprint you will have:&nbsp;


A refreshed visual identity that gives you a consistent look-and-feel across all your touchpoints, from your website to your business cards to your email signatures to your sales decks.&nbsp;


A website that works for you with clear copy and strong positioning, tied to a simple but effective tech stack that enables smarter marketing and sales through data.&nbsp;


A GTM plan that looks at the next steps across specific channels and assigns responsibility.&nbsp;


A revenue operations implementation plan designed to help you scale from spreadsheets to a CRM or help you optimise your CRM and marketing automation platform for growth.&nbsp;


Having stage-appropriate marketing and revenue operations support is crucial for startups. Our "sprint" style approach provides specific, measurable actions relevant to your business in a timely manner.


It's the SMART approach when your business is not ready for full-time hires or when your marketing or sales leads need some extra help.    


Are you ready to level up your startup for your next wave of customers or your next funding round? Apply for a call to see if we can help.&nbsp;

### The Marketing MVP: Minimum Viable Marketing Plan for Startup B2B Companies

Having a stage-appropriate marketing function is a critical success factor for startup companies.


This article is born from our experience working with companies from pre-Seed to Series D. By sharing what we have learned through the years, we hope we can save both Founders and the solo marketers at startups and scale-ups from some of the pain, and in turn help to bring their innovations to market.


Pre-Series A, founder-led marketing and sales is not uncommon, a process which typically involves managing the occasional contractor or freelancer for specialty skills such as design and copywriting.


From Series A to B, or as you move from startup to scale-up, you will likely need some full-time help. That can come in the form of headcount, a consultant, or an agency with a fractional marketing lead.


In all of these cases, there are clear, foundational items that need to be in place to succeed as a brand. These are “table stakes” things that can go unnoticed if implemented properly. Implemented poorly or not at all, they will be very noticeable and can even negatively impact your growth.


This "Foundational Marketing" does not have to break the bank, but it does require some purposed action and rigorous thinking.


Table of Contents


Branding


Website


Sales Decks and Slide Templates


Social Media


Revenue Operations and Analytics


Content Operations


Your First Marketing Hire


Branding


Branding and brand visual identity are a fundamental part of company growth at all stages. A consistent brand look and feel engenders trust.


How do you go about it? You could spend six figures and a year of your time with a brand consultant to come up with a killer brand identity and a 40-page set of brand guidelines.


Don’t.


By the Seed stage you are likely to already have a logo, and if you hired someone to create that for you, you hopefully have a basic visual brand guide as well.


As a startup you need to be comfortable with “good enough”. And unless there is something seriously wrong with your brand visual identity, we normally suggest you stick with it until you reach your Series B round.


But that does not mean you don’t need a graphic designer to tweak it.


At a minimum, you will need both horizontal and vertical versions of your logo in colour and monochrome (positive and negative) rendered in the most widely used formats (PNG, JPEG, SVG). Every graphic designer out there will know what this is and be able to supply it to you.&nbsp;


In addition, you will want to ensure you have the master Adobe Illustrator or EPS files for those logos.


Ideally, your logo designer should also have provided a primary and secondary colour palate, and font usage guidelines. If they haven’t, now is the time to get that together.


Pro Tip: If you are standardising your font usage for the first time, we suggest using free fonts such as Google fonts. There are some great paid fonts from the various font foundries out there, but startups shouldn't be burdened with the operational overhead of using paid fonts.


Those elements are used to create a simple two- or three-page visual brand guide that should be adhered to for everything – from your website to name cards to PowerPoint decks.


Minimum Viable Visual Identity Checklist:


Logo. Vertical and horizontal, colour and monochrome, favicon. Make sure you have the original artwork available as Adobe Illustrator or EPS files.


Colour Palette. Primary and secondary colour palette with the colour hex codes at a minimum, hex, RGB, and CMYK codes are a bonus.


Typography. Primary and secondary fonts and usage notes for headers (H1-H4) and body.


As you iterate your visual brand guide will evolve to include iconography and photography guidelines, and include things related to your brand identity such as a more refined vision/mission statement and brand voice and tone guidelines.


Some like to include buyer personas and ICP definitions in their brand guide. At Salween Group we define ICPs as companies (firmographic data) and personas as people at those companies (demographic data, buying role).     


Your brand guide needs to be shared so it can be followed by all. Create a read-only shared folder on your network drive called “Brand Assets” and keep those assets there. Share them internally and with vendors as required.


We’ve said it earlier, but we’ll say it again for the people at the back: a consistent brand look-and-feel engenders trust.


A consistent brand look-and-feel engenders trust. It is the most simple and cost-effective step you can take for your brand 


We’ve been at trade shows where three people from the same company have different name card designs.


We’ve seen websites that incorporate more colours than a fruit salad and the font usage looks like a ransom letter from a bad ‘50s crime show.


And we’ve seen more cringe-worthy sales decks than a human should be forced to bear in a lifetime.


Don’t be that brand.


Website


Your website is your most valuable salesperson. It works 24/7/365 and never complains about your bonus package.


Buyers will spend nearly 80% of their journey doing online and offline research before they reach out to you, so your website needs to be a discoverable repository of information that educates and informs.


The tech behind your website matters. For a pre-Series A, we suggest a simple, managed website builder like Squarespace. It is cheap, secure enough if you use 2FA, hosting is taken care of, and there are plenty of templates and integrations to keep you busy. What’s more, it is easy to grasp for beginners.


You will likely need a good copywriter to turn your vision into something understandable, but remember your website and your positioning will be an ongoing work in progress for a while. It doesn’t need to be perfect from the outset. The copy needs to be good and reflect who you are and what problem you solve today, but it will change as you get feedback from the market.


Positioning is a massive and important subject which we won't get into here. The takeaway should be that you need to be in a position to iterate your website design and copy quickly as you hone your positioning based on market feedback. 


Pro Tip: If you are a B2B tech company, you might be tempted to have your IT guys build a site in-house.


Don’t.


If they have the capacity, you have too many staff in IT, and when you ramp up your marketing and need to update your site regularly, they will not have the resources to support you at the speed you need to keep up with the market.


We’ve seen some very clever IT teams do very silly things on brand websites. This can easily cripple marketing’s ability to get what they need out of it.


We’ve seen some very clever IT teams do very silly things on brand websites. This can easily cripple marketing’s ability to get what they need out of it.


Don’t be that brand.


From Series A onwards, we suggest building your website on WordPress, the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS). It integrates with everything, has a massive pool of users and developers to provide support, and allows you to break away from the “templated” look of Squarespace and stand out with proper design.


Pro Tip: You may have come across Drupal and Joomla. What about those? Just say no. They were the darlings of the previous generation of enterprise IT departments, but today, the lack of users and developers of those platforms will add unnecessary cost and complexity.


But what about the HubSpot CMS? Aren’t you guys a HubSpot Solutions Partner? We are indeed, but our primary mission is to help our clients go to market better, not sell software.


We do not recommend using the HubSpot CMS for your website due to its limited pool of developers and inherent vendor lock-in.&nbsp;


We love, recommend and support the likes of HubSpot Sales Hub, Marketing Hub and Service Hub, but for your main brand website, use WordPress.


Moving on. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


As the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress is also popular with the hacking community. That has been the pushback from some IT departments, but like all online services those risks can be mitigated. To keep your site safe, we recommend:


Hosting with a reliable managed WordPress hosting service such as Pressidium or WP Engine.


Paying for monthly maintenance. For a few hundred dollars per month, you can subscribe to a WordPress maintenance service that will manage your plugin updates and generally look after your site. If we are not doing it for you, WPTangerine is good.


Monitor your uptime and get alerts with a free tool such as Better Stack. &nbsp;


Shameless Plug: Our Managed Web Services offering does all that and more. That service offer was born out of the fires of experience and takes the hassle of website design, development, copywriting, hosting and ongoing management off your plate.


The key takeaway here is that your website should be a source of revenue, not a source of pain.


The key takeaway here is that your website should be a source of revenue, not a source of pain.


Sales Decks and Slide Templates


In early-stage companies, the initial deliverables of the marketing function will be heavy on sales enablement content and content required for your go to market strategy.


The most basic is a well-designed and well-written sales deck along with the the resulting “template” that can be personalised or repurposed as needed.


The visual brand guidelines you created earlier come into play here.


Case studies and use cases are also handy in the sales process and are great for both presentations and the website. Regular conversations need to happen between marketing and sales to ensure sales has the collaterals it needs. Similarly, regular conversations between marketing and the customer success&nbsp;team on the post-sale process can help identify any messaging shortcomings and provide additional content ideas.


Social Media


In B2B, LinkedIn dominates as the social media channel. Facebook still has a role, particularly in some developing countries, but we are fans of looking good on LinkedIn and repurposing that content for Facebook.


You do not have to be on every social channel, and the general rule of thumb is to only be on the one or two where your users or potential customers will likely be.


For social, two things are involved:


Look the part. Get a digital designer to design your Company page banner and follow these guidelines on Company page optimisation. The Founder and senior team should use that same banner and make it available to employees in case they want to use it.


Post! This is harder and takes time. There needs to be regular posts on your Company page, and the Founder and senior team should be posting regularly to demonstrate thought leadership. Good content will be found by prospects who search for you on LinkedIn. And trust us, they will. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Managing the posting cadence (the rhythm of your content schedule) on LinkedIn, both for the Company page and the Founder’s profile page, is a common responsibility of the marketing function.


Revenue Operations and Analytics


For early-stage companies, capturing data on your customers and potential customers from Day 1 is essential and very easy to implement at little or no cost.


Things you need to set up include:


Google Tag Manager (GTM) on your website. It is a go-to, free tool for tracking user interactions and gathering data for analytics and marketing purposes. It will host all your tracking code and can be added without needing to make direct code changes.


Google Analytics (GA4). Install via GTM.


Install those as a minimum, as soon as possible with your website launch.


If you don’t have one already, start thinking about a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Companies of all sizes can benefit from keeping customer contacts and revenue forecasts all in one place.


Pro Tip: The contact forms on your website, landing pages, and even webinar registrations should all connect to your CRM, not to just an email address.&nbsp;


The CRM space is dominated by two players, Salesforce and HubSpot. There are others out there like Pipedrive, Monday, and Zoho CRM to name a few, but are yet to see a clear reason not to use one of the big two and benefit from the large installed base.


A large installed base means there will be good availability of mature third-party integrations, and people familiar with the tool be it contractors or sales staff. 


Salween Group is a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We haven’t always been, and for years we actually helped quite a few HubSpot customers migrate off the platform to other tools.


But what we learned over time is that it wasn’t the tool that was the problem, it was poor onboarding and post-onboarding support that led to limited tool adoption and eventual user frustration.


Churn is real, and it is a time suck.


We’ve since seen the light and ensure any client with whom we have a marketing or revenue operations mandate is given the ongoing support they need to be successful.


It is incredibly important.


For the uninitiated, HubSpot’s USP is that it unites sales, marketing, and customer success&nbsp;in one platform. That means all customer data is in one place on a unified code base, making operations and reporting a breeze.


Salesforce, on the other hand, is only sales process-focused. If you need a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), you would need to add their product, Pardot, or a third-party product like Marketo (enterprise) or ActiveCampaign (low- to mid-market)... or HubSpot!


Yes, HubSpot + Salesforce. It is becoming more common for sales orgs who insist on Salesforce to then use HubSpot as the MAP. There is very good integration between the two, and if your organisation follows the traditional marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sakes qualified lead (SQL) paradigm, that solution could work really well.


In short, Salesforce is an awesome tool, and we have some clients who use it with a MAP. But in general, we consider Salesforce to be an enterprise tool for large sales teams.


If you are looking for your first CRM, we’d suggest HubSpot’s Starter CRM Suite. At $360 a year for two users, it’s a steal.


As your grow your revenue and your team, you can add more starter seats or upgrade from the Starter Hubs to the Professional Hubs as required.


For example, upgrading from Marketing Hub Starter to Marketing Hub Pro gets you access to the social media tool, campaign-lever reporting, marketing automation, and other potentially useful features.


This means other third-party marketing tools would likely be unnecessary, and that Starter-to-Professional path through HubSpot is something we’ve seen often.


If you are pre-Series A, there is also the HubSpot for Startups programme. They offer 30%-90% off the subscription fees if you qualify, meaning you can get the Professional Hubs you need right out of the gate.


Shameless Plug: If you are thinking of getting HubSpot, let us help. Through the HubSpot Solutions Partner programme we might be able to save you some money, and us taking credit for the deal with HubSpot earns us the points we need to stay in the programme and enjoy access to partner training, beta releases, and other benefits.


We are not in the business of selling software, and are very transparent about that, but the HubSpot Solutions Partner programme has been very beneficial to our marketing operations professional development as individuals.


If you are able to get HubSpot through the HubSpot for Startups programme, you might even be eligible for the free version of our Onboarding Lite training. Follow that link to learn more.  &nbsp;&nbsp;


End of shameless plug.


Our GTM Sprint Solution


All the above might sound like a lot of work, and it is. But these requirements have come up so often over the years that we've bundled it all into a package we call GTM Sprint for Startups. 


It is a 90-day go-to-market “sprint” with a team of experts designed to take your brand to the next level and enable your sales teams to close more deals.


We go “deep in the weeds” with the Founders, sales and product teams to nail your latest positioning, clean up your visual identity, website, and social channels, and create and curate buyer enablement content to make sales easier.


You can read more about it and contact us any time to learn more about that or any of our "sprint" solutions.


Content Operations


The steps we have looked at so far have been foundational. You have laid the stones on which your brand can be built.


The path from Series A to Series B is in many ways the path from startup to scale-up. Roughly 65% of Series A-funded startups get Series B funding, so the odds are in your favour but you need to do everything you can to tip the scale.


Our house view is that B2B marketing is content marketing.


Our house view is that B2B marketing is content marketing. The modern buyer journey is marked by multiple stakeholders doing online and offline research, and by the time they are ready to talk to a brand they already have preconceptions.


A major role of marketing is to plan, produce and distribute content that educates and informs the user on the state of the domain, why your brand uses the approach it does, and the features and benefits of your solutions. Marketing’s job is to make sure this content, and therefore your brand, is readily available and discoverable.


Ramping up your content generation is a precursor to using paid media such as ads and boosted social posts to drive traffic to your website. It is also a precursor to earned media such as PR or public speaking.


A well-thought-out content strategy should be crafted and executed right after the foundational work is done.


Analytics on how that content is being consumed and driving revenue should be looked at monthly, and these analyses should inform a quarterly marketing strategy review.


This is also the stage where one can be tempted by the genie of generative AI to rattle out average content at scale.


That is as much a mistake today and it was three years ago when offshore “content farms” where churning out so-called SEO friendly blog articles for very low rates.


It added to the sea of noise that is the internet, and made many brands look mediocre and unoriginal.


The brands that succeeded with content then followed the same path as those that will succeed now:


Have a point of view.


Shared lived experiences.


That applies to your social media presence as well. &nbsp;&nbsp;


Your First Marketing Hire


Your first marketing hire should be a “generalist” growth marketer. Someone who can get down in the weeds and do things themselves.


A mistake we often see with startup hiring for marketing and sales roles is hiring from the enterprise space. The logic being since the startup is selling to the enterprise space, it needs a team from the enterprise space.


That thinking has been the primary source of pain for many companies we have worked with.


Why? The enterprise marketer has a support system in the form of a full marketing team, established product-market fit and brand positioning. They are also backed up by an operations team to make sense of all the marketing data and analytics.


At a pre-Series B startup, product-market fit is a work in progress, and your positioning and messaging is dynamic. The startup marketer needs to respond to changes in positioning, and if he or she is not copywriting that themselves, they need to recognise good copywriting from bad copywriting when they farm it out.


The startup marketer also needs to know good from bad design, and best practices for everything from pay per click campaign management to email list hygiene.


The enterprise marketer (or enterprise salesperson) likely had a very specific, siloed role and human capital and technical support to aid them in that role.


One of the first things they may try to do is build a team of marketing staff to support them. That should be a red flag unless your revenue supports it.


Where to Get Help


If you are looking for ideas or insights on how marketing should play a role in your startup, start by talking to your investors. They have a vested interest in seeing you succeed. As an agency, much of our work has come from VC firms in our portfolio asking us to help companies in their portfolio.


We’ve been brought in to assist with everything from a quick brand and revenue operations audit to providing a fractional CMO and marketing team.


Your investors probably have a similar relationship with an agency or two, and in some cases, VC firms have in-house marketers to work with their portfolio companies.


For online learning, we are fanboys (and fangirls) of Emily Kramer and her team over at MKT1. Her expertise is marketing for early-stage startups. Follow her on LinkedIn, sign up for their newsletter, and bask in the warmth of the knowledge they share.


There are a few other marketers who freely share their knowledge on LinkedIn, and we update a curated list weekly in our B2B Content Marketing Swap File. &nbsp;&nbsp;


Lastly, if you are going down the DIY route or have a single generalist marketer on your team, always be on the lookout for good contractors or freelancers in the following disciplines:


Graphic Designer. More “print” than digital, this person would create your logo, brand guidelines, brand collaterals such as business cards, letterheads, and things such as the pop-up banners you see at tradeshow booths.


Digital Designer. More “digital” than print. This person does designs for screens, be it social media designs for posts or personal and company pages, slide decks, infographics, etc.


Web Designer. Some digital designers do this, too. Websites, landing pages, and EDM template design that typically require design and HTML/CSS coding skills.


Copywriter. Good marketing copywriters are hard to find. These creatives can have a long conversation with a founder (and ideally some loyal customers) and distil that into a positioning statement and website copy.


Content Marketer. The person responsible for ensuring you have content (articles, white papers, case studies, social posts) that inform and educate your buyers and keep your brand top-of-mind in their journey.


Marketing Operations or Revenue Operations professional. As your sales and marketing teams grow, you need a dedicated operations person onboard to orchestrate the increasingly complex web of CRM and analytics tools.


Having on-demand access to those disciplines, be it in-house, through a trusted pool of freelancers and contractors, or via a boutique agency such as ours, gives you the support you need at the speed of the market.


If you are a Series A or later-stage B2B company and need some advice and how to orchestrate marketing, sales, and operations to grow your business, we’d be happy to chat.


I also welcome feedback from other marketers, Founders, or VC GPs who have something to share on startup marketing.


Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or through the Contact Us page.

### Solution Spotlight: Content Marketing Kickstarter

The modern B2B buyer journey involves multiple stakeholders, multiple touch points, and long buying cycles. In fact, most studies say that today's buyer has done the bulk of their research well before they raise a hand to speak to sales.


That’s why our house view is that B2B marketing is content marketing.


Your goal as a marketer, salesperson, or PMM is to enable the buyer in his journey.


But many brands struggle to find the time and the resources to create the content necessary to educate and inform their prospects, demonstrate thought leadership, earn their trust and grow their business.


We can help.


Rise Above the Noise&nbsp;


The answer isn’t churning out mediocre content at scale using offshore blog farms or worse, by using the AI tool of the week.


Today's B2B buyer is smarter than ever before, and has ungated access to an enormous amount of information. The old content marketing playbook simply doesn't work any more.  


Your goal as a marketer, salesperson, or PMM is to enable the buyer in his journey.


Your competitive advantage is the industry knowledge and experience inside the heads of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The people on the team who know your industry, understand your customers and stand behind your product have valuable insights that need to be shared.      


We make it easy for you to unlock that value and share your brand's insights by bundling our core content marketing consultancy with copywriting and design services in a package optimised for a 90-day sprint.  


We call it the Content Marketing Kickstarter.     


We bundle a discovery session with a basic content strategy and a three-month editorial calendar to kickstart your content marketing plan.&nbsp;


Our expert team will then ideate four to six stories based on that content strategy and arrange interviews with your SMEs to provide depth to the articles. Our graphic design team can also create on-point and on-brand infographics to complement the articles as needed, adding even more value to the content.


And just like that, you have the articles needed for your website to launch or to refresh that blog section you have overlooked for so long. 


The Three Step Process


We start with a discovery process that involves talking to your customer-facing teams, including sales and customer success, to determine what questions your prospects are asking. That could indicate gaps in your current marketing or sales content.&nbsp;


We also do a basic competitive and keyword analysis to inform the “MVP” content strategy complete with content pillars, cornerstone content ideas, and a content calendar looking out three months.&nbsp;


Strategy in hand, we produce four to six articles of up to 1,200 words with an image or graphic, and provide the copy for sharing the content on social media channels such as LinkedIn, improving the visibility of both your brand and your content.&nbsp; &nbsp;


Proven Outcomes


This smart package delivers SMART results; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Work is usually complete within 90 days.


One tech startup we work with saw positive results from our kickstarter program in only six months.


Sharing is Caring


We find that the brands most successful at content marketing have a strong brand story and, most importantly, a culture of helping and sharing their knowledge and expertise.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Sharing quality content to be helpful and educate is the new long game.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Our Content Marketing Kickstarter package is designed to help B2B brands of all sizes get started, today.

### Journalists: The Secret Weapon for Great Content Marketing

The internet is becoming increasingly saturated with content, intensifying the competition for visibility among key target audiences.


While brands are leveraging data, tools and algorithms to gain an edge, the core of what makes for a compelling brand story hasn’t changed, and quality content is still far more likely to perform well.


Our role involves crafting informative and engaging copy that educates B2B buyers. Brand stories are at the heart of B2B marketing, and journalists are incredibly well-placed to craft them.


“Transitioning from writing for newspapers, crafting magazines and branded content, and now managing cross-platform B2B digital content has confirmed my belief that storytelling is at the core of effective communication, no matter the platform,” comments Rod Mackenzie, Salween’s Content Director. &nbsp;


“It has underscored the importance of core journalistic skills: uncovering the essence of a story, understanding diverse audiences and weaving engaging narratives.”


Seven Reasons Why Journalists Make the Best Content Marketers 


Salween’s Content Studio applies journalistic principles to brand storytelling – we need to understand what it takes for a piece of content to tick off the who, what, when, why and how. The "how" is particularly important, and those with journalistic skills will have the know-how to create effective brand narratives.


Specifically, there are seven ways in which journalists make for powerful content marketing assets.


Experience Counts


Today, there are several ways to produce high volumes of content for a small cost. Content mills offer staggeringly economical rates and turnaround times that would make any seasoned journalist sweat. Quantity, however, does not lead to credibility.


In the B2B marketing world, content simply must be credible if brands want to be taken seriously. This requires experienced writers who understand your market – individuals who have honed their craft and know what it takes to cut above the noise.


Getting to the Crux of the Story


A good journalist will possess the ability to get to the heart of a story. When it comes to fashioning brand narratives, they will know which messages are likely to resonate with your target market’s pain points and needs.


Leaving No Stone Unturned


Journalists are trained to unpack complex information, scrutinise the details and analyse every angle. Good journalism is about providing authoritative answers to pertinent questions. But how do you know which queries will strike a chord with customers?


Asking questions is what journalists do. It is a key reason why they are highly effective at content planning and consulting on B2B marketing strategies.


Appealing to the Layperson


We work with highly qualified experts in the B2B world. Our clients know their solutions and sectors inside out because they live and breathe their brand every single day.


Tapping into that knowledge and using it for brand storytelling is what content marketing is all about. However, product development and sales teams often face challenges in effectively communicating their value proposition. All too often, executives become so product-focused that they leave customers feeling confused.


Journalists can solve this problem by helping to digest large volumes of complex information and translate it into content that is accessible to broad audiences.


Objective Analysis


Integrity is at the core of effective brand storytelling. Journalists understand that a story's credibility hinges on its ability to present facts in an unbiased manner.


While it's natural for brands to showcase their best qualities, skirting the truth to secure sales can ultimately undermine trust. Claims need to be backed by substantive evidence that can stand up to scrutiny – this has always been a fundamental pillar of sound journalism.


Helping Identify Blind Spots


Company owners, executives and marketers know their brands inside out. However, even those at the very core of a business may miss out on marketing opportunities.


This is where a journalist’s outsider perspective can pay dividends. Armed with a keen eye for identifying compelling narratives, journalists can spot opportunities which others may miss that can help elevate your brand story.


Being Adaptable


With that said, delivering a compelling narrative is not always plain sailing. Journalists often encounter obstacles – extracting insight from interviewees can be difficult, leads can dry up, and topics which have been assigned may appear too dry.


Top journalists are successful because of their ability to overcome these barriers. The best can navigate tough interview scenarios, draw on their resourcefulness to obtain new leads and leverage their creativity to pull interesting stories out of the most unlikely topics.


We Are Journalists at Heart


Salween has journalism in its DNA. Our founder and CEO, Sylvia Saw McKaige, is formally from CNBC and worked at the Bangkok Post during a media and communications career that has spanned almost two decades.


Meanwhile, our Director of Operations, David McKaige, covered breaking news for Reuters Television for more than a decade with datelines from Bosnia to Beijing.&nbsp;


Our confidence in crafting compelling stories is grounded in experience. We have worked on news desks, been at the frontline of storymaking, and understand what it takes to generate interest and debate around a topic or trend. We also know how to speak to a variety of readers, viewers and listeners through multiple communication channels – from technical experts to those with limited or no knowledge of a subject.


In a highly competitive B2B marketing landscape, leveraging journalistic expertise can provide you with a significant communications edge, enabling you to craft compelling, credible, and accessible narratives that position your brand as a trusted industry leader.


To discover more about how our approach to B2B marketing can empower your business, drop us a line.

### LinkedIn Ads Basics for B2B Marketers

As B2B buyers increasingly rely on digital channels for research and decision-making, LinkedIn has emerged as a powerhouse for connecting businesses with their target audience.


The social channel has nearly 1 billion active members, and with 4 out of 5 users driving business decisions, that makes LinkedIn prime real estate for B2B marketers and advertisers.


This article unpacks the nuances of the modern B2B buyer journey, sheds light on the potential within LinkedIn Ads and delivers practical insights for campaign setup and optimisation. Move beyond conventional lead generation and explore a comprehensive approach to advertising.


The B2B Buyer Journey


It’s no secret that the B2B buyer journeys of today are complex and involve multiple touchpoints and multiple stakeholders. To put that in perspective, here are some statistics:&nbsp;


According to Gartner’s B2B Buying Report, 27% of a B2B buyer’s time is spent researching independently online, 18% researching independently offline, and only 17% meeting with potential suppliers.&nbsp;


Gartner’s report further highlighted that B2B buyers engage in “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting the different stages in the buying journey more than once.&nbsp;


Demand Gen Report’s “2023 Content Preferences Survey” revealed that 71% of B2B buyers downloaded and consumed multiple assets to help with decision-making, also sharing such content with their team members.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Understanding the Total Market


We tell our clients to aim higher than traditional "lead generation" with LinkedIn ads. Why? Two key reasons:&nbsp;


In case you haven’t heard, the MQL (marketing qualified lead) is fast becoming obsolete. Gone are the days of measuring the value marketing brings based on the number of contacts they generate. Just because someone downloaded an eBook doesn't mean they are ready to talk to sales. MQLs also don’t account for the dark funnel, where the most important buying decisions are often made. There’s a growing shift towards “conversation-ready” lead nurturing, i.e. understanding all the members of the buying committee and knowing when and how to engage them.&nbsp;&nbsp;


The 95-5 rule suggests that at any given time, 95% of your target audience is not in-market for making a purchase decision, and only 5% of your total target market is in the buying cycle. This is where demand generation comes in. It’s a long-term, education-focused marketing strategy to engage your “out-of-market” buyers. By gaining the attention of potential customers and nurturing them over time, you are in a stronger position to command brand association when they do eventually enter the buying cycle.&nbsp;


Implementing a Full-funnel Approach


Once you’ve established the scope and dynamics of your total market on LinkedIn, it’s time to strategise how your ads can drive the desired outcomes across each stage of the buyer journey.&nbsp;


Top-of-funnel (awareness) stage


Arguably, this is one of the most critical stages, as this is often when initial impressions of your brand are formed.&nbsp;&nbsp;


What prospects are thinking: This is where potential customers are becoming increasingly aware of an unmet need or a problem they face. They are in the process of researching issues they face and haven’t yet grasped the exact solution that can fulfil their needs.&nbsp;


How you can engage them: This is your opportunity to show up early and engender trust through educational and informative content. Your content should address common pain points that prospects face.&nbsp;


Available LinkedIn Ads objectives: Awareness&nbsp;


Recommended LinkedIn Ads formats:&nbsp;


Video Ads: Video drives 5x more engagement on LinkedIn than other types of content. Using video ads, you can captivate your audience through rich storytelling that highlights their challenges and showcases how your brand is uniquely positioned to solve them.&nbsp;


Single Image Ads: As the name suggests, single image ads use a single graphic to convey a compelling message. We love this example from Gong that showcases a powerful stat to pique interest.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Thought Leader Ads: Thought leader ads are a lesser spoken-about format that involves sponsoring posts by your company’s thought leaders. According to LinkedIn, thought leader ads with an awareness objective have a 1.8x higher CTR (click-through rate) than single image ads.&nbsp;


Boosted posts: One of the more straightforward ways of promoting your content is boosting posts from your company page to reach a wider audience. The general best practice is to boost posts that are already performing well so you can increase your share of voice.&nbsp;


Middle-of-funnel (consideration) stage


At this stage, prospects may or may not have encountered your brand and are deep in the research phase.&nbsp;&nbsp;


What prospects are thinking: Prospects are now comparing different solutions and evaluating which one aligns best with their needs. They seek in-depth information and are open to engaging with brands that can help them make informed decisions.&nbsp;


How you can engage them: Here is where you can offer in-depth and insightful content such as whitepapers, case studies or insightful blog articles that showcase your brand’s expertise and offer an informed perspective related to the solution the prospect is seeking.&nbsp;


Available LinkedIn Ads objectives: Website visits, Engagement, Video views, Messaging&nbsp;


Recommended LinkedIn Ads formats:&nbsp;


Single Image Ads: Single image ads are one of the top-performing formats on LinkedIn, effectively catering to different objectives. At the consideration stage, single image ads can be a pivotal tool for drawing the audience's attention to your product or service’s key benefits.


Carousel Ads: Carousel ads are great for breaking up a longer message into bite-sized swipeable cards that tell an engaging story. Slack makes good use of the carousel format to communicate its unique selling points.


Text Ads: Despite their limitations in terms of real estate space, text ads are highly cost-efficient and can nicely complement your other richer ad formats by retargeting tightly defined pools of prospects based on what stage of the funnel they are in with concise message snippets to keep your brand top of mind.&nbsp;


Bottom-of-funnel (conversion) stage


At the bottom of the funnel, prospects are getting ready to decide and are actively seeking the best solution that meets their criteria.&nbsp;&nbsp;


What prospects are thinking: They are now evaluating the finer details – pricing, features and the overall value proposition. They may have additional concerns and need reassurance that the identified solution can address them.&nbsp;&nbsp;


How you can engage them: This is your opportunity to alleviate any concerns and nudge prospects in favour of your products or services. Blueprints, testimonials, or limited-time offers (if applicable) are all great ways to guide them towards making a purchase or requesting a demo.&nbsp;


Available LinkedIn Ads objectives: Lead generation, Website conversions&nbsp;


Recommended LinkedIn Ads formats:


Lead Gen single image ads: With native lead gen forms that have the option of auto-filling fields, you can also leverage LinkedIn’s single image ads for bottom-of-funnel activity. This Tealium example demonstrates how single image ads with an embedded CTA can effectively address potential challenges prospects may be thinking through as they near the purchase decision.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Conversation Ads: Conversation ads offer a highly tailored and interactive messaging experience with multiple pathways based on user responses for a dynamic exchange. This format is ideal to drive users to take specific actions such as content download, sign up for demos, event registration, etc.&nbsp;


To accurately track actions potential buyers take on your website after clicking on your ads, ensure you’ve configured Website Actions on LinkedIn, which you can use for future retargeting and gaining more granular insights on your ad performance.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Nailing your target market and ad formats is half the battle won; you also need breakthrough copy and creatives so that your ads resonate with the audience, especially considering that 80% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn ads in their marketing strategy. Here’s a quick checklist of must-haves for raising the bar for your LinkedIn ad creatives:&nbsp;


Succinct and thought-provoking introductory text (the caption) that prompts users to click or engage further.&nbsp;


Captivating, on-brand visuals that complement the text and evoke the desired emotion.&nbsp;&nbsp;


A clear and compelling call to action that guides users to the next steps.&nbsp;


Targeting More Precisely with Intent-based Data&nbsp;


Many different tools allow you to enrich your audience segmentation and targeting on LinkedIn. Here are some methods that we’ve tried and tested for our clients:&nbsp;


Website behaviour: With LinkedIn’s insight tag, you can match LinkedIn members who visited your website and retarget them or create lookalikes. It also unlocks more granular demographic data on these audiences, including job titles, seniority levels and company names.&nbsp;


CRM integrations: By connecting your CRM (e.g. HubSpot) to LinkedIn, you can directly push lists of your target accounts to LinkedIn and target them with relevant ads. These lists get automatically refreshed as you update any criteria, and you can pull the engagement data back in HubSpot to construct holistic profiles of prospects as they progress through the funnel.&nbsp;


Test, Measure and Optimise


As with other forms of performance marketing, it’s essential to run tests to compare different approaches, be it for audiences, objectives, formats, creatives or CTAs. Measure performance and establish an effective feedback loop between sales and marketing to understand what’s moving the needle on a business level. By adapting strategies based on data-driven insights, your LinkedIn ads can consistently resonate and drive meaningful engagement with your target audience.&nbsp;


Setting Up Your LinkedIn Ads Account&nbsp;


Whether you manage your LinkedIn ads yourself or have an agency help you, we always recommend that you own the ad account. It is your money paying for the ads, and the data they generate belongs to you, so it should belong to your company.


If you are ready to set up your own LinkedIn Ads account, we’ve compiled the key steps and links below for you to set it up:&nbsp;


Login to your personal LinkedIn account.&nbsp;


Click ‘For Business’ on the top bar and then click the ‘Advertise’ button. This will bring you to LinkedIn Campaign Manager.&nbsp;


Now you can create an account, choose your billing currency (you cannot change this later) and associate your ad account with your company LinkedIn page (you will need to be a Page admin to do this).&nbsp;


Your ad account will be on hold until you add a payment method under Account Settings &gt; Billing Centre.&nbsp;


The next step would be to configure LinkedIn Insight Tag. Here’s all you need to know about Insight Tag. Our recommended way to set up Insight Tag is via Google Tag Manager; follow the steps outlined here to use Google Tag Manager as your tag management system for LinkedIn.&nbsp;&nbsp;


With this, your basic ad account setup is done and you’re ready to unlock new opportunities with LinkedIn advertising.&nbsp;


Summary


A successful LinkedIn ad strategy aligned with the modern B2B buyer journey requires a nuanced approach. By understanding the stages of the journey, creating engaging content, leveraging precise targeting and continuously optimising your campaigns, you can position your brand as a valuable partner throughout the buyer's decision-making process. Ultimately, it’s still about connecting on a human level to build meaningful relationships.&nbsp;


Need help advertising on LinkedIn? We’d be happy to answer any other questions you have. Drop us a line.&nbsp;

### Email Deliverability in 2024: What You Need to Know

For B2B brands, email is second only to the website as their preferred content distribution channel. According to a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute, nearly 70% of B2B brands use newsletters or other types of email marketing to get their message out.&nbsp;


But those on the receiving end don't share the same enthusiasm. Gartner says B2B buyers and consumers feel overwhelmed by the volume of emails, and 67% set up junk email accounts to dodge unwanted emails.&nbsp;


Those “junk email accounts” tend to be Gmail, and that’s become a problem.&nbsp;


The recent news that Google and Yahoo are introducing new measures to reduce spam and unwanted messages by blocking suspect emails in transit has caused some concern not only in the marketing department, but also among sales teams who prospect through cold outreach.&nbsp;


What exactly are these new measures, and should you be concerned?&nbsp;


Google's Target is "Bulk Senders"&nbsp;


If you send more than 5,000 emails per day to personal Gmail accounts, Google considers you a bulk sender and, from Q1 2024, will be looking for you to:&nbsp;


Implement an email authentication protocol called DMARC. There is more on that below.&nbsp;


Keep your spam rate below 0.10%.&nbsp;


Have one-click unsubscribe for marketing messages and subscribed messages.&nbsp;


So, the actions your marketing or sales outreach teams take could make the difference between your normal emails getting through to your recipient’s inbox or landing in the junk folder at best or, at worst, blocked by Google altogether.&nbsp;


The upside? This change provides a perfect opportunity to reevaluate how your organisation uses email to market and prospect and ensure all players follow best practices.&nbsp;


In a recent blog post, Leandra Fishman, Chief Revenue Officer at sales intelligence tool Apollo.io, sums it up nicely.&nbsp;


“If you’re sitting there spinning out about these changes, I urge you to evaluate your messaging, positioning, and overall GTM strategy,” she said. “This update will not affect those who know their ideal customer profile, have nailed their messaging and have a refined GTM strategy in the same way it affects those who don’t.”&nbsp;


We will look at types of email, ways to implement what Google is asking for, and how to mitigate risk to your domain's email reputation.


If you’re sitting there spinning out about these changes, I urge you to evaluate your messaging, positioning, and overall GTM strategy. This update will not affect those who know their ideal customer profile, have nailed their messaging and have a refined GTM strategy in the same way it affects those who don’t.— Leandra Fishman, Chief Revenue Officer at apollo.io


Types of Email&nbsp;


There is no hard and fast definition, but in general, there are four types of email a company might send.&nbsp;


Corporate email. Your everyday emails to contacts you correspond with.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Transactional email. Emails you expect as part of a transaction, such as receipts, shipping notifications, and password reset requests.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Marketing email. Emails that you have opted in to receive from a company’s marketing department, such as newsletters, product updates, or special offers.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Sales Outreach email. “Cold” emails where a sales or business development representative thinks the recipient has a legitimate interest in being sent an email from your organisation.&nbsp;


If your business sends all those emails from the same domain, such as mycompany.com, you need to pay attention to these new changes, particularly if your marketing email list has thousands of contacts with personal Gmail accounts.&nbsp;


For many B2C brands, that is not uncommon, but we also see a lot of Gmail addresses on the mailing lists of some of the B2B and B2B2C brands we have audited recently.&nbsp;


You can stop those users at the door before they enter your database. Most form tools allow you to block free email addresses or, more politely, require a business email address.&nbsp;


HubSpot offers the option natively in its form tool, and our favourite alternative, Gravity Forms, has several plugins available that offer that functionality.&nbsp;


That may or may not work for your business, but it is worth consideration.&nbsp;


Be Authentic: Email Authentication 101&nbsp;&nbsp;


Google's new rules add a layer of sender authentication that most of the corporate world is unprepared for. It's called DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting &amp; Conformance), but to get there, we must work through two other acronyms: SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail).&nbsp;


Email authentication is a collection of techniques designed to provide verifiable information about the origin of emails.&nbsp;


The most basic authentication method is SPF. It is accomplished by publishing a TXT record on your DNS server and is designed to prevent email spoofing, a common technique used in phishing attacks and email spam. Your marketing operations or IT team should be able to set that up for you.&nbsp;


DKIM is a step up from SPF. DKIM uses a public/private key combination to validate the sender and the integrity of your email. The Internet Server Providers (ISPs) in the email’s path will know the mail they deliver is the same as the one you sent.&nbsp;


DKIM is also set up by adding a TXT record to your DNS records.&nbsp;


It is a best practice for all originations to have SPF and DKIM set up. Not sure if you do? Ask your marketing operations or IT team, or use an online tool like MX Toolbox to check.&nbsp;


DMARC is the nuclear option. DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, takes authentication a step further by defining how recipients should handle emails not verified by SPF or DKIM.&nbsp;


This means SPF and DKIM are prerequisites for setting it up. A DMARC policy is required if you meet the Bulk Sender definition.&nbsp;


A DMARC policy is also a TXT record you add to your DNS records.&nbsp;


There is a ton of information about email authentication available online, but HubSpot’s recently updated Knowledge Base article “Overview of email authentication” is probably the best place to start.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Best Practices to Avoid the Junk Folder&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


One scary statistic from a recent report by MarketingOps was that 30% of the companies surveyed don’t even know their spam rate, and 41% of companies that did are over Google’s recommended 0.1%.&nbsp;


Email marketing best practices are now more important than ever:&nbsp;&nbsp;


Never purchase or use third-party lists.&nbsp;


Only send marketing emails to opted-in contacts.&nbsp;


Use double opt-in.&nbsp;


Use an actual reply address, not "No-Reply".&nbsp;


Have your company name, physical address, and an unsubscribe button in the email footer&nbsp;


Practice list hygiene. Remove contacts that don't engage after a certain amount of time or emails sent.&nbsp;


Only sending emails to subscribed users is the best way to keep spam complaints down.&nbsp;


Sales outreach emails are a bit different. Those are usually cold emails where the user has yet to opt in to receive communications from your company.&nbsp;


And because you are sending emails to strangers, you have a much higher chance of the user marking your email as junk or, at worst, spam.&nbsp;


The simple solution is to only send cold outreach emails to recipients who are genuinely part of your target market and make them relevant and personal.&nbsp;


Whether you are a sales or marketing leader, you do not want to have to explain to your CEO why Google has blocked emails from your domain.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Alternative Email Domains&nbsp;


A common solution where email is a mission-critical part of your business is to use separate domains for the different types of email as a precautionary measure.&nbsp;


Most email marketers use this method because it lowers the risk of harming their primary domain’s reputation.&nbsp;


But be warned: not all agree with this tactic, and some would say using different domains is "spammy."&nbsp;


So how does it work?&nbsp;


Marketing might use a subdomain such as marketing.mycompany.com. That would mean that no matter how many newsletters sent by newsletters@marketing.mycompany.com were marked as spam, it should not affect the deliverability of emails from the mycompany.com domain.&nbsp;


The sales outreach team might consider using something like get.mycompany.com for emails, or if they had a problem creating subdomains for email (Office 365 has some limitations if your DNS records are hosted by Microsoft, for example), they could purchase getmycompany.com from their domain supplier of choice, and use that instead.&nbsp;


In both cases, you could create a redirect so that anyone typing marketing.mycompany.com or getmycompany.com would be directed to your website at mycompany.com.&nbsp;


Summary&nbsp;


Try to view the Google changes in a positive light. Marketers are being forced to reexamine their email marketing practices and procedures, which is good.&nbsp;


If you are below the bulk sender definition, at a minimum, you should:&nbsp;


Set up SPF and DKIM. Your marketing operations or IT team can help.&nbsp;


Set up Google's Postmaster Tools to monitor your spam rate.&nbsp;


Follow email marketing best practices.&nbsp;


For cold outreach emails, consider adding a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer to give the recipient an option to unsubscribe instead of marking your email as spam.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


If you are a Bulk Sender, you should do everything above and:&nbsp;


Set up DMARC.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Consider using subdomains or separate (but similar) top-level domains for email marketing and/or cold outreach.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Lastly, another option for sending transactional emails at scale is using an email service provider such as SendGrid. Brands such as Spotify and Airbnb use them and they have an excellent reputation for deliverability.&nbsp;


If you are a solo marketer or lead a small team and this all sounds way too complicated to manage, give us a shout. We’d be happy to help.&nbsp;

### Growing Smarter with Marketing-as-a-Service and a Fractional Marketing Team

The rise of fractional marketing has emerged as a hot topic within B2B startup and scaleup circles, thanks to the fundamental shifts in how we work in a post-pandemic world. Remote work is here to stay, and its widespread adoption has accelerated new business models – like Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) – that are turning the traditional agency model on its head. At the same time, an influx of expert-level B2B marketers in search of greater flexibility are pivoting out of in-house roles and embracing fractional work, which is transforming how growing companies source top talent and execute marketing strategies.


What is Marketing-as-a-Service and Fractional Marketing?


Marketing-as-a-Service is an emerging approach that provides companies with access to outsourced marketing resources with deep expertise on a subscription-based model. MaaS providers typically offer a range of on-demand services that can be tailored to your company’s needs, including marketing strategy and consulting, content creation, social media management, marketing operations and more.&nbsp;


Fractional marketers are highly skilled in their craft and typically come with many years of experience and a long history of driving results. Unlike an in-house marketer, with fractionals you only pay for the services you need or a portion of their time. Seasoned fractional marketing teams can often be sourced through a Marketing-as-a-Service provider, to deliver focused, specialised work with clearly defined outcomes.


Why Marketing-as-a-Service is Rising in Popularity


More companies are opting for a Marketing-as-a-Service model because it’s a more scalable and flexible way of using marketing resources to achieve business goals – providing leaders with access to both expertise and technology they may not have in-house on terms they can afford.


And in an economically turbulent time where marketing budgets and headcount are shrinking, but growth targets remain high, investing in MaaS can be a more cost-effective option over both traditional agencies and in-house marketers for a few key reasons:


Traditional agencies come with big price tags and complex billing structures.


If you’ve worked with a big agency before, you’ve likely found yourself in an expensive annual retainer or gone the project-based route, which means negotiating contracts for a specific scope of work every time you want to launch a new project or execute a campaign. On the other hand, employing a fractional marketing team through a Marketing-as-a-Service provider means you pay only for the services you need, avoid the agency overhead costs, and can easily scale up or down as your business needs change.


Hiring highly skilled in-house teams can be expensive and challenging.


As the breadth of B2B marketing skills needed to create and capture demand has soared in recent years, it’s no longer feasible to hire one full-time marketing generalist to do everything from creating a regular cadence of compelling content to managing your marketing operations and tech stack. And hiring a large team of specialists across a range of marketing disciplines is impractical for startups who don’t have the capital to bring multiple marketers in-house right away. Leveraging a fractional marketing team through a MaaS provider is a more accessible option for a growing company – making it easier to hire professionals with years of experience who can provide tremendous value from day one – without the need to build or pay for an in-house team.&nbsp;


Fractional Marketing Teams vs. Freelance Marketers: Which Option to Choose?


There will come a time for the majority of founders and C-level executives at early-stage startups where they realise if they want to see predictable revenue growth year over year, they will need to invest in marketing. The challenge for founders is that they often don’t have a lot of hands-on marketing experience. And without ample budget to hire an agency or an in-house team, many explore freelance options as they look to launch their marketing function.


While freelance marketers are a viable choice for augmenting your existing marketing efforts, like increasing your content production output, sifting through a myriad of profiles to find available, reliable talent from gig websites to create and fuel your content strategy can be frustrating. Plus, a major time investment is needed at the outset of the project from both parties: the freelancer needs to spend time understanding your niche, unique value proposition and brand voice, and you need to spend time managing them and the administrative tasks that come along with adding a new contractor to your roster, so it can take a while to gain momentum.


When it comes to choosing a partner that’s seasoned in both developing a comprehensive marketing plan from the ground up and executing on it, fractional marketing teams are a sound option.


When it comes to choosing a partner that’s seasoned in both developing a comprehensive marketing plan from the ground up and executing on it, fractional marketing teams are a sound option. Why? They typically have more experience working at the senior leadership level in companies than freelancers do, and can bring a wealth of strategic planning and knowledge to your organisation.


Martech is Getting More Costly and Complex to Manage


MAP. CRM. CMS. SEO. The number of different types of tools needed to execute the kind of marketing strategy that drives results is vast and continues to grow in size and intricacy. More than 60% of B2B marketers say their martech stack is too complex. For a budget-conscious, early-stage company, procuring and managing a sprawling tech stack isn’t ideal or sustainable. The benefit of partnering with a MaaS firm for a managed martech service is that your processes and technology are maintained by a fractional marketing team with specialised expertise, who will continuously optimise performance based on your program goals. This enables you to reduce the total cost of ownership, avoid lengthy software implementations and leave the critical data automation and system integration work to the technical experts – freeing you up to focus on other key areas of the business.


Navigating a Shifting B2B Landscape with Agile Marketing-as-a-Service


In a marketing landscape that’s rapidly evolving with technology innovations, changing B2B buyer behaviour, longer sales cycles and complex data protection regulations, it’s essential to stay on top of industry shifts and adapt quickly to keep growing. MaaS providers are performance-driven and agile, and if something isn’t working as expected or the next major algorithm drops, they can help you pivot quickly to stay ahead of the competition and mitigate risk to your business before it happens.


To learn more about Salween Group’s Marketing-as-a-Service offerings and how we can help you grow smarter through content-driven omnichannel marketing, connect with one of our marketing experts.

### Managing Employee Advocacy Programs on LinkedIn: B2B Edition

With an onslaught of algorithm changes and rising advertising costs – it’s become harder than ever to get in front of and grab the attention of your ideal customers on LinkedIn. A powerful way to amplify your reach and maximise your LinkedIn marketing efforts is to lean into an untapped resource: your people.Employee advocacy is one of the most effective yet overlooked ways to boost brand awareness, attract top talent and ultimately help drive demand for your products and services.


What is Employee Advocacy?


Employee advocacy is when employees actively promote the brand or company they work at – typically through social media.&nbsp;


In practice, this looks like employees sharing branded company content as well as their personal experiences working at your organisation on their social channels. Think posting your company’s latest research, product launch news, or employee-generated content like photos and recaps from company events that showcase your unique culture.&nbsp;


While there will always be a handful of engaged employees who will proactively share your content on their channels, the best way to leverage your employees and their networks consistently and at scale is to formalise the process by launching a LinkedIn employee advocacy program.&nbsp;


LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Benefits: Why It’s Worth Investing


Empowering your employees to share valuable content with their networks can benefit your company and your LinkedIn marketing strategy in a few key ways:


Increase reach and authentically engage your target audience


Algorithms typically prioritise organic posts from people rather than companies. Why? Because algorithms serve up content, the platform believes its users want to see and are most likely to engage with. Unfortunately for businesses, branded content doesn’t always fall into this category.As people tend to trust and engage with authentic posts from people more often than generic corporate content, when your employees do advocate for your company, it can not only boost your credibility but also expand your reach and improve your engagement. Data from LinkedIn shows that, on average, employee networks have 10 times more connections than Company Page followers. When employees share your content, there’s a good chance their connections may see and engage with it, amplifying your reach to a wider audience. Recent LinkedIn data also shows that employee posts can drive 2.5x more engagement than company posts.


On average, employee networks have 10 times more connections than Company Page followers— LinkedIn


Plus, if your sales team is practising social selling on LinkedIn, they’re likely already connected to a number of your active prospects and ideal customers, so empowering them to post regularly will help keep your brand top of mind. And before you can win that market share, you need to win mind share.&nbsp;


Demonstrate thought leadership


The value of thought leadership can’t be overstated, especially during challenging economic times. Edelman research shows that 55% of decision-makers say that during a downturn, it’s more important than ever for companies who don’t offer products that are deemed essential to produce high-quality thought leadership if they want to win their business.&nbsp;


Cutting through the noise on LinkedIn is tough. Original research, a unique point of view, and relevant content that solves your clients’ biggest challenges are essential to make your brand stand out in a crowded feed.


When your employees share your company’s thought leadership along with their commentary, it helps to build their personal brands and begins to establish them as trusted industry experts, too.


Improve talent attraction and employer brand&nbsp;


In a competitive market, a strong employer brand is essential to attracting and retaining top talent. When employees organically pull back the curtain and highlight why your company is a great place to work by showcasing the culture in action, it can complement your HR team’s recruitment efforts and aid in attracting candidates who align with your company’s mission and values.


Getting Your LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program Started


While the value of integrating employee advocacy into your LinkedIn marketing strategy is clear, getting your program off the ground can seem a bit daunting. To help you, we’re outlining some best practices for launching your program.&nbsp;


Optimise your LinkedIn company page


As you’ll be driving more traffic to your company’s page, consider auditing and optimising your presence on the platform before rolling out your LinkedIn employee advocacy strategy. A good place to start is by ensuring your page’s branding and profile details are up to date. For a deeper dive and best practices for creating a standout page, check out our article How to Optimise Your LinkedIn Company Page: B2B Edition.&nbsp;


Set program goals


After you have a solid company page in place, it’s time to document your program goals and how you’ll measure success. What are you looking to achieve? This will look different for every company, but common examples include:&nbsp;


Boost employer brand and build a diverse talent pipeline&nbsp;


Increase brand awareness and reach more of your target audience&nbsp;


Drive demand and generate more qualified leads&nbsp;


Identify key employee advocates


While it may be tempting to launch your program company-wide right off the bat, consider piloting your program first with a small group of engaged employees who are already active on LinkedIn. This group will be more likely to participate as they already recognise the value of social and can help refine your processes before rolling out to a wider group.


Provide training and clear guidelines


If you don’t have a social media policy in place, now’s the time to create one. Your company’s policy should provide clear guidelines for how the brand shows up on LinkedIn. A few things to cover:


The goals of your employee advocacy program


Direction on what to post vs. what not to post


Brand guidelines, including tips for tone of voice when writing on social&nbsp;


Best practices for sharing content on LinkedIn&nbsp;


Training on how to use tools, if you’re investing in employee advocacy software to scale your program&nbsp;


Curate compelling content and make it easy to share


Employees won’t consistently share if it’s not easy, so it’s up to you to make the barrier to entry as low as possible. Make posting simple for your people by sending regular internal communications that promote your LinkedIn employee advocacy program and provide toolkits with pre-written copy that’s on brand; include writing prompts employees can adjust for their own voice, and ready-to-go graphics.Or take it one step further and leverage LinkedIn’s Recommend to Employees feature to promote seamless sharing. Head to your Company Page admin view, click Recommend to Employees, and start writing your post. After you click the Recommend button, your employees can see the content you’ve curated for them by visiting the My Company tab on your page and seamlessly share it.


And by using LinkedIn’s employee advocacy analytics, you’ll be able to track the impact your recommendations are having on your advocacy program.


When curating content, consider what type of content employees would be most likely to post. A good starting place is educational resources that provide value and help solve a problem for your target audience and existing clients.


Reward participation


Once you’ve rolled out your program and the first few posts have hit the feed, it’s key to sustain momentum if you want to see your program flourish and your reach soar. Consider rewarding top advocates for their ongoing participation. This could include gift cards, company swag, or recognition at an all-hands meeting.&nbsp;


Measure and Optimise


After your program has been up and running for a few months, it’s time to see how you’re tracking towards those goals you set at launch. And you can report on some key metrics directly from LinkedIn. Using the Employee advocacy analytics functionality, Company Page admins can track the following, which can ladder up to your business and brand awareness goals:


The number of recommendations made, posts from recommendations, reactions and comments on posts, and reposts within a specific timeframe.


LinkedIn members reached, defined by the number of LinkedIn members who interacted with your employees’ posts according to their company, location, job function, seniority, and industry.


Recommendation engagement analytics that measures the quality of content recommended to employees, including impressions, reactions, comments and reposts.


Scaling Your Program With Technology


After initial success has been realised, you may want to take your program to the next level and implement an employee advocacy platform. These tools streamline and simplify advocacy activities like content distribution, turn advocacy into a friendly competition that drives engagement with gamification, and provide insights and metrics that go deeper than what’s available within LinkedIn itself. A few tools to consider when evaluating are Oktopost, Shield, and Inlytics.


Next Steps


Empowering your employees to share valuable, relevant content with their networks helps them build their personal brand while extending your reach and amplifying engagement. It’s a win-win for your company and your employees and a great complement to your always-on organic and paid LinkedIn marketing programs.&nbsp;


To learn more about LinkedIn employee advocacy programs or for help launching yours, see how our social media team can assist.&nbsp;

### The B2B Content Marketing Swipe File

We have an internal channel for sharing things spotted online that other team members might find helpful, educational, or inspirational as part of our ongoing quest for personal and professional growth.


LinkedIn posts are a big part of that. There are some B2B marketers on the platform who share truly useful information.


But it is social media, so there is also a lot of noise. To save our fellow marketers some time, here are some of the latest posts we've shared internally or found worth bookmarking. B2B UGC!


We'll be updating this regularly with public content from LinkedIn and other channels,  so feel free to bookmark this page. 


Are we missing anyone you think we should follow or feature? Let us know at contact at Salween Group dot com, and we'll take a look.

### How to Optimise Your LinkedIn Company Page: B2B Edition

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for businesses to reach their target audience, and it is a cornerstone of a strong, omnichannel online presence for B2B brands. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network and a hub for industry thought leaders and decision-makers with nearly a billion users as of this writing.


Regardless of your opinion of LinkedIn as a platform (and we've heard many!), LinkedIn company pages are seen by current and potential customers, employees and partners.&nbsp;


That means companies in the B2B space need to have an up-to-date LinkedIn company page that clearly showcases their brand and what they offer.&nbsp;


Optimising the page is a simple affair. Note: You must be a company page administrator to make these changes.&nbsp;


Start with a Strong Headline and Summary


The first impression your LinkedIn company page presents matters a lot. Your headline can make or break your chances of visitors reading what you have to say in your summary in the About section.&nbsp;


We are big fans of being clear over being clever in LinkedIn headlines — or any above-the-fold copy for that matter. Use relevant keywords and phrases your target audience will likely search for, and keep it brief and informative.&nbsp;


Here are some headlines we like:&nbsp;


2C2P: We are a full-suite payments platform trusted by global businesses.&nbsp;


Refine Labs: We innovate your revenue engine the way you innovate your product&nbsp;


6sense: 6sense Revenue AI™ reimagines the way revenue teams create, manage and convert pipeline into revenue.&nbsp;


HubSpot: The easy-to-use CRM to scale your business.&nbsp;


Here are a few that we believe tried to be a little too clever:&nbsp;


Gong: The Revenue Intelligence Platform.&nbsp;


Monday.com: The Work OS that gives everyone the power to build and improve the way their organisation runs.&nbsp;


For your company summary, the About &gt; Overview &gt; Description copy should match your website's positioning copy so you have a consistent online brand tone. You have up to 2,000 characters to play with.&nbsp;


The About &gt; Overview section also lets you add your website URL, information about your company, and up to 20 specialities. The more complete your entry is, the better.&nbsp;


About &gt; Locations lets you add the street addresses for all your locations or just your headquarters if you prefer.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Customise Your Cover Image and Company Logo&nbsp;


Your cover image and company logo are the eye candy that support your headline and summary.&nbsp;


The logo is, well, your logo. But the cover image can be nearly anything you want it to be. Effective options include a company-branded graphic, a picture of your company headquarters, or an industry-related photo or graphic.&nbsp;


The recommended image size for the cover is 1128x191pixels, and for the company logo it's 400x400 pixels. Image format must be PNG or JPG with a maximum file size of 3MB.&nbsp;


The logo is added via the Edit page &gt; Header &gt; Page info tab. You also have the option to add a custom button to your header at Header &gt; Buttons. We like “Visit Website.”&nbsp;


The cover image can be edited by clicking on the pencil icon on the left sidebar of your admin page. If you are planning to add text to the cover image, be careful — and experiment. The “title safe” area of the cover image varies not only across devices, but also depends on whether the user is logged in to the platform.&nbsp;


To give you an idea of the challenges involved, this article is an interesting read. It's a few years old, but still relevant.&nbsp;


That said, in B2B land the majority of your page visitors will be on desktop. That presents an opportunity that a few brands have leveraged by adding brand messaging or tactical campaign copy to cover banner.


Here 6sense is plugging an upcoming event.


Regularly Publish Content that Educates and Informs


Your LinkedIn publishing strategy should be a part of your holistic, omnichannel content marketing strategy. It should not live in a silo.&nbsp;


A well-optimised company page is not a ghost town — it's active and regularly offers content that's relevant to your audience. If you are pressed for time or short on ideas, our content team can help.&nbsp;


Monitor Your Metrics&nbsp;


LinkedIn's analytics tools allow you to track your page's performance, identify what's working and what's not, and then optimise your strategy accordingly.&nbsp;


When logged in as a page admin, the Analytics page provides you with:&nbsp;


Anonymised data on your company page visitors and their demographics such as job function, seniority and location


Page followers by LinkedIn profile name and demographics


Content engagement metrics


Competitor benchmarking by number of followers and content engagement


Employee advocacy metrics


The Competitors tab allows you to add up to 10 competitors and is a great way to see how your social media efforts compare to theirs.&nbsp;


Employee advocacy and engagement on LinkedIn is important. So important that we wrote an entire post on it. People follow other people more than they follow company pages on LinkedIn, so your team's active presence on the platform can greatly benefit the company. This article from LinkedIn shows how your company page can be used to curate and recommend content for your employees to reshare with their networks. 


Optimising your LinkedIn company page takes a little time and effort, but the rewards can be remarkable. Your LinkedIn company page should rank on the first page of search for your brand name, enhancing discoverability for current and potential customers and employees.&nbsp;

### Doing More With Less: The Art of Agile Marketing

Warren Buffet once said: "In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield". That sentiment has never been more true.


In today's rapidly changing world, adaptability is more crucial than ever. The economy is volatile, customer demands are ever-evolving, and technological advancements are reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace.


Gone are the days when a rigid annual plan could guide content marketing efforts, and developing a content marketing strategy that remains effective in the face of constant flux is a consistent challenge.


Many firms struggle when, locked into an annual marketing plan, they must pivot to face market realities. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and marketing leaders may need to quickly adjust their content strategy to address regulatory changes, product updates, new partnerships, or fresh funding rounds.


Imagine a world where you can swiftly react to shifts in priorities, capitalise on emerging trends, and maximise your marketing potential without having to ask for additional funds from your Chief Financial Officer. Picture the advantage gained from working with an agency partner who understands the delicate balance between budgetary constraints and the thirst for innovative content.


In this article, I will walk you through the advantages of Salween Group’s Content Credits system and outline why it offers our clients a better retainer model.


When marketers are being asked to do more with less, this can be a solution.


When marketers are being asked to do more with less, our Content Credits system can be a solution


What is the Content Credits System?


It is really hard to determine in Q4 that your next annual budget will need to include 10 blog articles, 104 LinkedIn posts, three white papers, four infographics, paid amplification on social media, and a search campaign.


But marketing leaders find themselves in that situation every year.


Our Content Credits system is a points-based retainer model that addresses the reality of fixed annual budgets while providing clients the flexibility to pivot and refocus on how they spend that budget. Instead of paying for a predetermined list of specific services or assets, clients purchase a certain number of Content Credits, which they can use to "buy" different services or assets as and when required. The monthly retainer fee stays the same, but the deliverables can vary.


For example, if marketing is seeing good traction with white papers, we can move some credits away from blog articles and social posts and produce more of them. Or, if after six months, their content-driven campaigns aren't generating the desired impact, we can easily switch the Content Credits to managed advertising spend for the rest of the year.


We assign each service or asset a specific number of Content Credits based on its complexity, time required to produce, or value provided. For example, writing a blog post might cost three points, while producing a 45-minute VLOG could cost 13 points.


Key Benefits of Content Credits


At Salween Group, we recognise that the key to content marketing success lies in adaptable solutions, not prepackaged, one-size-fits-all approaches. We also see that the traditional agency pricing model is broken. Our points-based Content Credits system fixes many of our clients’ pain points:


Cost Efficiency: Content Credits help eliminate unnecessary costs, giving clients greater control over budget allocation and ensuring they get the most value for their investment. Moreover, unlike the traditional retainer model, there’s no need to renegotiate a contract when priorities shift.


Flexibility and Scalability: Clients are never locked into a fixed set of services or deliverables at the start of the fiscal year. Instead, they allocate Content Credits to different tasks or projects and can adjust them at any time. This allows our clients to adapt their strategy and prioritise areas that require immediate attention during any particular month or quarter while adhering to a fixed budget.


Transparent Resource Allocation: With Content Credits, our clients have clear visibility into how their monthly budget is allocated and utilised. This transparency enables them to understand the services they are paying for and the value they receive in return. It also facilitates effective communication and collaboration between the client and Salween Group, as both parties can track progress, make adjustments, and optimise resource allocation based on the desired outcomes.


The ability to pivot and focus marketing spend on where it makes a difference empowers our clients in ways typical agency relationships can't— Sylvia McKaige


Going Forward with Confidence


Our system of Content Credits empowers founders, CMOs, and other marketing leaders to utilise our services as needed, freeing you from rigid plans that can quickly become obsolete. With us, you'll have the tools to pivot, adapt, and seize new opportunities, adjust your content marketing strategy in real time, and ensure a competitive edge.


To learn more about the system, how it has positively transformed some of our client relationships, and how it can benefit your business, reach out to me. I’d love to talk to you.

### From Startup to Scale-Up: How to Right-size Your Marketing 

We work with a few venture capital (VC) firms in Asia, helping them and their portfolio companies to achieve growth through marketing strategies and execution.&nbsp;


It is exciting to see these innovative B2B startups grow and flourish, and we thoroughly enjoy working alongside agile C-suite teams that like experimenting and trying new things in marketing.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


But the venture-funded space is incredibly dynamic, and founders face many challenges on their entrepreneurial journey. A theme often arises: how does marketing fit in with the growth plan, and when to spend money on it?&nbsp;


Those are important questions, and missteps can be costly.&nbsp;


We’ve seen some venture-funded startups squander their resources on misguided marketing endeavours, hire the wrong people at the wrong time in their growth cycle, and even add complex marketing technology that drained resources and alienated potential customers.&nbsp;


It can become a question of what marketing functions should be in-house versus what startups can outsource to freelancers, consultants, or an agency.&nbsp;


That’s the same question mature organisations face, but startups have a big caveat: they have limited money, limited people, and are still chasing the ever-elusive product-market fit. The target audience and the message might change in a heartbeat.&nbsp;&nbsp;


“The challenge in the early stage is that you can't separate product, sales and marketing,” says Thibaut Briere at Growth Marketing Studio.


The challenge in the early stage is that you can't separate product, sales and marketing— Thibaut Briere


Singapore-based Briere takes a hands-on, consultative approach, working specifically with early-stage B2B startups in Southeast Asia to give them direction in marketing strategy as well as processes in sales and marketing operations.&nbsp;


&nbsp;“The name of the game is to build a tight feedback loop between all these. The point is to build just the right level of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), not a product, then find early adopters and get their feedback. This is marketing to me.”&nbsp;


Joeri Gianotten is a partner at AccelerAsia Ventures, a Singapore-based VC firm that invests in early-stage B2B technology companies. “It's important to integrate marketing into the organisation from the outset,” he says.&nbsp;&nbsp;


“Initially, one of the founders or early employees may have to take on the responsibility (of marketing) in addition to their regular duties. Effective storytelling is crucial in securing funding and acquiring initial clients,” Gianotten adds.&nbsp;


But founders might not necessarily make the best marketing decisions.&nbsp;


“The challenge is that founders are either not aware of (brand and marketing) or worse, they think they are but actually aren’t,” Briere shares.&nbsp;


Marketing as an Investment Thesis&nbsp;


Over in the United States, Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich are former marketers at some very prominent tech firms. They now run a fund at MKT1 Capital with startup marketing at the centre of their investment thesis.&nbsp;


Their fund invests in startup companies where they believe exploiting a marketing advantage could lead to higher growth and better go-to-market (GTM) viability. To achieve that, they actively seek Limited Partners with marketing chops to value-add to their portfolio companies.&nbsp;


In an excellent newsletter post on this topic, they say that founders should look for that first full-time marketing hire once they find themselves managing more than one or two marketing contractors or agency relationships.&nbsp;


“Before cycling through contractor after contractor without an internal marketer to manage them, consider making a full-time hire—you might even save money. It’s simply too hard for early-stage founders to effectively manage a bunch of marketing contractors and agencies without having a single full-time marketer,” they advise.&nbsp;


Bootstrap Marketing


Although numerous tools are available for DIY marketing, focusing on a few key elements is crucial at the start, even if they may be revised or replaced within a year. Here we are assuming you already have a basic (if fluid) positioning statement. That in itself is worthy of another blog article (or book).&nbsp;


Brand Identity. You don’t need to drop six figures on your startup’s visual identity, but ensure you have a decent logo and a basic but complete set of brand guidelines. Hire a freelancer or a contractor for this. Anyone involved in graphic design down the road should follow those brand guidelines, from the printer making your name cards to your website developer to the guy designing a pop-up stand for a trade show booth.&nbsp;And your decks.


Visual consistency engenders trust.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Must-haves in your brand guidelines include:&nbsp;


Vertical and horizontal versions of your logo in colour and monochrome, plus a favicon. Ensure you get the Adobe Illustrator (Ai) or EPS files for the designs.&nbsp;


Your brand colours with RGB, HEX, and CMYK colour codes.&nbsp;


Your font usage details, ideally using free or open-source fonts. Save those paid fonts for the Series B brand refresh!&nbsp;


If you are more ambitious, you can integrate that basic brand guidelines document, your mission and positioning statements, and even a buyer persona into a more comprehensive brand style guide.  


Website. Go ahead and start with Squarespace to get your brand out there, following your brand guidelines. There are plenty of freelancers who can help if you need it.&nbsp;


Consider an upgrade to WordPress with your second or third round of funding, or if you are rebranding and ready for that website refresh.&nbsp;&nbsp;


WordPress is the world’s most popular tool for building sites, and it is what we use for all our clients. But there is a higher barrier to entry, and running a secure WordPress site takes resources like managed WordPress hosting.&nbsp;


CRM. Smart choices in what tech will unite your revenue operations and reporting must be made early. You don’t scale up using Google Sheets.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


There are lots to choose from here, but almost all businesses can benefit from a CRM that integrates marketing, sales, and customer success tools in a single platform.&nbsp;


For marketing that’s a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), the sales team needs pipeline and deal management, and customer success would typically need ticketing and self-directed help.&nbsp;


HubSpot does all of that well and has a low barrier to entry. They even have a HubSpot for Startups programme that gets you more for less if you meet specific criteria.&nbsp;


ActiveCampaign will work if you are really small and strapped for cash. It is more of a MAP with a basic CRM.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Salesforce might be the market leader in the sales CRM space, but you will need to integrate with other tools for marketing and customer success, so it is not our first choice for startups and scale-ups.&nbsp;


Ready to Hire? Hire Smart&nbsp;


What else can you do to “market” your startup before you hire a marketer? Network.&nbsp;


“Leverage, leverage, leverage. Leverage your big-name client, investor, and advisor,” says Rita Yang of GGV Capital.


Leverage, leverage, leverage. Leverage your big-name client, investor, and advisor— Rita Yang


And when you are ready, she stresses the critical nature of the relationship between the founders and the first marketing hire. “It’s going to sound cliché, but until you find that hire you’re comfortable with, don’t settle,” she adds.&nbsp;


And that hire needs to be domain-aware and work well with the team. “Build trust and align with the exec team. Spend time with your BD and sales, and co-create the marketing goal together with the exec team. The most common mistake I see marketing hires make is that they are eager to prove themselves with experience from a previous life, and they forget to take the time to contextualise,” Yang shares.&nbsp;


From what he has witnessed with AccelerAsia Ventures, Gianotten also sees that the relationship with the founders is key.&nbsp;


The marketer will “need to extract what’s in the founder’s brain, translate their thoughts and vision, and make it digestible and presentable so everyone will understand,” he says.&nbsp;


Regarding hiring a funding stage-appropriate candidate, Gianotten adds, “Consider hiring someone from a small firm or agency rather than someone with a corporate background. The marketing lead will likely have to start from scratch with a limited budget and, as part of a small team, needs to be someone who can deliver some core results such as (customer)-focused content, case studies, and blogs” to drive demand.


Consider hiring someone from a small firm or agency rather than someone with a corporate background— Joeri Gianotten


A Winning Strategy


The journey from startup to scale-up involves carefully considering when to bootstrap or handle your marketing on your own, when to seek outside help, and when to make new hires.&nbsp;&nbsp;


For that first hire, founders should seek individuals who align with the company's values, possess domain expertise, and can effectively collaborate with the team.&nbsp;


That first hire will likely be a generalist who can multitask and manage outside resources such as freelancers or small agencies as the startup grows and marketing needs to scale.&nbsp;


If you are a founder wondering how you can right-size marketing at your tech startup, feel free to drop us a line. We are happy to share our experiences and ideas.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

### Behind the Curtain — Our Martech Stack Revealed

As a marketing agency, we don't sell software, we sell solutions. But a big part of modern digital marketing involves software, and by extension making smart choices about which software tools you use.


I'll be honest, finding the best-of-breed software product for a specific task at hand is tedious and time-consuming. But the smart and cost-efficient use of marketing technology, or martech, is a big part of who we are as a company and the services we provide.


The guys over at the Chief Marketing Technologist blog have been keeping track through the years of just how big the marketing technology scene is. They say that in 2023, there were over 11,000 martech solutions out there. Growth in the space has been phenomenal, to put it mildly.


Let me share what software tools we are using right now, both internally and for our clients. Hopefully, this will save you some time, some money, and some pain.


WordPress


WordPress is a content management system (CMS), basically the software behind your website. We consider a brand's website to be its most important digital asset, so we'll discuss this first.


A CMS is used for websites that publish, well, content. That can be blogs, news, or a catalogue of widgets for sale online.


WordPress powers a third of all websites online today and commands a respectable 60% market share of the CMS space. It is such a big deal in what we do as an agency that I have written a separate article on it here.


Over the years, we've worked with Drupal, Joomla, and even Squarespace and Shopify. We have also worked with some pretty shocking legacy systems in place at some Fortune 500 companies. We've been through the pain, so you don't have to. Trust us. Go with WordPress.


We incorporate hosting in our Managed Web Services offering and host dozens of client sites at Pressidium, a dedicated WordPress hosting provider. If you run a WordPress website, working with a hosting provider that specialises in WordPress is a smart way to go. We also have good things to say about WP Engine and Pantheon.


We also use WordPress to create landing pages for our Managed Web Services clients, allowing them to launch targeted campaigns at the speed of marketing.


If we don't manage your site and you need landing pages for your campaigns, we can set up a subdomain such as go.yourbrand.com and publish landing pages via a WordPress instance there. That is a great solution for companies where access to the brand website is limited for compliance or security reasons (it happens), or whose brand websites are managed by teams that are not nimble enough to meet the modern marketer's needs. A subdomain specific to marketing is an answer.


HubSpot


After your website, tools that help you manage your relationship with visitors and turn them into customers come into play.


HubSpot is a done-for-you martech stack that addresses the requirements of marketing, sales, and customer success. For marketing, in particular, it is a veritable Swiss Army knife and is at the centre of much of what we do in content marketing and digital marketing.


It is what we use ourselves.


HubSpot also has landing page design, publishing and hosting, social media management, and ads management tools, among other things.


Native email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) allow you to track user engagement and automate tasks based on that information throughout the customer lifecycle.


Like all email marketing and marketing automation programmes, it relies on cookies.


Whenever a user submits a form or opens an email, a tracking cookie is placed on that user's device. From there on out, you can track that user's activities on your website and their interactions with your emails.


If a user has signed up for your e-newsletter of weekly cooking tips, for example, and subsequently visits the food processor page in your online shop say, three times in a week, you could serve a pop-up offering a limited-time discount on food processors, send the user an email on cooking tips with food processors, or serve an ad on food processors the next time that user is surfing Facebook or Instagram. Cool, right?


There is a fine line between being smart and being creepy, but most people have become accustomed to that targeted, personalised marketing, and some demographics even expect it.


Why does all this matter? It matters because you can use that all information to design better user journeys for potential customers and personalise your ongoing engagement with existing customers. That’s important stuff.


ActiveCampaign


ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and marketing automation tool with a basic CRM that works well in smaller businesses or an environment where sales and marketing are on different systems.


For example, Salesforce integrates tightly with ActiveCampaign, creating a powerful marketing suite for a fraction of the cost of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.


You could have rules and automations set up in ActiveCampaign that would filter and route leads to Salesforce as they progress through the buyer journey, from prospect to MQL to SQL, for example.


HubSpot also integrates well with Salesforce and is an option if you need a richer feature set than ActiveCampaign offers or if you want to replace a suite of marketing tools with an all-in-one solution.


We are a HubSpot Solutions Partner and ActiveCampaign Agency Partner, and work with our clients to get them the solution that best fits their needs.


Google Analytics and Search


Google Analytics and Google Search Console are tools that provide generic data about visitors to your website and landing pages, and how they found you. Those tools are part of the suite we use for search engine optimisation (SEO), an ongoing process to improve your visibility in organic search. More important stuff here. Being able to be easily found in search is a pillar of digital marketing.


For us, SEO involves both making sure your website is technically accessible to search engines and making sure the content on the site, be it static copy or articles, is search engine-friendly and answers users' needs. That is called on-page SEO.


Off-page SEO is the stuff that drives traffic to the site or drives awareness such as PR, social media, and people sharing links to the awesome content on your site.


Salween Group's content strategy team incorporates both on-page and off-page SEO as part of the strategy they ideate and manage across earned, owned, and paid channels.


Data is at the heart of digital marketing. By its very nature, digital marketing is measurable, and data is used to measure your campaigns' efficacy and optimise them. To make it easier to digest the multiple sources of data available, we run our client data dashboards on a white-labelled version of Agency Analytics. That is another example of where we've tried a few competing alternatives through the years (there are literally dozens of players in the data management and visualisation space) but picked the one that best suits our needs and clients' needs.


Asana


No martech stack would be complete without a project and task management tool. This is probably the software choice that haunts me the most at night (not really, but that sounds foreboding).


Your project management tool defines your workflows and how you interact with others in your organisation. By its very nature, it requires universal buy-in. Your whole team needs to adopt it and use it religiously.


What do we use? Asana.


For years we used CoSchedule, which is an incredibly awesome tool for marketers. I can't recommend it enough if all you are managing is an in-house marketing team for a single brand.


But our needs for internal and external collaboration outgrew what CoSchedule could offer at a competitive price point, and after a few months of research and trials, we went for Asana.


Project management software is another place where you're spoiled for choice, but once again, that magic "best price to features to the ease-of-use ratio" is what guides our choices. Asana ticked the boxes.


What else do we use? Here you go, in no particular order:


Agorapulse. Our social media management tool. A good feature set and granular permissions allow us to give seats to our clients where we co-manage their social channels. My only beef is that it doesn't play well with others. It's a very siloed tool.


SEMrush. This was originally brought in as an SEO and research tool, and those are still our primary uses for it. They have been adding features to the product to the point I'd almost call it bloatware. It is still useful, though.


Wistia. Video hosting. I have another&nbsp;article&nbsp;in the works about why you should not host your corporate videos on YouTube.&nbsp;Wistia&nbsp;and Vimeo are the alternatives we suggest. Vimeo is blocked in Indonesia,&nbsp;Wistia&nbsp;is not, so we use&nbsp;Wistia for our website (we do a lot of work for Indonesian clients) and suggest it for anyone who needs to be seen there.


Vimeo. Cheaper than Wistia. This is your best choice if you don't care about your videos being seen in Indonesia.


Similarweb. Online traffic data and competitive intelligence.


Muck Rack. A PR tool. Media monitoring, outreach, alerts, and reporting in a slick interface. Not cheap by any measure, but worth it if you are paid to do PR.


Grammarly. Multi-platform spell check. We are communicators, and we are humans that make mistakes. We've been subscribers since they were in beta. Love it.


Hotjar. Heatmaps and other tools to see how users&nbsp;interact with your website. We downgraded to the free plan and went for a paid version of Crazy Egg instead. More bang for the buck, IMHO.


Typeform. Multi-step forms and quizzes that integrate with HubSpot and ActiveCampaign.


Flockler. Social media walls. Allows you to aggregate social accounts and curate the content for embedding on websites or screens. Great price/feature ratio.


Adobe Creative Cloud. We are an Adobe CC shop, from Ps to Ai to&nbsp;Pr&nbsp;to Ae to Au. You&nbsp;have to&nbsp;be.&nbsp;It is what it is, and you pay for it. You pay A LOT for it.


vMix. Live video production and streaming. A software version of the hardware television studio. Not SaaS but an outright purchase. We use it for LinkedIn Live and Facebook Live.  


Riverside.fm. More of a video production tool, we use Riverside to prerecord podcasts and vlogs for later post-production.


Dealfront, formally known as Leadfeeder. This is a data enrichment tool we use with HubSpot to identify what companies are visiting our clients and our websites. It does what it says on the box.


Apollo.io. Sales intelligence and data enrichment. Plays nicely with HubSpot and LinkedIn.


Zapier. No-code glue that binds otherwise unconnected web apps with triggers and actions. Things like "send a message to a Slack channel when a sales enquiry form is submitted". Very useful tool.


I mentioned at the start that we don't sell software, we sell solutions. We are agency partners of a few of the products mentioned here, and we use those partnerships to get things like advanced training and access to new features. We are 100% transparent when we make our tech recommendations to clients, and if we get commissions through any of our partnerships, we pass those back as cost savings.


That's something we are proud of, being able to offer the right tools for the job, transparently and without bias.


Do you have a favourite tool you think would help us work smarter? Or want more details on our experiences with any of the software mentioned above? We are here to help. Drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you.

### Dark Social and the Myth of Attribution

LinkedIn marketing communities have been abuzz lately with renewed debate on an old topic, Dark Social.


Despite the sinister-sounding name, dark social is far from heinous.


Put simply, dark social is when people share links to your online content without any digital footprints or tracking codes, usually on private channels.


If you have ever had to look at a Google Analytics report, they call it "Direct" traffic. That is Google-speak for "we have no idea how those users got to your site". It is as if they typed your URL "direct" in their browser.


And this is where dark social can be a problem for marketing, particularly those pedantic about attribution. As a channel, it can play a major role in a conversion or sale, but by its very nature, that role is shrouded in darkness.


What Is Dark Social and Why Is It Important?


When you WhatsApp your bestie asking them what's the best taco joint in Singapore and they reply https://www.papis-tacos.com/, that's dark social.


When your work colleague forwards you a link via Slack to an interesting blog article, that's dark social.


These closed community channels look radically different now than they did 10 or even five years ago. Recent studies show that 84% of sharing is now happening over private channels instead of public ones like Facebook timelines or Twitter feeds. People have access to more platforms and tools to create, share, and exchange content – and that is what they are doing.


Source: RadiumOne


But how big a source of traffic is dark social?


Unlike some useful quantitative data we like to quote, such as average email open rates per industry, we have not seen benchmark data for how much direct traffic is too much. Still, we have heard that a minimum of 25% might not be unusual.


That's a quarter of your website traffic!


Here at salweengroup.com, around a third of our traffic is direct. Or so says Google Analytics, so it must be true.


[elementor-template id="42883"]


Source: Google Analytics


Dark Social and B2B Buyer Journey


Life as a marketer would be simple if the customer journey was always linear: someone is in the market looking for a product, they go online to search for options, your website comes up, then they click through to your site and buy your stuff.


But the B2B buyer journey is rarely that straightforward and is driven by multiple stakeholders, numerous touchpoints, and a lot of pre-purchase research.


Gartner has found that how B2B customers progress from one stage of their buying journey to the next is often unpredictable, inconsistent, and repetitive. Most of the buyer's time is spent in the middle of the funnel, researching, consulting online communities, reading blog articles, and getting consensus from their colleagues and peers.


Source: Gartner


In our article on B2B Growth Marketing, we shared that two-thirds of the B2B buyer journey is spent on self-directed research and education even before reaching out to a brand. As a brand, you need to create content to educate, inform and ideally influence the buyer along every step of their journey if you want to be considered.


The Myth of Attribution


A tenet of modern digital marketing is that everything can be measured. But that plays to the fallacy of "what gets measured gets managed".


Attribution is not an exact science, and there is a limit to how accurately you can calculate channel-level ROI.


We've seen clients obsess over lead attribution to prove marketing channel ROI, often wasting time and resources in search of data that is misleading or simply does not exist.


The idea that marketing spend should be biased towards channels that have the highest conversion rates has (thankfully!) been on the decline since Google dropped Last Click Attribution as the default measure.


We've seen clients obsess over lead attribution to prove marketing channel ROI, often wasting time and resources in search of data that is misleading or simply does not exist.


But even the more comprehensive concepts of Multi-Touch Attribution and Multi-Channel Funnels can be misleading in the context of dark social.


Dark social is dark social because you cannot track these channels with attribution software, be it Google Analytics or some excellent paid attribution tools like LeadsRX, Attribution, and Ruler Analytics.


Unlike Google Analytics, a free tool that analyses website visitor data anonymously, most paid attribution tools analyse contact data on a per-contact basis using cookies and integrating with your CRM, closing the loop between marketing data and sales data.


But such tools are out of financial or operational reach for most small businesses.


Shine a Light in the Dark


Instead of cursing the darkness, you can try a few things to get more information about how your content is being shared and how that content leads to revenue.


Here's one hack to see how much dark social sharing your blog content is getting. Head to Google Analytics (UA), Behaviour&gt;Site Content&gt;All Pages and use a filter for Source=(direct) on your blog pages. The results might surprise you.


In GA4, go to Reports&gt;Engagement&gt;Pages and screens.


View the Dimension where First source user includes (direct) by choosing Add comparison and building it. Then view your blog pages only (e.g. Search /blog).


You can also make it easier for users to share your content on private channels like WhatsApp by adding a WhatsApp share button along with the other social sharing buttons on your blog or article pages. Track those button clicks using UTM parameters or some code.


Another way businesses can start getting a sense of what's working is by talking to their leads and customers: How did you hear about us? You can put those questions on a Contact Us form or even better, make them a part of the sales conversation. Primary data like this is invaluable.


Awareness of dark social as an important revenue driver is the first step. To get your content shared and then attributing that to a sale demands much more work.


What can you do? Focus on providing valuable content for the buyer in that critical first two-thirds of their journey. B2B marketing is content marketing.

### Growth Marketing in B2B: Why it Matters

Marketing trends come and go, but there's one new strategy that's not only sticking around, it's rapidly gaining traction with businesses who are falling in love with its ability to engage with customers and generate revenue.


We're talking about B2B Growth Marketing, which was ranked the #2 marketing trend in 2020 before jumping into the #1 spot last year.


Before discussing what it is, let's explain what it is not. It isn't conventional marketing that stops at casting a wide net for 'likes' and smiley faces on social media. That "top of the funnel", awareness-only approach to marketing is very common and still very important, but as more businesses are finding out, these are empty calories that quickly leave them feeling hungry again – feeling hungry to prove marketing ROI.


B2B Growth Marketing takes a more thoughtful approach. It looks past the fizz of superficial attention and seeks deeper and long-lasting engagement that ultimately delivers more sales not only to new customers but also through retention and upsells to your existing ones.


This more impactful engagement throughout the customer and revenue lifecycle is becoming increasingly possible with the explosion of new marketing technology solutions and advanced data analysis that is transforming how companies find and retain customers.


Just as significantly, these new technologies are also transforming how customers expect to be reached. Today, we all want to be engaged with a more personalised experience.


B2B Growth Marketing is the hottest trend in marketing because it works. It helps bridge the marketing, sales and customer success functions, connecting businesses with new customers and turning these connections into relationships that generate significant long-term revenue.


It does that in part by having components of the marketing function at every step of the customer journey, from discovery to consideration to decision to delight.


Discovery


Back in the day, most marketing was an outward flow of information from the seller to the potential buyer.&nbsp; Companies sent up their flag and hoped people would bite, whether by cold-calling or placing ads on billboards.


But in the Internet Age, and especially during a pandemic that's triggered a permanent spike in online activity, marketing has undergone a massive shift from outbound to inbound.


Now it's the potential customer who is reaching out and initiating contact. They are self-directed and search-savvy, and they are out constantly scouring the Internet for ideas, products and suppliers. One study revealed that 71% of people are online looking for new products every single day.


Amid this flood of inbound attention, a business needs to ensure they can be discovered. And this means embracing an omnichannel strategy that creates as many opportunities to connect as possible.


By deploying a variety of touchpoints across owned, earned and paid channels for inbound marketing and coupling that with traditional outbound marketing, a business creates multiple runways to land potential customers.


A study by McKinsey found that some businesses are now using ten or more different channels, and these businesses are expanding market share at the expense of their peers.


Source


Brazil is among the world's leaders in omnichannel communication, with customers using an average of 11 channels. Who's bringing up the rear? That would be businesses in Japan and France who are finding it difficult to move on from traditional in-person meetings with their customers.


The Internet has made discoverability key to business success, and omnichannel communication is key. But what comes next? After a potential customer arrives at a business' door, what happens once they walk through that door?


This brings us to the next essential step of B2B Growth Marketing: connecting these potential customers with the resources they need to educate and inform themselves as they seek a solution. Enter Content Marketing.


In many ways, B2B Marketing is Content Marketing.


Consideration


Today's B2B buyers have access to massive amounts of content. They often make decisions or create impressions well before direct contact with a sales rep.


Gartner found that B2B buyers are researching, learning and meeting with peers independently from suppliers about two-thirds of the time. They spend just 17% of their time meeting with suppliers — so if there are three potential suppliers, each gets only about 5% of a customer's time.


As a brand, you need to create content to educate, inform and ideally influence the buyer along every step of his journey.


Source


Content is the initial conversation between a company and a potential customer. The content strategy that informs what content is produced and where it can be found is based on research and an agile, iterative optimisation process.


The content optimisation needs to be customer-centric, answering their questions and reducing scepticism. You need to be the trusted source of information on your domain. Think of helping over selling and sales should come when the buyer is ready to buy.


Information now plays a role in driving sales effectiveness. In a world where information can move far more freely, access more people and be available across channels, information can do things today that individuals cannot. — Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner


Decision


In B2B marketing, the customer journey usually involves a series of micro-conversions, baby steps towards the big goal.


Getting found in search for the phrase you want to be found for is a baby step driven by content strategy and SEO.


Having a website visitor consume more than one article on your website is a micro-conversion. That can come from having content relevant to the visitor, and having it easily accessible through good web design. Think “You Might Also Like” sidebars.


A whitepaper download in exchange for an email address is a micro-conversion, and an important one as the visitor has exchanged something of value (his email address) in exchange for something they perceive to be of value, your gated content.


The micro-conversions do not always lead to the macro conversion, but they are a part of the process.


In the B2B context, multiple stakeholders are typically involved meaning a level of consensus is required. That means you are not only targeting the decision-maker in your marketing but the various team members tasked with identifying the problem, exploring solutions, and identifying possible suppliers.


You want to reach each of them.


Delight


The “sale” is not the end of the customer journey but the beginning of a new phase in your relationship.


Customer retention is core to any business's long-term success. Hubspot points out a few reasons:


Affordability: It's 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer.


ROI: A 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.


Loyalty: Retained customers buy more often and spend more than newer customers. They've learned the value of a product or service and keep coming back, again and again.


Referrals: Satisfied, loyal customers are more likely to refer their colleagues — bringing in new customers free of charge.


The Growth Marketer understands this and ensures marketing continues even after the initial sale.


Post-sale responsibilities of the marketing team can range from a stellar "Welcome" email campaign to crafting your customer's positive experience into case studies to ensuring the Customer Success team has all the collaterals they need.


This virtuous circle of discovery, learning, growth and more discovery is the goal of B2B Growth Marketing and the key to the long-term success of businesses today.


And it is all focused on giving the customer information they trust to help them make an informed decision. Content marketing done well.

### PR in the Digital Age

The public relations industry is going through some unprecedented changes in the digital age. With 4.7 billion internet users worldwide, most of them using the web as their primary source of information, the very definition of PR is being rewritten.


Not too long ago, the marketing and advertising industries mainly focused on using clever creative and paid placements in newspapers and magazines or purchased seconds of airtime on radio and TV. Think Mad Men.


Separately,&nbsp;the public relations business tacked toward trusted but unpaid channels such as traditional news media and speaking engagements&nbsp;or through sponsorships.


Now in the internet&nbsp;era, anyone can be a publisher. That has reshaped how information is distributed and consumed&nbsp;and&nbsp;undermined legacy industries such as traditional print and broadcast media.


A multichannel communications model


As a rule, communications industry practitioners plan an overall communications strategy through a mix of Paid, Earned and Owned channels.&nbsp;Agency head and author Gini Dietrich introduced a fourth channel — Shared — in her 2014 book,&nbsp;Spin Sucks, to create the&nbsp;PESO model. PESO is widely used and is a lot more catchy than PEO, but at Salween Group,&nbsp;we stick to three channels, classifying shared content under Earned. Good content “earns” shares for you. That will be the subject of a future blog post.


[elementor-template id="47450"]


Your&nbsp;strategy should not insulate these&nbsp;channels and components. They can overlap, and integrating campaigns and resources under a multichannel marketing strategy will yield better overall results.


Here is an example:


Let's say you've conducted a study or published a white paper. You summarise the results on a blog on your website (Owned), post about it on your social media and link back to your blog (Owned), and maybe boost the post to reach a wider audience (Paid). Simultaneously, you publicise the results through a press release, leading to mentions in the media and bloggers' sites (Earned). Further awareness is raised as people share links to stories or post about them via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (Earned).


That is a basic&nbsp;content strategy.&nbsp;You maximise&nbsp;the value of a piece of content by repurposing it across multiple channels.


Value of earned media


As mentioned, paid media has long been the go-to tool of choice for marketing and advertising, but that has changed. Owned and earned media have been&nbsp;rising in importance&nbsp;in an age where people resist being sold to,&nbsp;and&nbsp;the&nbsp;buzzword&nbsp;among&nbsp;younger&nbsp;consumers&nbsp;is&nbsp;"authenticity".


So while many people recognise the importance of being mentioned by a news outlet, you may not be unlocking as much value as you could. It requires slightly more attention in&nbsp;today's&nbsp;digital&nbsp;world.


Yesterday's newspaper will end up in the recycle bin or at the&nbsp;bottom of your birdcage, but online media persists well beyond the day of publication. A piece of content can be found on the internet long after it has been&nbsp;uploaded.


And&nbsp;people can find&nbsp;that content through a search.


For a brand, being found in a search is perhaps the most&nbsp;crucial&nbsp;PR outcome&nbsp;right now,&nbsp;where online search and research dominates the customer journey.


On average, a person does&nbsp;three to four searches every day, and through search,&nbsp;people become familiar with a brand and its products and services.


What improves the ability to be found in searches? Online brand mentions, social shares of those mentions, and links back to a brand's "Owned" digital properties all help.


So when&nbsp;you do&nbsp;PR correctly,&nbsp;you can reap the rewards of greater brand awareness, credibility and&nbsp;domain authority&nbsp;months&nbsp;or&nbsp;even years after the initial media mention.


Pitching


One element that has withstood change is relevance. Is this&nbsp;newsworthy&nbsp;to the media outlet's audience?


Journalists, bloggers and influencers are inundated with story pitches and press releases in their inboxes. Some editorial teams get hundreds of releases daily.


To cut through the noise and be heard, &nbsp;your pitches and press releases need to be relevant, concise, and on point.


Relevant means not only newsworthy but placed in the hands of the right person at the right media outlet.


PR practitioners today are spoiled for choice when it comes to media databases and outreach tools. From the big boys&nbsp;Cision&nbsp;and&nbsp;Meltwater&nbsp;to scrappy digital-era startups like&nbsp;Prowly, PR software is available at&nbsp;various&nbsp;price points and feature sets.


That is a positive, modern development. But it also means a lower barrier to entry into the public relations space. It doesn't take much for a digital marketing agency to add PR to its menu of offerings.


Here is where Salween Group stands out. Our founder and senior management team come from journalism and corporate communications backgrounds.


Our corporate mission is to promote better understanding and empathy through communication. That mission is the cornerstone of our company's culture,&nbsp;and&nbsp;our people&nbsp;embody it.


It forms the core of what we do from a brand storytelling and PR and media outreach standpoint.


We help brands tell compelling stories. It is in our DNA.


Our view is high-quality content as part of a well-crafted multichannel communications strategy can differentiate your brand in the sea of online noise.


Oh, what tools do we use? Muck Rack is our current choice, and because they require an annual commitment it is one we'll be living with for a while. It is a great tool for media outreach and pitching and has some excellent features for media monitoring, coverage reports, competitive benchmarking for things like Share of Voice and features that help measure what matters for PR.


PR Newswire, the granddaddy of wire distribution services, is our go-to choice&nbsp;for the broad distribution of press releases.


Listening


Brand monitoring is an essential part of public relations. A few of the tools already mentioned offer monitoring but in terms of bang-for-buck, we are admirers of Brand24.


Brand24 allows us to monitor online brand mentions across news sites, social media, blogs, and podcasts.&nbsp;That is important in helping measure our PR work's efficacy and immediately alert us to any negative comments or changes in brand sentiment.


We can also monitor our client's competition,&nbsp;gauge our share of voice, or&nbsp;see&nbsp;who is getting the most online buzz.


Muck Rack has replaced Brand24 for some of our use-cases. Its search parameters are pretty powerful and that helps weed out false positives in monitoring.


For brands where we have a mandate for social media, we complement our PR tools with Agorapulse. Agorapulse is excellent for managing social media accounts at scale.


Media Training


Getting C-suite executives on-air, on panel discussions, or interviewed over a call works best when those executives are confident speakers.


But anxiety over speaking to media can cripple even the most confident, and we tackle that through media training.


For us, media training is not about "spin". It incorporates an understanding of the process behind the interview, the "why" and "how". Thus, besides question-and-answer rehearsals, the preparation may recreate an on-site mock TV interview fully equipped with lights, microphones and broadcast-quality cameras.


Practice makes perfect.


It's a wrap


Public relations is a&nbsp;critical&nbsp;component of branding and marketing in the digital age.


It should no longer be a siloed practice. Instead, it should be part of an integrated paid, earned, and owned multichannel marketing strategy. And it must&nbsp;be executed with the modern tools available for distribution and targeted outreach&nbsp;while being assessed with&nbsp;the&nbsp;measurement metrics that matter.

### What Are Landing Pages and Why Do You Need Them?

When we say tactical marketing, we mean tactical marketing; sometimes your goal is to market a specific product or service to a particular customer segment. It could be part of a bigger content marketing strategy or a social media campaign perhaps. For that laser-focused approach, a tool called a landing page is often our channel of choice.


What Exactly is a Landing Page?


A landing page is essentially a single web page that a person literally "lands" on after clicking on an ad or a link.


It's not your website's home page. Your website is an online showcase of your brand in its totality, with everything from your company's back story and new job openings to pictures of the team. It has many goals and encourages exploration.


A landing page is instead focused on a single offer and has no navigation other than a call to action. That call to action, or CTA for short, can be a form or a button such as Sign Up, Download Now, Learn More, or RSVP.


Remember, the visitor came to your landing page because he or she clicked on a link you shared or a pay-per-click (PPC) ad that you ran, so they're already interested in that specific offer.


That's 50% of the work done. You have the attention of someone in need of your product or service, and now the copy and design of the landing page will determine its effectiveness.


A well-written, well-designed landing page is crucial to converting visitors into qualified leads. That process is called, get ready for it, conversion. The conversion rate of a landing page, the ratio of page visitors to conversions, is how the efficacy of landing pages is measured.


How Landing Pages Work - Example


If you're looking for a dog groomer, your first action is likely to be a search for dog groomers on the internet.


If you are a pet shop owner wanting to push your dog grooming services, you might run a paid search campaign targeting the words "dog grooming". You wouldn't want to send those valuable, intent-driven clicks from people searching for dog grooming straight to your website's home page (Cats? Fish? What is this!), right? Instead, you would send them to a landing page that specifically talks about your superb dog grooming services, has customer testimonials praising them, and a “Book Now” button to make an appointment.


That's what we call a tactical campaign, targeting a specific buyer to one particular service you offer through a landing page. Landing pages are used for a wide range of things, from event signups, to booking a sales call or demo, to software product trials to downloading whitepapers.


Who Visits Landing Pages?


People who don't know you would find you through searches or ads, and people who do know you might find you through your social feeds or newsletters.


That is why PPC pairs exceptionally well with landing pages. PPC can be paid search, display, or paid social ads, allowing you to target specific demographics or keywords.


Outside the PPC arena, links to your campaign landing pages can be shared on your social media (Linktree is an awesome tool to help with this) or in email marketing campaigns to your subscriber base.


What Makes a Good Landing Page?


Remember, landing pages are judged by their conversion rate, not whether your boss likes it or how much time and effort you put into creating it. Conversion rate is a very objective measure.


So the better question is what are the fundamental practices of high-converting landing pages? Our friends over at Unbounce literally wrote the book on that, and this is what they say:


Use a clear and concise value statement (above the fold, before you have to scroll down) so visitors immediately understand your page's purpose.


Match your primary headline to the ad your visitor clicked to land on the page in the first place (or the button of the email CTA, for example).


Include social proof and testimonials to back up your claims.


Focus the whole page on a single offer, with just one primary call to action (CTA).


Use a conversion-centred layout to make your CTA stand out (think about whitespace, colour, contrast, and directional cues).


Test new ideas using A/B testing. Sometimes what works will surprise you.


A picture may be worth a thousand words, but 34 examples of some great landing pages are pretty useful too.


Landing page design, copywriting for conversions, and conversion rate optimisation are so important that some boutique agencies focus only on that and software providers such as Unbounce, Instapage and others that provide the required no code/low code tools that non-developers need to create and publish landing pages.


How We Do It


How do we do it? Our content studio works closely with our website design and development team and our data people. We use WordPress to create and manage landing pages on sites we manage because it gives us enormous flexibility in design and integration.


For our HubSpot clients, we build and publish landing pages directly from the platform. The landing page, form, and CTA tools in the Marketing Hub are very powerful and come with great reporting.


For sites we don't manage, we create a WordPress instance on a subdomain such as go.mycompany.com and create and manage landing pages there.


Tools like Crazy Egg help with A/B testing and conversion rate optimisation on WordPress. HubSpot and Unbounce have some great A/B testing tools, too.


Landing page form submissions can be integrated with marketing automation and CRM platforms such as HubSpot or ActiveCampaign, or just sent to an email address.


Landing pages, CRM, and email marketing can be a powerful combination for attracting people during the discovery process through to conversion and post-sale engagement. They are a great tool to have in your digital marketing toolkit.

### The Power Trio: CRM, Email and Marketing Automation

Sooner or later, every marketing leader gets asked the big question: How is marketing contributing to pipeline?


Your answers will likely reflect where you are in the marketing operations maturity model.


The what? It's a thing.


Put simply, if you manage a strategically-thinking, proactive team and a well-integrated marketing technology stack, you will have better clarity over marketing's contribution to the bottom line than the reactive marketer focused on executing campaigns.


That may sound intuitive enough, but it does not mean more headcount and more tools bring better insights.


Instead, awareness of marketing operations' role in the wider marketing function and broader revenue operations space informs your team's growth in relation to your organisation's growth.


That awareness should influence the people (or the agency) you bring on board and the tools you adopt in your marketing technology (martech) stack.


Let's look at the marketing operations maturity model and some real-world examples.


Take the humble "Contact Us" form on your website, the most basic of demand capture/lead capture tools. If you are a small business with long lead times and big invoices, you might be able to handle the one or two enquiries you get weekly via your email inbox.


Your martech stack is limited to a form plugin on your website and your inbox. If you are a bit tech-savvy, you might even connect the form to a Google Sheet and Mailchimp with Zapier.


In the marketing operations maturity model, you are at a foundational level. There is limited process and limited data.


But if you are scaling up or operating at scale from the start, managing those form submissions directly from your inbox or a spreadsheet will drive you crazy and likely cost you some business through lost opportunities.


You need to manage your leads and pipeline with tools designed for the task.


That will be a Customer Relationship Management platform, or CRM.


Fields of... Data


A CRM is essentially a smart database, and like all databases, it has objects and attributes. 


Let’s look at some basic CRM Objects:


Contact. Exactly what is says on the tin. A person.


Company. You guessed it, a Company. A Contact can be (and almost always is) associated with a Company.


Deal or Opportunity. A step in the journey to revenue! A Deal is a potential sale to a Contact at a Company.


Pipeline. The (usually) linear path a Deal takes from raised hand to revenue.


Now let’s look at attributes.


The usual attributes of a Contact include Email Address, First Name, Last Name, etc., but that is just a list you could keep in Excel.


What makes a CRM truly useful are attributes specific to the sales, marketing, and customer success processes and the relationships between objects.


In those processes, a Contact, for example, could be anything from a newsletter subscriber to a paying client. An attribute is used to keep track of that. In HubSpot’s default case, the Lifecycle Stage attribute is used for that purpose. A Contact can be a:


Subscriber


Lead


Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)


Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)


Opportunity


Customer


Evangelist


Other


And attributes might have attributes (not literally, but bear with me). The Lead, for example, can have a Lead Status of:


New


Open


In progress


Open Deal


Junk Lead


Unqualified


Attempted to Contact


Connected


Bad Timing


Again, those are HubSpot defaults.


The Pipeline object has attributes called stages, and moving Deals through Pipeline Stages is the sales game. Here are the HubSpot defaults, which are almost always customised per organisation to match each unique sales process.


Appointment Scheduled


Qualified to Buy


Presentation Scheduled


Decision Make Brought In


Contract Sent


Closed Won


Closed Lost


Those are your most basic of CRM basics. Other objects like Products allow your reps to provide quotes efficiently, and attributes like Target Account, which can be used with the Company object to create a tiered Target Account List for an account-based marketing (ABM) motion.


Those should all be detailed in your onboarding and training.


How Can a CRM Help?


A CRM will allow you to manage and nurture your leads, collaborate with your team, and keep track of how those leads interact with your brand and your content on the journey to becoming opportunities and your customers.


But marketing today is as much about nurturing customers post-sale and making them brand advocates as it is landing new ones. In a perfect world, you would use an integrated CRM solution that works for marketing, sales, and customer success.


Using a shared CRM across those three revenue functions or revenue operations can give you full visibility of where your customers are coming from, what marketing channels provide the best ROI, and where opportunities exist to delight and retain or upsell your current customers.


HubSpot is a leader in that space for integrated tools. It's a done-for-you marketing, sales, and service tech stack in an easy-to-use but powerful SaaS tool.


It is billed as a self-service tool, but to be honest you will need a marketing operations person to get the most out of it. That can be an in-house headcount or a HubSpot Solutions Partner agency like ours.


Once you are on a tool like HubSpot, you are further along that marketing operations maturity model and can better manage campaigns, pipeline, and data.


You have processes in place and a dedicated marketing operations function on your team.


It is a good place to be, and if implemented correctly, you will be able to answer how marketing contributes to pipeline and much, much more.


Follow the MAP


But in our not-so-perfect world, Marketing and Sales often have different preferences, requirements, and workflows, particularly in larger or legacy organisations.


Your sales leadership may prefer&nbsp;Salesforce, for example, the market leader in the sales CRM space.


But Salesforce lacks the functionality modern marketers expect, so a separate marketing CRM or marketing automation platform (MAP) is needed.


Most major MAP vendors offer integrations with Salesforce to varying degrees.&nbsp;HubSpot and&nbsp;ActiveCampaign&nbsp;are our favourites, and we are agency partners with both.


Those integrations offer bi-directional data flows, a great enabler of full lifecycle marketing.


Adobe Marketo&nbsp;and Oracle's Eloqua are notable in the enterprise (read: expensive) space, and Salesforce's own&nbsp;Marketing Cloud Account Engagement aka Pardot&nbsp;needs a mention here too.


Organisations with split sales and marketing CRMs can have split sales operations and marketing operations teams, and possibly a separate business intelligence function.


This is the peak of the marketing operations maturity model, where orchestration between multiple tools and business units happens.


Or should happen. Deep functionality can bring dysfunctionality if implemented poorly.


First Contact – the Benefits of Automation in CRM


Let's go back to that humble "Contact Us" form. As mentioned, in the most basic of use cases form submissions get emailed to the designated guy or gal on your team, and they follow up with that lead.


But if that form was linked directly to a MAP or CRM, simple automations could do things like respond automatically via email saying someone will be in touch soon, assign the lead to a designated rep for follow-up, and start tracking that user's activities on your website.


Multiple lead capture forms can also be used so that different tailor-made forms could appear on campaign or vertical-specific landing pages, for example, and automatically tag or segment leads as they come into the CRM.


Going beyond that, tools like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign also provide the marketer with:


Lead Scoring. Scoring users by how they interact with your specific web pages and emails.


Automated Email Marketing. Send a series of emails to a new contact to nurture them, or a new customer to onboard them.


Chatbots and on-page messaging, both automated and live chat.


Attribution. What campaign, ad, event, or referral brought that lead to your business?


These tools are designed to enhance the user experience and increase personalisation without being too in-your-face or creepy and provide the business intelligence that product, sales, and marketing need to grow revenue.


The relationship between your sales and marketing teams intersects at your CRM. At Salween Group, we've worked with companies large and small to improve their processes and their sales pipelines through tighter integration of the tools their teams use.


Implementing those tools does not need to be daunting, and we provide marketing operations support to our retainer clients as part of our agency's managed marketing technology offering.


We are a HubSpot Solutions Partner and an ActiveCampaign Agency Partner because we really like those products as marketers, and in the case of HubSpot, it is what we pay for and use ourselves.


We've learned what works and what doesn't through first-hand experience over the years, and are happy to share our expertise and opinions on what might be best for you and your business.


We are here to help. Drop us a line any time.

### Why We Became a WordPress Shop and Why You Should Care

We became a web design company by accident. A happy accident.


Back when Salween Group was first started, the founder and her small team were producing some very cool thought leadership content for one of the company's first clients, a well-known regional conglomerate.


The initial remit with them was international public relations and media outreach, getting the client's C-suite team on-air in media appearances and speaking on panel discussions at events.


As that quality content was being generated and getting broadcast and published on news sites, the next logical step was to help their marketing team get it up on the client's website.


But they didn't have a website for their brand.


They did have websites for their business units in banking, real estate, and healthcare, but the brand itself, the holding company, was not represented in the digital space. They found the process too painful.


After some discussion about the challenges they had faced with previous website projects, they placed their trust in us and became our first web design client, a move that changed their world view, and ours.


We consider a brand's website to be its most important digital marketing asset.


Web design and development has since become a cornerstone of our integrated offering, putting a brand's most important online asset, its website, at the centre of our content and digital marketing efforts.


Through the years and through dozens of client engagements, we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. We have refined our web design and development offer to address the major pain points affecting our clients.


Do any of these sound familiar?


"We hired a team to design our site 18 months ago. It looked great at the time, but it no longer represents who we are as a company. Now we have to start from scratch again."


"We don't have the time or the resources to update our site."


"The IT department runs our site, and it will require a mountain of paperwork and heaps of time to get it updated."


"One of our team created our website in Wix/Squarespace/Shopify, and it looks just like everybody else's website and can't be changed."


"We have to pay a developer to update our site, and that was not budgeted."


Managed Web Services


We break that cycle of marketing mediocrity and pain by offering websites as a managed service. Specifically, managed web services using WordPress. Here is how it works.


Managed web services are usually a component of our retainer. We design, develop, host, and maintain your website for a fixed monthly fee.


Need changes? We change it.


Need additional pages? We add them.


Need some landing pages for your upcoming marketing campaigns? You got it.


Need a completely new design? No problem.


And with our Content Studio, we are also able to keep your site fresh with new copywriting, images, infographics, and videos. That strengthens your marketing by providing engaging content for your users and boosting your rankings in search engines.


All of that is managed by us as part of a transparent marketing strategy to help you meet your business goals and objectives. And that gives you back the most important commodity you have – time.


What is WordPress and Why Should I Care?


WordPress is what is known as a content management system, or CMS. It is the backend software of a website that, well, serves up content.


If your website has a blog, news articles, or a catalogue of products, you are probably using a CMS.


WordPress is open source, and is the world's most popular CMS, powering over a third of all websites on the Internet and commanding a respectable 60% market share of the CMS space.


What that means is that there are a lot of qualified people out there who can work with WordPress, and that keeps your costs down. It also means third-party integrations for everything from e-commerce to email are widely available and robust.


Its main competitors in the open-source CMS space include Drupal and Joomla. We've worked with both, and that has firmly pushed us to the WordPress camp. Why? Costs.


While WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all free and open-source, there are a lot fewer qualified Drupal and Joomla developers out there than there are for WordPress. And while all have their specific strengths, there are not as many integrations available with Drupal and Joomla, and in modern digital marketing, integration is everything.


WordPress and E-Commerce


In the e-commerce space, a competitor to WordPress is Magento. License fees for the supported version of the software from Adobe start at around US$20,000 per year, and you will still need to pay a Magento-certified developer to build the site for you.


No thanks.


For big e-commerce sites (by big, I mean a lot of SKUs) we use WordPress with BigCommerce, and for smaller ones, we sometimes use WordPress with WooCommerce.


BigCommerce is very cool, abstracting the e-commerce layer to their cloud-based backend. That allows you to build a content-rich user experience in WordPress while having a scalable and robust shopping engine.


WooCommerce is a freemium WordPress plugin or add-on. It runs on the same server you are using for WordPress. It is very popular and can work effectively for smaller shops with a limited catalogue.


What about Shopify? Shopify is great for e-commerce DIYers. By DIY, I mean you would rather spend your own time building your website than paying someone to do it for you.


Shopify uses a system of templates and is pretty easy to use. If you are happy with Shopify, great! You probably don't need us. We find it very restricting and there is too much "sameness" to the user experience.


That said, we are a Shopify Partner and have helped SMEs already on the platform to optimise their site as best as possible, and then focus more on their other needs such as content marketing, social media management, etc.


Squarespace and Wix are also there for the website DIY community. They are good tools for smaller businesses with limited resources, but again you are restricted to how much you can do with them, not just from a design standpoint but also in terms of functionality and interoperability.


With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility


But the power of WordPress does come at a cost, and one of those is the requirement for ongoing technical maintenance. Our managed web services include regular checks for updates to WordPress and any plugins we use. When you hear about brand websites being hacked, it is almost always due to the site owner not regularly updating the software that powers their website.


Speaking of security, we host all our WordPress websites on the enterprise-grade infrastructure at Pressidium to provide strong security and high availability.


Pressidium is one of a handful of technology companies that do one thing and do it very well - managed WordPress hosting. From an integrated staging environment and managed web application firewall to daily onsite and off-site backups, they act as an extension of our team.


Our clients are also welcome to "own" and pay for their own WordPress hosting accounts, and we recommend either Pressidium or WP Engine.


Your website is your brand's most important digital marketing asset. In many cases, it dictates how you are found and is the world's first impression of you. Look your best.

### Don&#039;t Use YouTube for Your Corporate Videos

Are you embedding YouTube videos on your brand's website?


Bad idea.


Why? Because YouTube does not want users to stay on your website, they want users to stay on YouTube so they can serve them ads. It is as simple as that.


So when your well-polished 90-second corporate video comes to an end, the viewer will be faced with a choice: click on that cute cat video YouTube is teasing them with, or return to your brand's website.


The cat always wins.


Even worse, YouTube's recently updated terms of service mean that you can no longer turn off ads on the content you host with them. So in theory if you embed YouTube videos on your website, a visitor may navigate to your product page, click to watch your product overview video, and then get served an ad from your competitor instead. Not good.


Don't get us wrong, YouTube should have a place in your marketing strategy, but it needs to be treated more as a social media channel than a free place to host videos for your brand's website.


What you need is a video hosting service. And yes, you should pay for it.


The video hosting providers we'll be talking about here do offer free plans, but it is worth skipping that Starbucks coffee a few times a month to get on a paid plan. It will make the video hosted on your website a much stronger part of your marketing toolkit.


Vimeo has been around forever and is our first recommendation in many cases. It just works. No ads, no "you might also like" distractions, and no cats. Roughly $25 per month gets you on their Pro plan which is fine for smaller businesses who only need to host a handful of videos on their website. If you are more active in your video marketing and change up your content frequently, their Business plan — about $50 per month — will integrate nicely into your marketing technology stack with additional analytics features and call-to-action options.


We use Vimeo almost daily for client approvals and sharing in our video production workflows. It is a great product at a great price, but if you are a regional brand in Southeast Asia, there is an important caveat. Vimeo can't be seen in Indonesia.


As a premium video hosting service, Vimeo is home not just to brands but also to independent film makers and artists. Indonesia's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have decided there is too much, ahem, "art" on Vimeo and block it in the archipelago.


For that reason, we host our own website videos on Wistia.


While Wistia is a good product, we are paying twice as much for half the features we enjoy on Vimeo. But it can be seen in Indonesia, and that's an important market for us. Check out our Indonesia Night highlights from the World Economic Forum as an example.


Wistia does have some cool tools that make it the platform of choice for many digital marketers, and it is worth considering if you can spare the extra cash over Vimeo.


From here, we start getting really expensive.


We heard good things about Vidyard but haven't had a reason to try it out. At $300 per month for the comparable video hosting features of Vimeo and Wistia, here you are paying a premium for a raft of extra features and tools.


Vidyard and Wistia's Soap Box product are video engagement tools, apps that allow you to record and share personalised videos at scale. We have not used either, so can't really comment. Vidyard has an "Us vs. Them" comparison page optimised for that very search phrase here.


Last but not least, Brightcove is a big player in the enterprise video hosting space, works with some major brands, and has been around for a while. They are overkill if all you need to do is host some brand videos on your website, but if video is a major part of your marketing it is worth being aware of them as a provider.


There are others out there, but for our money we lean to Vimeo and Wistia as the best choices.


Like I said earlier, YouTube should have a place in your marketing strategy. YouTube videos show up in organic search results, so make sure your YouTube channel is optimised, up to date, and on-brand. It is also the second most popular search engine after Google, so it pays to be discoverable there.


But just remember that in the battle for user attention on YouTube, the cat will always win.

### A Look Inside Our Content Studio

What's a Content Studio?


A studio — that sounds kind of creative, right? Well yes, ours is. Just don't expect to find us wearing a paint-splattered smock with a brush gripped between our teeth as we channel our inner-Van Gogh. That might be fun to do, but it's not us. Not during working hours, at any rate.


We are makers, however. Our Content Studio is a unit that unites Salween Group's content strategists, copywriters, video producers and graphic artists as a cohesive team making multimedia content for brands. So, while there's certainly plenty of creativity going on here, everything we produce is backed by journalistic rigour, intelligence, critical thinking, and expertise in the art of storytelling. And most importantly, we understand how this all fits together with the science of data and analytics. This means we are positioned to develop an integrated approach to all forms of content across the agency.


Essentially, the Content Studio is an in-house multimedia resource that collaborates with clients to understand their needs and translate that into smart, impactful content for a variety of channels that solves business challenges.


But why? Because there's tremendous value in great content — for any business or organisation, it sells your expertise, your credibility, your trustworthiness and your values to your audience. It can motivate and educate your employees, new talent and other stakeholders. That's a lot of good stuff boosting your bottom line, in other words.


Our Content Studio's talents lie in achieving results by creating content that resonates — content that educates or entertains the target audience or demonstrates thought leadership. From evergreen website content to tactical campaigns, thought leadership to social media snippets, and press releases to CEO speeches, we have it covered.


Winning in this landscape means cutting through all the noise and producing stuff people really want to spend time reading or viewing. How do we do that? Read on to learn more about our core skills.


An Eye for a Story


In the crowded space that is content and digital marketing, we differentiate ourselves through the quality of our in-house editorial knowledge. Our Content Studio's journalism pedigree has taught us how to spot a good news story and hot trends. We keep our finger on the pulse of media, culture, lifestyle and the political atmosphere to understand what content has the best chance of getting consumed today.


For us, authentic storytelling has the most power to engage, which means treating audiences with respect. Today's consumers – especially the millennials and younger generations who have grown up with the Internet — are increasingly savvy and can see through a weak or inauthentic message in a fraction of a second, swiping it away and moving on to find something more snackable. Getting someone to pause for a moment demands giving something worthy of their precious time.


The Content Studio team is focused on ideation and creation with great speed, finesse and quality. This starts with the ability to string words into stories that inspire and empower, copywriting, editing or ghostwriting copy that is on point and creative.


Science also has a part to play here. We use SEO tools such as SEMrush — part of Salween Group's comprehensive martech stack — to help our content get discovered online by the right audiences. We're careful how we use SEO as littering articles repeatedly with keywords will turn off audiences and undo all the good work. Done right, however, this is when content becomes a valuable traffic driver as part of a brand's marketing campaign.


Bringing Clarity to the Complex


Working with clients in the fintech and capital investment sectors, we embrace the challenge of making the biggest impact with the most technically complex subject matter. Building knowledge informs the direction of the content and provides context within the writing style.


There's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to content creation, we know that every industry is unique and requires a nuanced approach


There's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to content creation, we know that every industry is unique and requires a nuanced approach. This calls for good old-fashioned research. We read. A lot. We'll ask questions that matter to get to the root of a brief, to both save time and make sure we hit your right thought leadership or product press release selling point spot on.


As mentioned earlier, we have in-house content creation expertise and plenty of it. But sometimes we need to supplement this with external resources, either because we're overloaded with work (we're not complaining!) or we have a piece of content that demands specialist knowledge. In such cases, we go to our bank of freelance content writers. This is never a case of outsourcing work to the lowest bidder or commissioning anonymous contributors we've never tested before. We only use hand-picked, experienced professionals whom we trust. They are experts in their respective fields or local markets. This is important: after all, what we create is just as important as how we publish, promote and amplify our clients' content.


Hard-working Content


We consider a brand's website to be its most important digital marketing asset, so getting the copy and content right here is essential. This is your brand's shop window, after all. Fresh, engaging content on a new or refreshed website can be used to engage users from the awareness stage through to the consideration stage. In terms of content production, we're able to go beyond the traditional text-and-photo blog paradigm and create infographics, video, and motion graphics, and add on features such as case studies and testimonials to white papers. We've successfully done this for many B2C consumer brands and B2B clients.


We often deploy tactical landing pages as a key lead generation tool for online campaigns. Crafting the messaging is key, and a core skill of the Content Studio. Good landing page copy brings clarity to a complex product, explaining its benefits and how it solves a business problem without sounding hard-sell. We work hard to get the tone of voice and language just right to target specific verticals or personas.


And finally...


Perhaps the most important skill of all in the Content Studio is the ability to see content through the eyes of the audience that will consume it. There's no short-cut to this. It simply requires a depth of experience — an understanding of what's worked well in the past — as well as intuition about what may or may not resonate tomorrow. While not quite in the Van Gogh mould, you could say a touch of the visionary comes in handy in the Content Studio after all.


Like to know more about how our Content Studio can help your business? Drop us a line now to arrange a chat.


### Newsletter Test


### Careers

Join Our Team				
					B2B content marketing is among the most exciting spaces in the communications industry today. With longer buyer journeys, multiple stakeholders, and multiple touchpoints, marketers have more opportunities to make a difference and drive business impact.				
					Working With a Purpose 				
					Our culture isn't a job benefit, it's what drives our business and our relationships with our clients. It's a culture of trust, transparency, and responsibility in an environment that encourages mentoring and promotes lifelong learning.				
					We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, passionate about helping others, and conscious of leaving the planet in better shape than we found it.				
					No current openings but read on...				
					We have no open positions at present, but that does not mean we are not hiring. If you know you can make the world a better place through better communication, we'd like to hear from you. We welcome talented people with demonstratable experience to reach out to us at any time, be it wordsmiths or web devs, martech geeks or graphic artists. We do things a little bit differently than most. We are not your typical agency.				
					Interested? Drop us a note at contact at salweengroup.com. We'd love to hear from you.				
					Content That Means Business				
					
							
									Let's Talk

### Instagram

Website
					
			
						Careers
					
			
						Contact Us

### Terms &amp; Conditions

By signing a quotation (hereinafter, "Quotation") issued by Salween Group Pte Ltd (Company Registration No: 201229717E), a company incorporated in the Republic of Singapore and having its registered address at 1 Keong Saik Road, Singapore 089109 (“Salween”), you (“the Client”) agree and give your irrevocable acceptance to be bound by these Terms and Conditions (this "Agreement").Terms and ConditionsIt is hereby agreed between the parties as follows:1. Definitions1.1 ADVERSE INFERENCENo provision of this Agreement will be construed adversely to a party solely on the ground that the party was responsible for the preparation of this Agreement or that provision.1.2 CALENDAR DAYSUnless expressly indicated otherwise, all references to several days mean calendar days, and the words "month" or "monthly" as well as all references to a number of months mean calendar months.1.3 CLAUSE AND SCHEDULEIn this Agreement, references to a clause or schedule shall be deemed to refer to the clause or schedule of this Agreement, as may be amended, modified, or supplemented from time to time.1.4 CONFLICT - AGREEMENT PREVAILINGIn the event of a conflict or inconsistency between any two or more provisions under this Agreement and its Schedules or Annexes (if any), whether such provisions are contained in the same or different documents, the provisions in the body of this Agreement shall prevail.1.5 CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATIONConfidential Information means and includes information not available to the public, client lists and details, trade secrets, business plans, financial information, employee lists and details, information known to a party to be confidential, information that may affect the competitive position of a party, and any information which a party is obligated not to disclose. It includes proprietary information belonging to one party and which is transferred or conveyed to another party. By way of illustration but not limitation, proprietary information includes: (a) inventions, trade secrets, ideas, data, programs, works of authorship, know-how, and improvements, discoveries, designs, techniques and sensitive information that that party has expended time, money and resources for; (b) technical information, existing and future plans or products, including, where appropriate and without limitation, software, firmware, information, patent disclosures, patent applications, development or experimental work, formulae, engineering or test data, product specification and part lists, names of suppliers, customers or contractors, techniques, processes and apparatus relating to the same disclosed by one party to another party through observation or examination of the information; (c) confidential marketing information (including but without limitation, marketing strategies, customer names and requirements and product and services, prices, margins and costs; (d) confidential product, marketing, development and other plans; (e) confidential financial information provided by one party to another party; (f) personnel information (including without limitation employee compensation); (g) confidential information relating to one party including without limitation, corporate information and secrets, unannounced financial results reports and statements or information, projections, profiles, investment plans, capitalization plans; business plans or expansion plans or arrangements relating to its business whether or not with third parties; and (h) other confidential business information or information received by one party which is marked "confidential" or words to that effect conveyed, transmitted, recorded or stored by any means whatsoever including, without limitation, documents, drawings, photographs, computer diskettes, computer hard disks, computer network storage devices, Internet or intranet electronic mail, discs, designs, plans or models or any of the media (electronic or otherwise) for storing or recording information.1.6 HEADING AND MARGINAL NOTESThe headings and marginal notes in the Agreement shall not be deemed to be part of the Agreement nor be taken into consideration in the interpretation or construction of the Agreement.1.7 INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATIONWhenever the words "include", "includes" or "including" are used in this Agreement, they will be deemed to be followed by the words "without limitation".1.8 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTYIntellectual Property means and includes any invention, discovery, trade secret, trademark, service mark, trade name, logo, get-up, patent or improvement to and development of procedure, product or process idea, improvement, invention, program, formula, process, technique, development, design, know-how and data, whether or not patentable or registrable under copyright or similar statutes, and all designs, trademarks and copyrightable works.1.9 MEANING OF "MAY""May" means has the right, but not the obligation to do something and "may not" means does not have the right to do something.1.10 MEANING OF "WILL" AND "SHALL""Will" and "shall" are expressions of command, not merely expressions of future intent or expectation.1.11 NATURAL PERSONSReferences to any "person" include any natural person, corporation, judicial entity, association, statutory body, partnership, limited liability partnership, limited liability company, joint venture, trust, estate, or unincorporated organisation. The use of any gender shall include all genders.1.12 PARTIES AND ASSIGNSAny reference to any party will be construed as a reference to such party's successors and permitted assigns.1.13 SINGULAR AND PLURALWords importing the singular shall also include the plural and vice versa where the context requires.2. Appointment &amp; provision of services2.1 By these Terms and Conditions, the Client hereby appoints Salween as its service provider for the provision of the services (“Services”) set out in the signed Quotation(s) (hereinafter, Statement(s) of Work ("SoW")) mutually agreed between the parties. Salween shall perform the Services in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.2.2 Each SoW shall set out the agreed-upon scope of work, service deliverables, applicable service fees and other pricing information, project schedule (where necessary) and estimated delivery dates. Each SoW shall be regarded as a separate and divisible contract.3. TermUnless earlier terminated in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, this Agreement shall become effective as of the date of its execution (“Commencement Date”) and shall continue in effect for the period stipulated in the SoW (“Term”).4. Fees4.1 In consideration of the Services rendered by Salween under this Agreement, the Client shall pay Salween the amounts as agreed under the applicable SoW.4.2 The Service Fee shall be payable under every SoW on the payment terms set out in the SoW. In the event that the SoW does not set out the payment terms:4.2.1 fifty percent (50%) of the Service Fee shall be payable immediately within thirty (30) days of the date of the SoW;4.2.2 twenty five percent (25%) of the Service Fee shall be payable three (3) months of the date of the SoW; and4.2.3 the final twenty five percent (25%) of the Service Fee shall be payable upon handover of all service deliverables set out in the SoW.An invoice for each such instalment under the SoW shall be issued by Salween to the Client with a payment term of thirty (30) days unless otherwise provided for thereunder. The mode of payment shall be set out in the invoice issued by Salween.4.3 For the avoidance of doubt, the Service Fee shall exclude any and all out-of-pocket expenses, including but not limited to travel costs, costs of accommodations and any other ancillary expenses reasonably incurred by Salween, its agents, employees or representatives arising out of or in connection with Salween's delivery of the Services, which the Client acknowledges and agrees to reimburse Salween (inclusive of VAT and any other applicable taxes), and which Salween shall add to the applicable invoice.4.4 For the avoidance of doubt, the Service Fee does not include third-party costs incurred in connection with the delivery of Salween's Services. The Client agrees to pay any and all third-party costs arising out of the delivery of the Services. In the event, Salween incurs any third-party cost, such third-party cost shall be invoiced to the Client at cost (inclusive of VAT and any other applicable taxes), in the next monthly invoice. Salween reserves the right to require payment in advance of any third-party costs that exceed the cumulative sum of $10,000, which shall be payable in cleared funds within thirty (30) days of receipt of Salween's invoice. Salween may help the Client appoint a relevant third-party vendor following consultation, if, and when required as part of the Services.4.5 Time is of the essence with respect to the Client's payment of any and all sums set out in this Clause 4, including but not limited to the Service Fee, any out-of-pocket expenses or third-party costs charged by Salween under its invoices.4.6 The Parties acknowledge and agree that any and all Service Fees paid in advance which remain unutilised (for any reason whatsoever) as at the earlier of the expiry of the Term of this Agreement or the term of the applicable SoW shall be non-refundable. Any and all unutilised Service Fees may be carried over and applied to a subsequently renewed service agreement or SoW respectively, in Salween's sole and absolute discretion.4.7 Salween shall proceed with production or publication of the deliverables set out in a SoW as appropriate, once final copies, layouts, scripts, storyboards, designs and the like have been approved by the Client in writing. Where draft deliverables, including but not limited to artwork or other materials are sent to the Client for final approval, the Client shall use its best endeavours to review the draft deliverables and notify Salween in writing of any errors or proposed alterations. Salween will use its reasonable endeavours to effect any changes so notified but Salween reserves the right to charge additional fees on a case-by-case basis if any of these proposed alterations:4.7.1 go beyond the original brief, in Salween's sole and absolute discretion;4.7.2 are notified to Salween more than five (5) working days after delivery of the draft deliverable to the Client; or4.7.3 unless otherwise agreed, the proposed alteration exceeds the 2nd proposed alteration in respect of the same deliverable. In this event, every proposed alteration thereafter shall be subject to additional fees;such additional fees shall be added to an applicable invoice and issued to the Client by Salween.5. Variation order protocol5.1 In the event that the Client requests a variation to an existing SoW agreed between the parties (hereinafter "Variation Order"), it shall be in writing and shall specify the proposed additions, reductions and/or amendments to the SoW.5.2 Thereafter, subject to:5.2.1 Salween determining that such Variation Order(s) are reasonable in its sole and absolute discretion;5.2.2 Parties' written agreement on costs; and5.2.3 Parties written agreement to any change to the Service Fees resulting from the Variation Order proposed by Salween (for example, for amendments made to the Variation Order which extend beyond the scope of work contemplated in the Client's original brief to Salween),Salween shall deliver the Services as modified and/or amended by the Variation Order upon confirmation in writing of Clauses 5.2.1 to 5.2.3 above and the Client shall bear any and all costs of such amendments and/or modifications. If the Parties are unable to agree on the Variation Order, costs or changes to the Service Fee, Salween shall continue to provide the Services as agreed between the Parties under the SoW.5.3 Any changes in the Service Fee payable by the Client arising out of a Variation Order shall be made by Salween in good faith, and in its sole and absolute discretion, having regard to the additional work required by Salween to execute the amendments contemplated in the Variation Order which were not contemplated under the original SoW.5.4 Parties shall further negotiate in good faith, an extension of time to deliver the Services as amended and/or modified by the Variation Order. In the event that no agreement is reached despite an agreed Variation Order, Salween shall have an additional three (3) months to deliver the Services set out In the SoW.6. AgentsSalween may instruct its agents, employees, contractors and/or other officers in the provision of the Services under this Agreement and Salween shall not be liable for any of their acts or defaults.7. Intellectual property rights — Standard licence7.1 Unless otherwise agreed, any and all intellectual property rights arising out of the deliverables set out in the SoW, or which Salween develops in the performance of its obligations under this Agreement shall, so far as not already vested, become the absolute property of Salween, and the Client shall do all that is necessary to ensure that such rights vest in the proper party.7.2 Salween shall grant the Client a royalty-free, exclusive licence over the use of any and all intellectual property rights set out in Clause 7.1 above, in perpetuity and coming into effect on the payment of the relevant invoice(s) under the SoW (the "Licence"). The Licence shall be applicable worldwide and in respect of the products and/or services defined in the Client's brief, for the purposes of:7.2.1 advertising and promotional projects, including printed materials, product packaging, presentations, film and video presentations, commercials, catalogues, brochures, promotional greeting cards and promotional postcards (i.e. not for resale or license);7.2.2 entertainment applications, such as books and book covers, magazines, newspapers, editorials, newsletters, and video, broadcast and theatrical presentations;7.2.3 online or electronic publications, including but not limited to web pages, social media and video streaming services;7.2.4 prints, posters (i.e. a hardcopy) and other reproductions for commercial use or promotional purposes specified in (1) above, but not for resale, license or other distribution; and7.2.5 any other uses approved in writing by Salween Group.7.3 The Client shall seek Salween's prior written consent before using the intellectual property rights under the Licence for purposes outside of those contemplated in Clause 7.2 above.7.4 All intellectual rights arising out of the deliverables set out in the SoW, or which Salween develops in the performance of its obligations under this Agreement shall be free from all proprietary interests and rights of third parties unless otherwise provided for in third-party license agreements (e.g. the purchase of a non-exclusive royalty-free music license or the purchase of stock images and/or footage).7.5 Unless otherwise stated, the Client shall grant Salween a royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable, perpetual license to use, reproduce, modify, display and publish any and all content provided by the Client ("Content") for the purposes of the delivery of Salween's Services, for Salween's marketing and promotional purposes, and any other purposes agreed to in writing between the Parties. For the avoidance of doubt, the Client's Content referred to in this Clause 7.5 shall include without limitation, any and all trademarks, logos, patents as well as any intellectual property rights or proprietary rights arising from documents, files, images, videos, graphics, animations, audio recordings, designs, data, information, materials and briefs provided by the Client to Salween.7.6 For the avoidance of doubt, the standard licence set out in this Clause 7 shall not include the right of access to source files, source code, working files which include but are not limited to Photoshop files, Illustrator files and/or source materials used by Salween in the course of delivering its Services. The access to any such source files, source code or working files may be requested by the Client, subject to good faith negotiations between the Parties as to an appropriate price in consideration for the same.8. Representations and warranties8.1 Salween hereby represents and warrants to the Client that:8.1.1 its provision of the Services shall be performed using reasonable skill and care, and will be of a quality which conforms to generally accepted industry practices and standards.8.2 The Client hereby represents and warrants to Salween that:8.2.1 During the Term, the Client shall fully cooperate with Salween and provide Salween with all information and documentation reasonably required by Salween, give at its own expense reasonable access to hardware and software, make available appropriate staff support, provide reasonable working space and facilities and any and all such assistance as may be reasonably required by Salween to perform the Services. This shall include but not be limited to direct access to primary or secondary marketing data sources such as Google Analytics, as and when required by Salween;8.2.2 The Client shall provide feedback and approvals in relation to the Services in a timely manner and without undue delay as may be required by Salween and the delivery of its Services;8.2.3 The Client acknowledges and agrees that Salween shall not be liable in respect of alleged errors occurring in deliverables where the Client omitted to pay for proofs or mock-ups or to oversee the print and production process or does not allow reasonable time in the production schedule to check layouts, copy, pagination or other content aspects;8.2.4 The Client shall use the Services and the Licence in strict compliance with all governmental regulations and legislation throughout the Term of this Agreement in any and all applicable jurisdictions;8.2.5 The Client shall not use the Services or the Licence to transmit information or content that is unlawful, upsetting, intended to disgust, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable. Salween reserves the right to determine whether any content is appropriate and complies with the terms of this Agreement and to remove or refuse any content within the proposed deliverables or the Client's brief, in its sole and absolute discretion. Examples of such objectionable content shall include but not be limited to:8.2.5.1 Spam, machine or randomly-generated content, or content which constitutes unauthorised advertising or unauthorised solicitation, or any form of lottery or gambling;8.2.5.2 Content containing or installing any viruses, worms, malware, trojan horses or other harmful software that is designed or intended to disrupt, damage or limit the functioning of any software, hardware or technological equipment or to damage or obtain unauthorised access to any data or other information of a third person;8.2.5.3 Content that infringes on any proprietary rights of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity or other rights in any jurisdiction;8.2.5.4 The impersonation of any person or entity including Salween and its employees, agents, contractors or representatives;8.2.5.5 Content that violates the privacy of any third person;8.2.5.6 Content published with an aim to proliferate false information and/or features; and8.2.5.7 Defamatory, discriminatory or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted minority groups.8.2.6 The Client shall bear the full costs and liability of ensuring that it maintains all licences, permits, authorisations or certifications necessary to use the deliverables under any SoW and/or to enable Salween to carry out the Services in the applicable jurisdictions and territories;8.2.7 By providing Salween the Client's brief and the Client's Content, the Client warrants and undertakes that it is the legal owner or legal licensee of all intellectual property rights (or other proprietary rights) used or proposed to be used in the deliverables under the SoW and that it has the right and/or the necessary approvals to grant Salween the right to carry out the Services and the licence set out in Clause 7.5 above with all such materials contained within the Client's brief and the Client's Content. The Client is not in breach of any obligation owed to any person nor is it infringing or violating any laws, regulatory requirements or codes or the patent rights, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, proprietary information, design rights, other proprietary or intellectual property rights or any other rights of any other person by sharing the materials and information in the Client's brief or by engaging Salween to carry out the Services;8.2.8 The Client shall use its best endeavours to ensure that the details provided in the Client's brief are true and accurate;8.2.9 The Client undertakes that it shall obtain all the necessary approvals and/or consents from its customers, employees, agents, representatives or other relevant persons before disclosing the personal data of such persons to Salween for the purposes of carrying out the Services;8.2.10 The Client undertakes not to interfere with or attempt to disrupt the Services by distributing harmful computer code or malicious viruses, amongst other things; and8.2.11 The Client shall not crawl, scrape or spider any page of any webpage, website or online content delivered under the Services or to reverse engineer or obtain the source code underlying the Services, without Salween's consent.8.3 The Parties, individually, represent and warrant to the other Party that:8.3.1 all action will have been taken so that the execution and delivery of, and the performance by it of its obligations under, this Agreement shall not:8.3.1.1 infringe, or constitute a default under, any instrument, contract, document or agreement to which it is a party; or8.3.1.2 result in a breach of any law, rule, regulation, ordinance, order, judgment or decree of or undertaking to any court, government body, statutory authority or regulatory, administrative or supervisory body (including without limitation, any relevant stock exchange or securities council) to which it is a party, whether in Singapore or elsewhere.8.3.2 it has full power and authority to execute and deliver this Agreement and the agreements contemplated herein, and to consummate the transactions contemplated hereby and thereby and that this Agreement and all such other agreements and obligations entered into and undertaken in connection with the transactions contemplated hereby constitute its valid and legally binding obligations, enforceable against it in accordance with their respective terms; and8.3.3 it has no insolvency order against it and that it is not the subject of any insolvency proceedings pending, being contemplated by or to the knowledge of the Party, in a court of any jurisdiction.9. Personal data protection9.1 The Client shall, where necessary for Salween to carry out the Services and subject to obtaining the requisite approvals and/or consent, provide Salween with authorised access to the personal data of its customers, employees, agents or representatives that the Client has in its possession or control, strictly for the purposes of enabling Salween to carry out the Services under the SoW(s) and in full compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 ("PDPA") or similar statute.9.2 In Salween's capacity as a data intermediary under the PDPA or similar statute, Salween shall make reasonable security arrangements to protect any personal data disclosed by the Client from unauthorised access, collection, use, disclosure or any such similar risks.10. Limitation of liability10.1 In no event shall either Party be liable to the other Party in respect of any indirect, consequential, special or incidental damages or losses, including any loss of profit, goodwill or business contracts or any other form of pure economic loss howsoever and whether arising in contract, tort or otherwise.10.2 Salween’s maximum aggregate liability to the Client in connection with or under this Agreement, whether in contract or tort or otherwise, shall not, in any event, exceed the aggregate value of all payments due to Salween by the Client calculated from the date of this Agreement up to the date of occurrence of the said breach.10.3 The Client acknowledges that Salween has no control over and assumes no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third-party websites or services which may be used in the course of delivering the Services, including but not limited to third-party web hosting service providers. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Salween disclaims any and all liability, including any express or implied warranties and representations, whether oral, written or otherwise, for any and all such third-party service providers and/or contractors. The Client acknowledges that no representation has been made by Salween as to the fitness of the third-party service provider for its intended purpose.11. Indemnity11.1 11.1. The Client shall indemnify Salween, its officers, directors, employees and agents and hold them harmless from and against all claims, costs, damages, expenses, losses or liabilities arising from any claims made by any third party in connection with:11.1.1 the use of images, files, data and any and all materials provided by the Client or Salween for the purposes of carrying out the Services;11.1.2 the infringement of intellectual property rights, breach of confidentiality, property damage or fraudulent or unlawful acts or omissions by the Client;11.1.3 the breach of a third-party service provider's terms of use, privacy policy and any and all other agreements or contracts entered into between the service provider and Salween or the Client in the course of delivering the Services and arising out of the actions or omissions of the Client; and11.1.4 any and all claims in relation to the content of the deliverables within the SoW and/or the content of the Services delivered and so published by Salween, the Client and/or any authorised third party.12. Force majeure12.1 Neither Party shall be liable for any failure to perform any of its obligations under this Agreement if the performance is prevented, hindered or delayed by a Force Majeure Event (defined below) and in such case, its obligations shall be suspended for so long as the Force Majeure Event continues. For the purpose of this Agreement, fire, flood, elements of nature, acts of God, health hazards, pandemics, acts of war, terrorism or civil unrest, industrial action or any other similar events beyond the reasonable control of a party and which affects the general public are the only events which shall constitute a “Force Majeure Event”.12.2 If either Party is prevented or delayed in the performance of any of its obligations under this Agreement by a Force Majeure Event (defined above), and if such Party gives written notice thereof to the other Party specifying the matters constituting the Force Majeure Event, together with such evidence as it reasonably can give and specifying the period for which it is estimated that such prevention or delay will continue then the Party in question shall be excused the performance or the punctual performance as the case may be as from the date of such notice for so long as such cause of prevention or delay shall continue, provided always that whenever possible the affected Party will resume its obligations as soon as such Force Majeure Event ceases or abates. If the Force Majeure Event continues for more than three (3) months either Party may terminate this Agreement on five (5) days’ notice.13. Termination13.1 Notwithstanding anything else contained herein, this Agreement may be terminated:13.1.1 by mutual agreement between the Parties at any time provided that for termination of this Agreement pursuant to this Clause 13, the Services shall be terminated on the last day of the month in which the termination takes place and all outstanding payment of Service Fee shall be settled between the Parties as of that day;13.1.2 immediately by a Party forthwith on giving notice in writing to the other Party, in the following circumstances:13.1.2.1 if there is a failure to perform or observe any of the provisions of this Agreement (or an SoW) or where there Is a breach of any obligations in this Agreement (or in an SoW), which breach, if remediable is not remedied within thirty (30) days of a notice in writing to the other Party;13.1.2.2 If such party has become subject to a judicial management order or if a court of competent jurisdiction makes an order to that effect, or has entered into any composition or arrangement with its creditors, or has ceased or threatens to cease to carry on business;13.1.2.3 If such party has a receiver or manager appointed over it or any part of its undertaking or assets, or such party passes a resolution for winding up (otherwise than for the purpose of a bona fide scheme of solvent amalgamation or reconstruction); or13.1.2.4 in accordance with Clause 12 if a Force Majeure Event continues for more than three (3) months.13.2 On termination or expiry of this Agreement for any reason:13.2.1 such termination shall be without prejudice to the rights, duties and liabilities of the Parties which have accrued prior to this Agreement's termination. The provisions in this Agreement which expressly or impliedly have effect after termination of this Agreement shall continue to be enforceable notwithstanding termination;13.2.2 any and all SoWs entered into under this Agreement shall be deemed to have been terminated and such termination shall be without prejudice to the rights, duties and liabilities of the Parties which have accrued prior to this SoW's termination;13.2.3 all software licenses and subscriptions including website hosting services provided by Salween to the Client shall be cancelled; and13.2.4 the Client shall immediately pay to Salween all sums due and owing to Salween up to and including till the date of termination.14. Confidentiality14.1 Each Party agrees that it will not, without the prior written consent of the other party, at any time (save as may be required by law) use, divulge or communicate to any person, other than officers or employees of the party whose province it is to know the same, any Confidential Information other than that which may properly come into the public domain through no default of the party. Each party will use its reasonable ok to prevent the publication and disclosure of any such Confidential Information concerning such matters, and on termination or expiry of this Agreement shall return all documents and copies of such Confidential Information that are in his possession. The Parties acknowledge and agree, having had the opportunity to seek independent legal advice thereon, that all the clauses relating to Confidential Information in this Agreement are reasonable and necessary to protect the legitimate interests of the Parties.14.2 The foregoing obligations under Clause 14.1 above shall not apply to any part of the Confidential Information of either Party which is already known to the other Party prior to receiving it or becomes generally available to the public through no act or default of the other party or his employees or agents.15. Notices15.1 Any notice or other communication in connection with this Agreement shall be in writing in English and shall be sufficiently given or served if delivered or sent:To Salween:Address: 1 Keong Saik Road Singapore, 089109Email: contact@salweengroup.comAttention: Sylvia McKaigeTo Client:At the address and/or email address indicated to be the Client's address in the SoW.or (in either case) to such other address or email address as the relevant party may have notified the other Party in writing in accordance with this Clause.15.2 Any notice may be delivered by hand or sent by email or prepaid registered post or registered airmail in the case of international service. Without prejudice to the foregoing, any notice shall conclusively be deemed to have been received five (5) Business Days from the time of posting, if sent by post, or ten (10) Business Days from the time of posting, if sent by airmail, or at the time of delivery, if delivered by hand or at the time of transmission, if delivered by email.16. Further assurancesEach Party agrees to perform (or procure the performance of) all further acts and things and execute and deliver (or procure the execution and delivery of) such further documents as may be required by law or as the other Party may reasonably require for the purpose of giving to such Party the full benefit of the provisions of this Agreement.17. Entire agreementThis Agreement contains the entire agreement between the Parties relating to the subject matter of this Agreement at the date hereof, to the exclusion of any terms implied by law which may be excluded by contract, and supersedes all previous agreements and understandings (written or oral) between the Parties in relation to the matters dealt with in this Agreement.18. Variation &amp; amendmentNo variation, amendment or rescission of this Agreement shall be effective or bind either Party unless made in writing and signed by both Parties. Unless expressly agreed, no variation or amendment shall constitute a general waiver of any provision of this Agreement, nor shall it affect any right, obligation or liability under or pursuant to this Agreement which have already accrued up to the date of such variation or amendment, and the rights and obligations of the Parties under or pursuant to this Agreement shall remain in full force and effect, except only to the extent that they are so varied or amended.19. Assignment19.1 Neither Party shall assign or transfer, or purport to assign or transfer, any of its rights, interests or obligations under this Agreement to any other person without the prior written consent of the other Party.19.2 Save as permitted under this Agreement, there shall be no transfer, assignment or licence created in respect of any intellectual property rights by any party without obtaining the prior written consent of the other party. In any permitted transfer, assignment or licence, the transferor, assignor or licensor shall procure and ensure that the transferee, assignee or licensee shall assume all rights and obligations of the transferor, assignor or licensor under this Agreement and that the transferee, assignee or licensee agrees to be bound to all the terms of this Agreement20. InvalidityIf any provision in this Agreement is or shall at any time become invalid, illegal or unenforceable in any respect (in whole or in part), such invalidity, illegality or unenforceability shall not in any way affect or impair the other provisions of this Agreement, and this Agreement shall be construed as if such invalid or illegal or unenforceable provision had never been contained herein.21. Third-party rightsA person who is not a Party to this Agreement may not enforce its terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act, Chapter 53B of Singapore or its statutory replacement or equivalent.22. Waiver22.1 No failure on the part of either Party to exercise, and no delay on the part of either Party in exercising, any right or remedy under this Agreement will operate as a release or waiver thereof, nor will any single or partial exercise of any right or remedy under this Agreement preclude any other or further exercise thereof, or the exercise of any other right or remedy. The rights and remedies provided in this Agreement are cumulative and not exclusive of any other right or remedy (whether provided by law or otherwise).22.2 Any provision or breach of any provision of this Agreement may be waived only if the relevant Party so agrees in writing. Any waiver or consent given by the relevant Party under any provision of this Agreement must also be in writing. Any such waiver or consent may be given subject to any conditions thought fit by that Party and shall be effective only in the instance and for the purpose for which it is given.23. Independent contractorSalween shall, in the performance of its obligations under this Agreement, be deemed to be an independent contractor. Nothing contained in this Agreement shall constitute or be construed to constitute a partnership, agency, joint venture or fiduciary relationship between the Parties for any purpose whatsoever. Neither Party shall be authorised to represent or bind the other to any other person.24. CounterpartsThis Agreement may be executed in any number of counterparts, each of which shall be an original, but all of which together shall constitute one and the same instrument. Each Party may enter into this Agreement by signing any such counterpart.25. Governing lawThis Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Singapore.26. MediationAny dispute arising out of or in connection with this Agreement must first be submitted within thirty (30) days of the dispute arising, to the Singapore Mediation Centre (“SMC”) in accordance with the SMC’s Mediation Procedure in force for the time being. Either Party may submit a request to the SMC to mediate upon which the other Party will be bound to participate in the mediation within thirty (30) days thereof. Each party to the mediation must be represented by a representative of the party who has the authority to negotiate and settle the dispute. Unless otherwise agreed by the Parties, the mediator will be appointed by SMC. The mediation will take place in Singapore in the English language and the Parties agree to be bound by any settlement agreement reached. Should Parties fail to reach a settlement through mediation, then the Parties shall proceed to resolve the dispute in accordance with Clause 27 below. For the avoidance of doubt, the Parties shall be deemed to have failed to reach a settlement if either party serves a written notice terminating the mediation.27. Dispute resolutionFollowing the Parties’ unsuccessful mediation, any dispute arising out of or in connection with this Agreement including any question regarding its existence, validity or termination, shall be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration administered by the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (“SIAC”) in accordance with the Arbitration Rules of the SIAC for the time being in force, which rules are deemed to be incorporated by reference to this Clause. The seat of the arbitration shall be Singapore, the tribunal shall consist of one arbitrator and the language of the arbitration shall be English. Notwithstanding anything herein to the contrary, in the event that the quantum in dispute is less than the sum of S$30,000, the Parties acknowledge and agree that the matter may be referred to the Small Claims Tribunal in Singapore, which shall have the jurisdiction to hear the dispute. Last updated on 24 January 2025				
					Content That Means Business				
					
							
									Let's Talk

### Privacy Policy

We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors; this policy sets out how we will treat your personal information.
The salweengroup.com website uses cookies. By using our website and agreeing to this policy, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy.
1. What information do we collect?
We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
(a) information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation.
(b) information that you provide to us for the purpose of registering with us.
(c) information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our website services, email notifications and/or newsletters.
(d) any other information that you choose to send to us; and
(e) other information.
2. Cookies
A cookie consists of a piece of text sent by a web server to a web browser, and stored by the browser. The information is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser.
We use “session” cookies on this website. We will use the session cookies to: keep track of you whilst you navigate the website; and other uses.
Session cookies will be deleted from your computer when you close your browser. Persistent cookies will remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach a specified expiry date.
We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of this website. Google Analytics generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies, which are stored on users’ computers. The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of the website. Google will store this information. Google’s privacy policy is available at: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html.
3. Using your personal information
Personal information submitted to us via this website will be used for the purposes specified in this privacy policy or in relevant parts of the website. We may use your personal information to:
(a) administer the website;
(b) improve your browsing experience by personalising the website;
(c) send you general (non-marketing) commercial communications;
(d) send you email notifications which you have specifically requested;
(e) send to you our newsletter and other marketing communications relating to our business or the businesses of carefully-selected third parties which we think may be of interest to you by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications)
(f) provide third parties with statistical information about our users – but this information will not be used to identify any individual user;
(g) deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to the website; and
(h) other uses.
Where you submit personal information for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the licence you grant to us.
We will not without your express consent provide your personal information to any third parties for the purpose of direct marketing.
4. Disclosures
We may disclose information about you to any of our employees, officers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes as set out in this privacy policy.
In addition, we may disclose your personal information:
(a) to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
(b) in connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings;
(c) in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
(d) to the purchaser (or prospective purchaser) of any business or asset that we are (or are contemplating) selling; and
(e) to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
Except as provided in this privacy policy, we will not provide your information to third parties.
5. International data transfers
Information that we collect may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this privacy policy.
Information which you provide may be transferred to countries (including the United States, Japan, (other countries) which do not have data protection laws equivalent to those in force in the European Economic Area.
In addition, personal information that you submit for publication on the website will be published on the internet and may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use or misuse of such information by others.
You expressly agree to such transfers of personal information.
6. Security of your personal information
We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.
We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall- protected) servers. All electronic transactions you make to or receive from us will be encrypted using SSL technology.
Of course, data transmission over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.
7. Policy amendments
We may update this privacy policy from time-to-time by posting a new version on our website. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes.
We may also notify you of changes to our privacy policy by email.
8. Your rights
You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you. Provision of such information will be subject to:
We may withhold such personal information to the extent permitted by law.
You may instruct us not to process your personal information for marketing purposes, by sending an email to us. In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt-out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.
The website contains links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of third party websites.
9. Updating information
Please let us know if the personal information which we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
10. Contact
If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our treatment of your personal information, please write to us by email or by post.
The Data Protection OfficerSalween Group Pte Ltd1 Keong Saik Road, Singapore 089109				
					Content That Means Business				
					
							
									Let's Talk

### Marketing Operations

Marketing Ops for a Strategic Foundation		
			Managing the technology and the data behind modern digital marketing. From website design and development through to a fully managed martech stack, we help you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. 		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Campaigns &amp; Distribution

Omnichannel Growth Marketing		
			Strategy meets execution through targeted PR and media outreach, social media management, field marketing and events, and tactical paid campaigns to complement your organic reach.		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Content Studio &amp; Multimedia Production

Insightful B2B Content at Scale		
			We are founded and managed by former journalists, and content production is at the heart of everything we do. Original, educational, and insightful content for every step of the buyer journey.		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Marketing Strategy &amp; Consulting

Content-Driven Omnichannel Marketing		
			Marketing strategy across owned, earned, and paid channels that targets your ideal customers. 		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Intellectual Property Policy

Salween Group IP Policy		
		Policy on notification of alleged intellectual property ("IP") infringements.Salween Group Pte Ltd ("Salween Group") respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same.It is Salween Group's policy, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, to disable and/or terminate the account or access of users who repeatedly infringe or are repeatedly charged with infringing the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others.If you are an IP owner, or are authorized to act on behalf of one, please report alleged IP infringements taking place on or through the Site and Application by completing the following Notice of Alleged Infringement and delivering it to Salween Group as described below.Upon receipt of the Notice as described below, Salween Group will take whatever action, in its sole discretion, it deems appropriate, including removal of the challenged material from the Site and Application.Notice of Alleged Infringement ("Notice")Identify the specific protected work that you claim has been infringed, or - if multiple works are covered by this Notice - you may provide a representative list of the works that you claim have been infringed.Identify the material that you claim is infringing (or to be the subject of infringing activity) and that you believe should be removed or access to which should to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material, including at a minimum, if applicable, the URL of the link shown on the Site and Application where such material may be found.Provide your mailing address, telephone number, and, if available, email address.Include both of the following statements in the body of the Notice:"I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the identified material is not authorized by the IP owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use).""I hereby state that the information in this Notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the IP rights that are allegedly infringed."Provide your full legal name and your electronic or physical signature.Deliver this Notice, with all items completed, to:Salween Group Pte Ltd143 Cecil Street, #25-01 GB BuildingSingapore 069542contact@salweengroup.com		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Thank You

Contact Us		
			Your Content Marketing Journey Starts with a Conversation		
			Thanks for reaching out! We have received your message and one of our Content Strategists will get back to you shortly to start the conversation. We usually respond within a few working hours.

### Our Team

Award-Winning Strategists, Creatives, Marketers and Big Thinkers				
		Sylvia Saw McKaigeFounder & CEO
		Sylvia Saw McKaigeFounder & CEOSylvia steers the Salween Group ship. Her entrepreneurial spirit, pragmatic approach and knack for bringing out the best in people has shaped who we are and what we do. With nearly two decades of experience in media and communications, Sylvia understands clients' perspectives and shares their vision. Her experiences in balancing the best of editorial and commercial content mean she's always ready to embrace the challenges and the potential of the region.
		Zachary PestanaLead Content Strategist
		Zachary PestanaLead Content StrategistZachary brings over 10 years of experience in content marketing to the team. With deep expertise in content strategy and brand positioning, Zachary specialises in crafting compelling narratives that help businesses drive brand growth and market leadership, leveraging his broad experience across the technology, fintech, recruitment and education sectors.
		Yidan HuangMarketing Business Development Manager
		Yidan HuangMarketing Business Development ManagerYidan is a marketing and communications professional with five years of experience in China and Singapore. Her diverse background includes roles at IKEA, Huawei and DJI, where she honed her project management skills. Fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, she's excels at bridging cultures and swiftly understanding customer needs.
		ZarniGraphic Designer
		ZarniGraphic DesignerZarni is a highly experienced graphic designer passionate about branding and typography. For over 10 years, he has been creating engaging visual content, individually and with teams, for various companies in the digital world.
		Sherry ChuaDigital Designer
		Sherry ChuaDigital DesignerSherry is a versatile creative with eight years of experience across various industries. Her expertise in marketing and design enables her to expertly craft impactful consumer journeys. Previously, she served as a creative lead for premium European brands looking to expand in APAC, contributing to rapid growth. At Salween Group, she continues to prioritise lifelong learning to deliver top-notch results.
		Ferlin FrangeCreative Director
		Ferlin FrangeCreative DirectorWith over 15 years of experience in web design and development, Ferlin leads our digital team. He always challenges himself to think out of the box for user interaction and experience design to fulfil both his creative streak and our client's business goals and objectives.
		David McKaigeDirector of Operations
		David McKaigeDirector of OperationsDavid was an award-winning news and current affairs cameraman and producer before venturing into the technical operations world. With a career progression from broadcast operations to financial and capital markets operations, he brings his depth of specialised experience to lead Salween Group's marketing operations team and manages the martech stack.      
					Content That Means Business				
					
							
									Let's Talk

### Perspectives

News & Views From the Frontlines of B2B Marketing		
			Insights and opinions on growth marketing and marketing operations		
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Work

Transforming B2B Brands Through Content		
			Discover our clients' success stories		
			Some Brands We Have Helped Transform		
			
											
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
						Let's Talk

### Home

B2B Content Marketing Agency		
			Your brand has a story. Your customers need to hear it. We’ll help you tell it.		
			We're a boutique but full-service agency that fuels business growth by creating, executing and managing dynamic demand-generation programmes. Our content-driven omnichannel approach brings global brands to Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asian brands to the world.		
			
							
									Let's Talk
					
			Brands That Trust Us		
											
			
									Case Studies & Results
					
			The Salween Group Difference		
			Agency help without the agency hassle		
			
							
									Contact Us
					
																										
			Journalism Pedigree		
			Cut through the noise with differentiated content. Founded by award-winning former journalists who are storytellers at heart, our B2B content marketing team brings clarity to the complex through compelling copy and visuals, illuminating your message for greater impact.		
																										
			Driven by Outcomes		
			Our outcome-focused methodology lives at the intersection of marketing and sales, optimising buyer journeys from raised hand to revenue. Our sales and marketing operations expertise enables a better experience for your buyers, and clearer data for your Board. 		
																										
			Boutique by Design		
			No account managers! You deal directly with the senior strategists and project leaders doing the work. Experience a boutique-style partnership with a flexible, agile team that collaborates without silos.		
			
							
									Contact Us
					
			B2B marketing is hard. Today's buyer journey involves multiple stakeholders and self-directed research across various channels before they even reach out to talk to you. Providing helpful, differentiated content that educates the buyer along every step of that journey builds awareness and trust. We are here to help.		
			Our Services		
			B2B marketing is content marketing and our proposition is simple. Clear copy, engaging graphics and compelling video tells your story, and an enterprise-grade marketing technology stack pushes it out across paid, earned, and owned channels enabling your growth.		
	Marketing Strategy & ConsultingContent-driven omnichannel marketing strategy across owned earned, and paid channels. Persona and customer journey development informs content planning and SEO.
	Content Studio & Multimedia ProductionWe create original, educational, and insightful multimedia content for every step of the buyer journey. From articles and white papers to social posts and video, content fuels demand. 
	Campaigns & DistributionProduction meets execution and delivery  through targeted PR and media outreach, social media management, field marketing and events, and tactical paid campaigns that compliment your organic reach.
	Marketing OperationsManaging the tools and the data behind modern digital marketing. From website design and development through to a fully managed MarTech stack, we help you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
								Marketing Strategy & Consulting 							
								Content-driven omnichannel marketing strategy across owned earned, and paid channels. Persona and customer journey development informs content planning and SEO.
Learn more
								Content Studio & Multimedia Production							
								We are founded and managed by former journalists, and content production is at the heart of everything we do. Original, educational, and insightful content for every step of the buyer journey.Learn more
								Campaigns & Distribution							
								Strategy meets execution through targeted PR and media outreach, social media management, field marketing and events, and tactical paid campaigns to compliment your organic reach.Learn more
								Marketing Operations							
								Managing the tools and the data behind modern digital marketing. From website design and development through to a fully managed MarTech stack, we help you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.Learn more
			Positive Impact Through Smart Content		
			Helping founders and marketing leaders achieve their growth goals since 2012 		
			
							
									View All Case Studies
					
			
									View All Case Studies
					
			Our Approach		
	Discover Understanding your brand, your audience, and your competition
	DefineMarketing goals and strategy crafted to align with your business goals and objectives
	Create Expert copywriting, design, and multimedia production brings clarity and focus to your message
	DistributeTouching every part of the customer journey across owned, earned, and paid channels
	Measure & OptimiseAnalysis and insights for data-driven, iterative marketing
								Discover							
								Understanding your brand, your audience, and your competition
								Define							
								Marketing goals and strategy crafted to align with your business goals and objectives
								Create							
								Expert copywriting, design, and multimedia production brings clarity and focus to your message
								Distribute							
								Touching every part of the customer journey across owned, earned, and paid channels
								Measure & Optimise							
								Analysis and insights for data-driven, iterative marketing
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
									Let's Talk

### About

B2B Content Marketing Agency		
			Boutique but Full-Service		
			Our mission is to promote better understanding and empathy through communication. That aim is the foundation of our company's culture and our people embody it. We come from diverse and vibrant backgrounds in broadcast media, journalism, design and production, all united by our passion for creating compelling, impactful content that starts conversations.		
			Why Salween Group? 		
			Companies rely on us for our regional expertise and unique strengths in brand storytelling. With digital marketing becoming increasingly commoditised, our bespoke solutions help B2B and select B2C brands rise above the noise and be heard. 		
																										
			Journalism Pedigree		
			Cut through the noise with differentiated content. Founded by award-winning former journalists who are storytellers at heart, our B2B content marketing team brings clarity to the complex through compelling copy and visuals, illuminating your message for greater impact.		
																										
			Driven by Outcomes		
			Our outcome-focused methodology lives at the intersection of marketing and sales, optimising buyer journeys from raised hand to revenue. Our sales and marketing operations expertise enables a better experience for your buyers, and clearer data for your Board.		
																										
			Boutique by Design		
			No account managers! You deal directly with the senior strategists and project leaders doing the work. Experience a boutique-style partnership with a flexible, agile team that collaborates without silos.		
			Our Approach		
			Our omnichannel approach puts your brand and story in front of your audience at every step, while iterative optimisation ensures continuous improvement.		
	Discover From stakeholder analysis, questionnaires and audits to brand discovery workshops, we gain a deep understanding of your brand, business, products and users. We work through personas and user stories to draw up requirement matrixes to uncover unmet needs before moving on to the define stage. 
	DefineThe brand experience plan gets charted now. We define goals, KPIs and success metrics and develop a roadmap across desired brand touchpoints and channels. Idea generation begins. We gear strategy blueprints to achieve your brand's objectives and North Star goals. 
	Create Our content and design teams work harmoniously to craft a meaningful blend of visual and text synergy. Templates and structured outputs are born for scalability and brand uniformity. 
	DistributeImplementation happens. We publish content and roll out designs according to the strategy devised.
	Measure & OptimiseData analysis, testing, reporting, continuous optimisation and project reviews occur at this stage. We measure and evaluate results, documenting gaps, learnings and areas of improvement and placing them in line for the next iteration. 
								Discover							
								From stakeholder analysis, questionnaires and audits to brand discovery workshops, we gain a deep understanding of your brand, business, products and users. We work through personas and user stories to draw up requirement matrixes to uncover unmet needs before moving on to the define stage.
								Define							
								The brand experience plan gets charted now. We define goals, KPIs and success metrics and develop a roadmap across desired brand touchpoints and channels. Idea generation begins. We gear strategy blueprints to achieve your brand&#8217;s objectives and North Star goals.
								Create							
								Our content and design teams work harmoniously to craft a meaningful blend of visual and text synergy. Templates and structured outputs are born for scalability and brand uniformity.
								Distribute							
								Implementation happens. We publish content and roll out designs according to the strategy devised.
								Measure & Optimise							
								Data analysis, testing, reporting, continuous optimisation and project reviews occur at this stage. We measure and evaluate results, documenting gaps, learnings and areas of improvement and placing them in line for the next iteration.
			We Are Social		
		[flockler site_uuid="16e684fd24c021d2690dc5895f4699b5" embed_uuid="17ac23634510457fe68b4a2006412b21"]				
			Content That Means Business		
			
							
									Let's Talk

### Services

Our services
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors.


						Social Media
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing.

learn more


						PPC
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing.

learn more


						SEO
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing.


learn more


						Strategy
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing.

learn more


						Increase Sales
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur.


						The ROI expert
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur.


						Best practices
This text briefly introduces your main services to your visitors. Lorem ipsum elementum tempus egestas sed sed. Eget nullam non nisi est sit amet facilisis magna. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur.
Ask us anything


How do I customize this widget?
Each question and answer are an item in an Toggle Widget. Change the number of items and customize their content in the editor panel.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.

															
How do I customize this widget?
Each question and answer are an item in an Toggle Widget. Change the number of items and customize their content in the editor panel.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.

															
Add a question frequently asked by visitors and answer it in the dropdown box.
A detailed answer to provide information about your business, build trust with potential clients, and help convince the visitor that you are a good fit for them.
Do you want to boost your business today?
This is your chance to invite visitors to contact you. Tell them you’ll be happy to answer all their questions as soon as possible.

contact us

### Contact

Contact Us		
			The Next Step in Your B2B Marketing Journey Starts with a Conversation		
			Our content-first approach works for growing B2B brands and can work for you too. Share your details with us here, and one of our Marketing Strategists will get back to you shortly to start the conversation.​ 		
			FAQs		
								Types of Engagement							
								How do you work? Retainer? Projects?About 70% of our work is based on annual retainers, and the bulk of those end up being multi-year relationships, a testament to our strong focus on our clients. The balance of our work is project-based, such as tactical campaigns, large events, and video production.I&#8217;ve been burned by agencies in the past and don&#8217;t want to sign an annual agreement. Can we try you out for three or six months first?We hear you! Quite a few of our clients sought us out after some frustrating experiences with the big guys. Nobody wants to be stuck in a relationship that isn&#8217;t working out, us included! Let&#8217;s talk and see what we can do for you.Do you work with B2C brands?We&#8217;ve done some amazing work with B2C brands like Kenwood and De&#8217;Longhi, who understand the value of content marketing and trusted us to create and manage their content hubs for some regional campaigns. We&#8217;d be happy to tell you more.Do you work with government agencies?We do when it fits within our core content marketing mandate, and we&#8217;ve delivered some highly effective results. The Indonesian Ministry of Trade has entrusted us for years to manage Indonesia Night and the Indonesian Pavilion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and in Singapore we work with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and SGInnovate.
								Pricing							
								How much do you charge?It depends!  Our retainer solution offers a fractional marketing team for a monthly investment starting around the cost of an experienced marketing headcount. And that&#8217;s a sweet spot for many of the CMOs and Marketing Managers we work with. We work as a scalable extension of their team.I&#8217;m not 100% sure what I need, so how can you price it?We offer Discovery as a paid service where we deep-dive into your brand and your competition and develop recommendations. You can then run with those recommendations on your own or get us onboard to help. What if my marketing goals change over the year?We fully expect they will! We know you may need to pivot between campaigns and content types and offer a flexible system of Content Credits. Your spend with us can be targeted where it is needed the most. Do you work with Singapore Government grants?For select clients, our Registered Management Consultants can work under the Enterprise Development Grant, specifically for Strategic Brand and Marketing Development. Contact us for more information.        


### Senior Content Strategist

The Salween Group is looking for an exceptional candidate to join our agency team in Singapore as Senior Content Strategist.


Content Strategists run the show in our boutique agency when it comes to owning the content creation process and consulting clients on marketing strategy. We are looking for an experienced strategist to help expand our brand storytelling and digital marketing capabilities for our clients in the B2B space.


B2B content marketing is one of the most exciting spaces in the communications industry today. With longer buyer journeys, multiple stakeholders, and multiple touchpoints, marketers have more opportunities to make a difference and drive business impact.   


The ideal candidate possesses organisational acumen, effective time management skills and proficiency in managing cross-platform content marketing projects.


Your capacity for efficient teamwork, collaborating with editors, designers and the rest of the team is crucial. This role also requires a strong interest in tech or topics related to startups and venture capital.


Job Scope and Responsibilities


Manage and building strong client relationships and being the day-to-day point of contact


Develop omnichannel content strategies for businesses across different industry verticals


Oversee and project manage ad hoc social media, lead generation and video campaigns. This includes writing clear briefs to team members, managing timelines and day-to-day external communications with clients.


Develop on-brand short-form copy for social media captions, landing pages, EDMs.


Contribute to brainstorming and ideation for client briefs.


Requirements


A minimum of 5 years relevant industry experience in account management, editorial, content marketing, social media marketing or advertising for B2B clients.


Exceptional multitasking abilities, along with strong organisational and detail-oriented traits.


Excellent verbal and written English skills.


Clear comprehension of content creation across various formats and media platforms.


Experience in managing content creation on LinkedIn is advantageous.


Effective collaborative and proactive work style.


Self-starter able to work independently.


A passion for lifelong learning


About Us


The Salween Group is a B2B content marketing agency that helps companies build their brands through smart content. Established in Singapore in 2012, the company is focused on Southeast Asia, bringing global brands to the region and regional brands to the world.


As an employer, we offer competitive pay and benefits, an inclusive workplace, and family-friendly working hours. We don’t have a pool table, but we do have a dartboard, really good coffee, and a mission to make the world a better place through communication.


Due to local regulations, only Singapore citizens or Permanent Residents are eligible for this role.


### Singapore FinTech Festival

Background


As the world’s largest FinTech festival, the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) has become the premier platform for the global FinTech community, where heads of state, policymakers, financial services leaders, founders, investors, and technology experts convene to shape the future of finance.


SFF approached us for support in driving sign-ups for its event and to bolster its standing as a key stakeholder in the global FinTech ecosystem.


Challenge


With many complex themes and topics on the agenda, the team at SFF looked to distil and convey the broader narrative around the event. Additionally, they wanted to capture and translate the dynamic energy and vibrant atmosphere at SFF across different touchpoints to highlight the event’s “wow” factor and ultimately boost sign-ups. 


Approach


Collaborating closely with Elevandi and Constellar, we developed a comprehensive content calendar for SFF’s primary LinkedIn channel to drive awareness of key topics and upcoming launches to be discussed at the event. Additionally, we provided extensive video coverage support for the three-day conference and side events, producing daily event highlight videos, speaker interview videos, attendee interview videos, and post-event sales videos.


Social Media — Building Anticipation for Speakers &amp; Sessions


Explainer carousel posts served to distil complex themes and topics, effectively showcasing SFF’s sector expertise, relevance, and capacity to foster deeper conversations within the global FinTech ecosystem.


[elementor-template id="58141"]


Creating Buzz and Driving Registrations for SFF


We produced a variety of pre-event videos and content in which the organisers articulated their vision for the SFF 2023 edition, offering insights into the extensive work that occurred behind the scenes.


[elementor-template id="58157"]


Engaging Attendees and Showcasing SFF’s Vibrant Atmosphere


Our on-site coverage featured comprehensive video recaps of each day’s events, meticulously produced and released within 24 hours to ensure timely engagement. Additionally, we conducted in-depth video interviews with prominent speakers, distinguished sponsors, and key participants, highlighting the extensive diversity and unparalleled expertise present at the event.


[elementor-template id="58161"]


Extending the Impact Beyond the Event


From the three-day event, we developed additional marketing and sales assets designed to sustain the buzz, drive ticket sales and exhibitor sign-ups for SFF 2024.


Outcomes


6.1x growth in total followers


9.7x growth in unique visitors via mobile devices


111% uplift in total impressions vs other content in the same period


167% uplift in total clicks vs other content in the same period

### Moka HR

Background


Moka HR, a leading Chinese AI-powered HR SaaS company, has served over 2,000 prominent brands, ranging from startups to Global 500 companies.


In 2024, they sought our expertise to strategically expand into overseas markets and enhance their brand’s digital presence.


Challenges


Despite its leadership position in China, Moka HR had limited visibility in overseas markets and needed to align its product features and unique value propositions in a way that would resonate internationally.


Compounding this challenge was the lack of digital content and resources in English and a tight deadline for developing their English-language website.


Approach


Leveraging our linguistic expertise, we efficiently mined their existing Chinese materials, extracting key value propositions suited for global distribution.


We also conducted a comprehensive audit of their corporate and founder's LinkedIn profiles, delivering a strategic proposal that established content pillars for ongoing social media operations to ensure a consistent and effective global digital presence.


Outcomes


4 weeks to fully develop the website


66% increase in Corporate LinkedIn page views


55.8% growth in unique visitors for Corporate LinkedIn

### The Cambodia Run

The Cambodia Run Challenge is a cross-country ultramarathon aimed at raising funds for Temple Garden Foundation (TGF), a charity organisation that creates sustainable change for rural communities in Cambodia.


It is also one of our passion projects, and we support the Cambodia Run x TGF team through a 360-degree digital approach that includes a website, video production, a social media strategy, as well as collateral designs.


An Interactive Website Design


The modern hub of any charity is its website. It should be a platform where visitors can find out anything and everything about their work and be able to donate seamlessly through a clear call-to-action.


To ensure that the website donation funnel accepted donations from locations across the world, multiple donation methods via PayPal and Give2Asia were integrated with the website.


We designed a website that was interactive and simple yet informative without being too wordy. By using a mixture of images, videos, and infographics, the website could convey hard facts and figures in an effective and visually engaging manner without being too text-heavy.


[elementor-template id="54348"]


Using Videos to Evoke Emotions


Video storytelling harnesses the power of emotions and builds a connection with the audience – which words and images may fail to mirror in certain scenarios.


We produced two 1-minute pre-run videos to articulate TGF's impact, not just on the community they help, but on alleviating poverty in Cambodia.


Post-event, a series of videos were produced and shared on social media to capture the runners’ journey and personal breakthroughs during the 7-day run.


By showing the cause and effect of the team’s dedication, the videos delivered a compelling story that encouraged contribution to the cause.


[elementor-template id="54402"]


Communicating Through a Social Media Strategy


Building a presence through social media without a defined strategy can be counterproductive.


With our strategy defined by goals, we had a calendar that was pre-filled with content in advance. Cambodia Run's Instagram was fully managed by us, and we worked tightly with the TGF team to leverage their social media channels and outreach.


Our team was on-ground to document the sights and scenes on Instagram, effectively using social media as a live broadcasting platform.


Media Outreach


We initiated a short press campaign, which covered the week leading up to the Challenge as well as a few weeks post-Challenge.


Aside from the two press releases created for Southeast Asian business media, Challenge founder Mark Ferguson and TGF Co-chair Brad Levitt were also pitched to media outlets so that they could speak on the importance of this initiative and what it stood for.

### Creating Events to Showcase Thought Leadership

As a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum, Lippo aimed to elevate their executive team's visibility in Davos. They tasked Salween with organising a two-hour lunch event 'The Indonesia Lunch Dialogue' at the Belvedere Hotel.


[elementor-template id="54131"]


Lippo's objective is to enhance its reputation as an emerging market pioneer and a bridge to Indonesia for foreign investors, achieved by delivering an inclusive, engaging, and informative experience for global leaders.


The event reached full capacity, hosting approximately 100 to 120 attendees, primarily composed of C-Suite and Business Decision Makers.


[elementor-template id="54173"]


Salween managed all aspects of this custom event, including invitation design, attendee management, speaker recruitment, format development, script writing, logistics such as stage setup, room decoration, and menu selection. We also filmed the event, producing segments, highlight videos and several social media clips.

### Oddbods&lt;br/&gt;(One Animation)

Oddbods is a Singaporean cartoon television series produced by One Animation. Aimed at preschool-age children, the show is broadcast in over 180 countries, with 10 million subscribers on YouTube. In early 2021, One Animation approached Salween to engage parents of preschoolers in the US and UK with informative, educational and fun content to raise the profile of the Oddbods brand and boost fan growth organically. They needed a content marketing agency with an excellent grasp of international markets and expertise across social media, online campaigns, content strategy, design and copywriting.  &nbsp;


[elementor-template id="41737"]


The Birth of Oddblog&nbsp;&nbsp;


In a crowded children's cartoon market, Salween had to find a way to create a unique, compelling narrative to win the hearts and minds of parents — value-adding to their parenthood journey. In the summer of 2021, the "Oddblog" was born. Under the Learn, Grow and Play pillars, we created a series of high-quality articles and amplified them on Oddbods' social media platforms. We partnered with parenting communities and preschool thought-leaders in the US, leveraging their expertise and influence to support parents while sharing the learning values of Oddbods. The "Oddblog" became a useful source of comfort for parents — inspiring, authentic, yet relatable.&nbsp;


Entering a New Market: Indonesia Campaign&nbsp;


One Animation wanted to penetrate the Indonesian market via a Tokopedia launch for Oddbods merchandise. Salween Group planned a tactical campaign to create hype and excitement around the event. We also produced Summer Back to School, Halloween and Christmas campaigns throughout the year. 

### Branding Indonesia on the World Stage

Indonesia has emerged as one of Asia’s most attractive destinations for foreign investment, and the Indonesian government and business community want to be putting their best foot forward on a global stage. At the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings in Davos, Switzerland, we created a platform just for that.


[elementor-template id="48686"]


Both the Indonesia Night and Indonesia Pavilion have become flagship events at the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings, and as of 2023, this marks the seventh year Salween Group has been involved in organising and marketing them.


The goal of the events is to spark international awareness and conversations about Indonesia by showcasing the country’s uniquely diverse cultural heritage and business opportunities on a major world stage. The Indonesian government and the business community jointly organise the events.


Event and Sponsorship Management


We conceptualised the branding of both events, Indonesia Night and Indonesia Pavilion, and coordinated sponsorship coverage, event programmes, microsites, and RSVP management.


From managing media opportunities and special guest invites to creating promotional materials, every aspect was meticulously planned and executed by our team.


Our work included email marketing to a select list of VIPs, venue conceptualisation and design, on-ground event management and vendor management, and post-event content production of both curated photographs and videos.


Indonesia Night 2023 Highlights


[elementor-template id="48617"]


Salween Group has organised the past seven Indonesia Night events held on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The one-night RSVP-only event showcases the best of Indonesian culture, food, performing arts, and opportunities to over 700 guests.


Indonesia Pavilion 2023 Highlights


[elementor-template id="48893"]


We also organised the Indonesia Pavilion, a week-long event space for meaningful workshops hosted by the Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) to further complement Indonesia Night.


2023 marked the fourth time the Indonesia Pavilion made it to Davos.


Indonesia Night and Indonesia Pavilion have become sought-after events where WEF attendees could network with strategic partners. Both have received strong support and positive feedback year after year, further establishing Indonesia as an investment stronghold in Southeast Asia.

### Eu Capital

Independent asset management firm Eu Capital needed our help to refresh their website and provide marketing support to promote their services. The boutique asset management company, led by founder Kelvin Eu, worked closely with our team to produce an updated website with stronger branding, as well as regular content production to educate a high-net-worth audience (and potential customers) about investments, financial strategies and industry developments.


This niche market required us to propose digital marketing strategies to keep an HNW audience engaged with the Eu Capital brand. As part of our services, we also support Eu Capital with social media management with a focus on LinkedIn, growing the network and connecting with working professionals on a targeted platform.


Website Refresh​


Featuring a more sleek look and feel to capture a modern brand, we revamped the website with a reimagination of their corporate colours, and provided copywriting to reflect a stronger brand voice. The website was also produced in three languages: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.


Content Strategy and Creation


We assessed key content categories that would be relevant to Eu Capital’s target audience, and created content for the website, which would become a resource for independent financial advice, industry updates and financial strategies.


[elementor-template id="48709"]


Social Media Management


Content is amplified on social media, in this case, LinkedIn. As part of our deliverables for all clients, we created a social media guidebook to align branding and content strategies. On their new LinkedIn page, our goal is to grow the Eu Capital network, and engage with users on a professional level.


Branded Print Collaterals


Understanding Eu Capital’s clientele, we designed printed collaterals such as a branded folder and investment factsheets to educate potential clients about the firm.

### Onlayer

Background


Onlayer is an end-to-end merchant management platform that streamlines onboarding, compliance, monitoring and insights to mitigate risk and secure growth at every stage of the digital business lifecycle.


Having conquered the Turkish market, they pursued global expansion and sought a marketing partner to help them bring their story to the world.


Challenge


Onlayer sought to refresh its brand visual identity and sharpen its market positioning, supported by a modern revenue operations technology stack, to better represent its status as a fast-growing platform company breaking into new markets.


Approach


Starting with a high-level audit of the Onlayer brand, customers, competition, collaterals and infrastructure, we identified existing gaps and opportunities. This, together with a few rounds of product and sales deep-dives, formed the backbone of our strategic recommendations across refreshed brand identity, on-brand sales collaterals and growth-enabling martech setup.


[elementor-template id="58070"]


Outcomes


Created a comprehensive sales toolkit with competitive analyses and master sales deck with use cases


Optimised the company LinkedIn pages and developed on-brand graphics for even marketing.


Setup a new CRM from scratch covering onboarding, implementation and ongoing consulting.


Defined pipeline stages and qualification criteria and developed playbooks and user guides for team members.


Successfully migrated their entire database from spreadsheets to HubSpot for a centralised, real-time view of revenue &amp; forecasts.


Set up actionable reports and dashboards used by in-house sales teams and partner co-selling teams.

### Sirius Technologies

Background


Sirius Technologies is a rapidly growing composable application platform that enables banks and financial institutions to scale effortlessly and introduce new digital products while safeguarding their legacy IT investments. ​Their investors approached us at a key point in their journey, post-Series A and on the path towards Series B.


Challenge


Sirius Technologies sought to strengthen its messaging and value proposition across different touchpoints and standardise its sales assets to drive stronger engagement with key stakeholders.


Approach


In close collaboration with the Founder and the product and sales teams, we conducted structured discovery sessions to develop a 6-month sprint program prioritised into 30-day, 90-day and 180-day deliverables to elevate the brand, establish tight sales and marketing alignment, and kickstart a steady stream of thought leadership content.


Brand Revamp


The young company's brand assets were limited to a logo and a basic colour guide.​​​​


We expanded on that to develop a set of proper brand guidelines, including iterations of their logo, font usage guidelines and colour palettes.​


New brand assets were then developed, including business cards, letterhead, name cards, email signatures, and presentation decks, which elevated their visual identity to a new level.​​


Website Design


We did a complete revamp of Sirius Technologies’ website, managing the end-to-end process from defining key website objectives, to establishing the Information Architecture, creating content and key visuals, designing the user experience, as well as implementing integrations with marketing analytics tools and the CRM system.


Sales Enablement


In close consultation with Sirius Technologies’ customer-facing teams, we created a comprehensive sales toolkit that included a corporate profile, product brochures, a master sales deck, and explainer videos and case studies.​​


All of this was designed to answer customer questions and address objections, making the sales process easier. ​​


Social Media Management


LinkedIn is the social channel of choice in B2B marketing. We optimised the company and founder’s LinkedIn pages and developed key content pillars for regular posting.​


Revenue Operations


We setup a new CRM from scratch covering onboarding, implementation and ongoing consulting.


Successfully migrated their entire database from spreadsheets to HubSpot for a centralised, real-time view of revenue &amp; forecasts.


Set up actionable reports and dashboards used in weekly commercial update meetings and quarterly board review meetings.


Defined pipeline stages and qualification criteria and developed playbooks and user guides for team members.


Providing ongoing Revenue-Ops-As-A-Service to unlock additional value from the CRM.


Outcomes


Launched the new website including copywriting, design and information architecture in under 30 days, with regular publishing of insightful articles and reports post launch.


48% of traffic to website is driven by organic search, indicating growing brand awareness


+87% healthy increase in average impressions on LinkedIn


+79% engagements on LinkedIn

### Laiye

Robotic process automation (RPA) player Laiye provides a software platform that blends automation, AI, and analytics for efficient workflows and rapid digital transformation. Founded in China, the company aimed to expand globally, establishing itself in EMEA, the Americas, and Asia Pacific.​&nbsp;


Salween Group was an integral part of Laiye’s global expansion strategy. ​ We worked closely with their newly-formed global marketing team to deliver comprehensive multi-channel digital and content marketing strategies, PR and communications plans, and website redesign for their international markets.


We started with the basics. The company’s web presence and online community had been focused on the domestic market, so overhauling the English-language messaging and website content was the first step.&nbsp;


Updated sales enablement content followed, mirroring the messaging of the website.  


With the foundations built, a comprehensive PR and media strategy integrated with social media posts, SEO-optimised long-form articles, and monthly newsletters brought Laiye into the global spotlight, positioning the company as a leader in the automation space.​

### Singapore Fintech Association (SFA)

Background


Singapore FinTech Association (SFA) is a cross-industry, non-profit platform that facilitates collaboration between all market participants and stakeholders in the FinTech ecosystem within Singapore and the rest of the world. ​SFA approached us for support in boosting awareness of its role within the global FinTech ecosystem and communicating its mission of advocacy, collaboration, and connecting the community.


Challenge


SFA sought to cogently demonstrate the value of its membership through a strategic omnichannel marketing approach that highlights its impactful initiatives, partnerships, and expertise within the regional FinTech ecosystem.


Approach


As SFA's fractional marketing communications team, we provide ongoing strategic leadership to enhance brand visibility and drive engagement. Working closely with cross-functional teams, we supported the development of a full-year omnichannel marketing calendar to position SFA as a FinTech thought leader.


Content Marketing


LinkedIn posts


Email newsletters


Infographics


Videos


Event support (talking points)


Growing the Brand


We created a video featuring key industry leaders articulating SFA’s brand vision, impact and benefits for the regional FinTech community and ecosystem. Additionally, we created a comprehensive "Year in Review 2023" post, showcasing key initiatives and milestones achieved throughout the year.


[elementor-template id="58169"]


Engaging the Community


We developed social posts and EDM newsletters showcasing SFA’s variety of programmes, events, and opportunities, thereby demonstrating its efforts in fostering consistent engagement with its members and partners within the regional FinTech community.


Event Drivers


We collaborated with SFA to support the world’s largest FinTech event, the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF), helping to create visual and marketing materials to drive sponsorship and registration for the Singapore Pavilion and the SFF FinTech Excellence Awards 2024.


SFA also periodically organises knowledge-sharing sessions and courses to help its members better understand FinTech trends and gain key industry insights. SFA also regularly conducts networking sessions to help its members find business and partnership opportunities. To support its efforts, we created marketing materials to help SFA drive sign-ups for these events. 


Outcomes


300% growth in LinkedIn impressions


20% growth in LinkedIn followers


17% increase in newsletter contacts in 2024


7.7% newsletter subscribers' growth in 2024

### De&#039;Longhi

The Prima Donna Life blog was mooted as a content marketing campaign that highlights individuals who are experts in their own fields — who seek precision in everything they do, even in a cup of coffee. Our scope includes original branding ideation, an online magazine, two social media channel, paid search and social media, and an advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketing automation that could generate and identify leads.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="41224"]


Spotlighting Prima Donnas In Their Own Right&nbsp;&nbsp;


The centre of De’Longhi’s campaign is its Prima Donnas — unique individuals who are passionate in their fields and have a unique story to tell. Produced and shot entirely in-house, our team conceptualised each piece after thorough research on inspiring and talented Singaporeans and Malaysians. As a collective, the films provide a rare glimpse into the life and inspiration behind each individual.​&nbsp;


Aligning Content Strategy With Users' Journey and Person​&nbsp;


We deployed rich content with 'soft' product-centric content including video highlights, engaging articles and infographics on coffee, lifestyle and travel.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="41488"]

### YPO

A Content Hub for Global Leaders&nbsp;


In early 2020, YPO — an organisation recognised as the home for global leaders — approached us to build a Content Hub in Davos. They needed to find an agency with the right balance of global production expertise, an expert team of copywriters who could write quickly and prior knowledge of navigating the Davos experience. This was the first time YPO took event space in Davos at the World Economic Forum and needed to get it right.&nbsp;


In Davos, the organisation aimed to build an inclusive Content Hub: a place where global trailblazers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and world leaders could come together in meaningful conversations extending beyond Davos — creating ideas and sparking conversations around the world.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="42790"]


Taking Centre Stage Through Content&nbsp;


We got to work by asking the right questions of some high-level, world-renowned leaders — H.E. Sun Chanthol, Senior Minister for Public Works and Transport and Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan — to develop the ambitious content themes for the event.&nbsp; From there, we provided services that ranged from programme planning to content production and full event coordination whilst managing and amplifying ideas via a microsite and social media.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="42784"]

### Kenwood

Content for the Kitchen&nbsp;


Long-standing partner Kenwood invited Salween Group to create a kick-ass new campaign and content-rich website to engage the health-focused home cook.&nbsp;


The well-known brand had one clear goal — educate, inform, and entertain the customer without the hard sell of traditional advertising.&nbsp;


The Love Wholesome campaign became a textbook example of content marketing in action.&nbsp;


Using storytelling techniques and great design to bring the recipes to life — the Salween Group team created the website and managed an extensive content pipeline supported by a paid omnichannel outreach plan.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="41102"]


Building a Newsroom&nbsp;


The website was run (by us) like a traditional newsroom — with specialist writers contributing to the news agenda, creating story angles and feature ideas that fed the bigger content pipeline. Video and infographics complimented articles, giving the site a modern mix of shareable content to engage the customer.&nbsp;


We chose to reach the different audience groups with the right content at the right point in their journey. Our plan was supported by a tactical PPC (Google Search &amp; Display) campaign whilst managing ads on the site to drive targeted traffic to the Kenwood e-commerce site.&nbsp;


Our team used regular EDMs and newsletters to engage the community further, with traditional tactical and seasonal campaigns complimenting the evergreen message; EDMs and landing pages worked as a powerful combination.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="42721"]

### GGV Capital

A Vision for Asia&nbsp;


GGV Capital is a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders and aims to help startup teams win and scale. Since the beginning, the organisation has worked to establish a growing community of listeners with their successful bi-monthly podcast — Evolving for The Next Billion. The team was looking to expand its community in Asia — a recognised hotbed for innovative startups and entrepreneurs — using a new content strategy and digital assets that would strengthen its position as a thought leader.&nbsp;


The task was two-fold: create an inspirational brand position to encourage a new cohort of founders to join the community and produce from scratch a content strategy and all the digital assets, including a content-rich website, podcasts, articles, and support with managed web services and social media amplification.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="41689"]


Content Marketing &amp; Social Outreach&nbsp;


Our team took the lead and came up with a position — The Next Billion — an idea rooted in helping founders to better the lives of the next billion internet users. Next, we created 'The Next Billion’ website, a content hub that brought the idea to life with rich, engaging content and acted as a valuable resource for a tech-focused audience who wants to make a difference.&nbsp;&nbsp;


To further inspire the audience, we chose tactics such as creating 'Ask Me Anything' sessions with Managing Partners, videos featuring portfolio companies and well-researched articles on culture, trends, and other industry insights. Channel activation includes a new regional LinkedIn page that curated content from the Next Billion (podcasts and choice reads), relevant news and valuable insights — all to establish GGV’s position as a solid regional thought leader.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="42733"]

### Thunes

Creating Stories at Scale


Coming off an accelerated growth track with a string of successful acquisitions, fintech startup Thunes needed to increase awareness and understanding of their product. Not only did they want to build a content strategy around crucial business milestones (such as their Series B funding), but they also aimed to communicate their broader growth story to the world. More importantly, they operated in a crowded fintech and payments landscape and needed to cement their position as a cross-border visionary.


Their ambition was to tell their story at scale.


[elementor-template id="40939"]


Setting a New Standard for Content


Salween Group came on board at this critical moment to work with Thunes on several fronts — these included defining their integrated content strategy, crafting themes, writing, producing in-depth content and managing all outreach across earned, owned and paid media. We also created a content strategy for one of their core products — 'Business Hub' — to engage their core ‘users of payment solutions’ audience. We helped them build landing pages, easy-to-use interfaces, action-focused copy, impactful design elements, and targeted EDM.


Since working with them, Thunes has become one of the leading players in the cross-border payments space. Our direct impact on their business delivered a 300% increase in LinkedIn followers and over 3,000 earned mentions across multiple media.


[elementor-template id="41576"]


### CRM Service Request Portal

Is there something you are trying to figure out in your CRM and need a little help? Please provide a clear headline and as much detail as you can.


[hubspot portal="23283633" id="4acd0b99-2c48-447b-a921-cd0711d9881e" type="form"]

### Advisory Solutions for VC &amp; Startups

HubSpot for startups		
			Are you a pre Series B startup?		
			Get expert HubSpot onboarding — for free		
			If you’re moving from founder-led sales to a repeatable, effective sales motion, you need a solid CRM setup.  

We offer this service free — to two handpicked  
B2B startups each month.  		
			
							
									Apply for a Spot
					
			Valued at $1500. Limited to 2 per month.		
			
							
									See if You're Eligible
					
			Spreadsheets aren't scalable		
			You’re ready to get serious about your sales.		
			And you know you need a CRM.		
			If you’re like thousands of B2B startups, you’re seriously considering HubSpot: it’s one of the most popular CRMs — and they offer two valuable perks to teams through their  
HubSpot for Startups programme:		
								
									
							Up to 75% off software fees						
					
								
							No mandatory paid onboarding						
					
			These savings are great!		
			But there’s a catch. 		
			When startups DIY their HubSpot onboarding, it usually leads to		
					
							
										Poor implementation
									
								
										Poor adoption
									
								
										Inaccurate data
									
								
										Eventually, an expensive rip-and-replace.
									
						
			This is why up to 70% of CRM implementations fail. 		
			Journal of Money and Economy, 2022		
			Getting CRM setup wrong is costly and time-consuming —  hurting both the startup and their VC investors.		
			 We can help.  		
			Complimentary Offer		
			Get expert HubSpot onboarding from our  
in-house specialists — for free 		
			A $1500 value		
																										
		Over 8 focused weeks, we set your team up in HubSpot to maximise efficiency — and sales. We take the time to understand your needs, develop tailored processes, and teach you proven techniques to make HubSpot work for you. By the end of the programme, you’ll have a CRM with precise reporting and forecasting capabilities, along with a repeatable, scalable sales process that empowers you to concentrate on revenue and growth.				
								
									
						We’ve seen the messes firsthand. We’ve seen how DIY setup can derail sales and paralyse growth for years, because nobody wants to use the CRM. 					
								
									
						We’ve worked with B2B startups for over a decade. We know what it’s like to be tight on budget.					
								
									
						We want to be a valuable partner early in your startup's growth journey, committed to your long-term success.					
								
									
						Our hope is you will see the value we bring and that we are a pleasure to work with. Ideally, we’ll be top-of-mind should you need any marketing or revenue operations support down the road.					
			NOTE: We cap this offer to two B2B startups per month.		
			
							
									Apply for a Spot
					
			
									See if You're Eligible
					
			How It Works		
			8 weeks and your CRM is ready to go		
			Access our startup & scaleup expertise, honed over a decade		
			01		
			Blueprint		
							During a 60 to 90-minute stakeholder call, we’ll deep-dive into your goals &amp; processes — and ask questions like:						
					
							
										What are your highest-priority HubSpot goals?
									
								
										What are your organisation’s capabilities? 
									
								
										What does your current tech stack look like?
									
						
							Using that info, we’ll customise an effective, efficient onboarding plan.						
			02		
			Build		
							Over the course of 8 weeks, you’ll access our guided email training course. In each email, you’ll be prompted to complete simple, specific (but critical) tasks directly in HubSpot, like:						
					
							
										Map your sales process to the CRM.
									
								
										Add tracking code to your website.
									
								
										Build a newsletter and send it to your list.
									
								
										Connect your team email to the CRM.
									
						
			03		
			Refine		
							HubSpot is known for its robust support, but sometimes you need a little more attention. If you need more support as you implement, you can work directly with our CRM experts — in up to one hour of consultancy per week. With personalised attention and expert guidance, you’ll be able to:						
					
							
										Resolve outstanding kinks.
									
								
										Optimise your workflows.
									
								
										Turn your CRM into a sales machine.
									
						
			01		
			Blueprint		
		During a 60 to 90-minute stakeholder call, we’ll deep-dive into your goals &amp; processes — and ask questions like:				
					
							
										What are your highest-priority HubSpot goals?
									
								
										What are your organisation’s capabilities? 
									
								
										What does your current tech stack look like?
									
						
		Using that info, we’ll customise an effective, efficient onboarding plan.				
			02		
			Build		
		Over the course of 8 weeks, you’ll access our guided email training course. In each email, you’ll be prompted to complete simple, specific (but critical) tasks directly in HubSpot, like:				
					
							
										Map your sales process to the CRM.
									
								
										Add tracking code to your website.
									
								
										Build a newsletter and send it to your list.
									
								
										Connect your team email to the CRM.
									
						
			03		
			Refine		
		HubSpot is known for its robust support, but sometimes you need a little more attention. If you need more support as you implement, you can work directly with our CRM experts — in up to one hour of consultancy per week. With personalised attention and expert guidance, you’ll be able to:				
					
							
										Resolve outstanding kinks.
									
								
										Optimise your workflows.
									
								
										Turn your CRM into a sales machine.
									
						
			“Wait. Why are you offering this for free?”		
			Simple:		
			We want to make quality friends along the way. 		
								
									
							Avoid DIY mistakes						
					
									
						Sidestep the most common issues: choose the right products (the ones you really need), and get an optimised setup from the start.					
								
									
							Ensure team adoption						
					
									
						Poor setup usually ends in poor adoption. With expert setup, your sales team will actually use the CRM to drive consistent growth.					
								
									
							Graduate from founder-led						
					
									
						Remove the bottleneck. Enable the move from founder-led sales to a structured, CRM-managed sales process.					
								
									
							Get accurate forecasting & reporting						
					
									
						Access precise, reliable insights into your sales performance. Track progress effectively, make informed decisions, and scale with confidence.					
			Expert Advisory		
			We are platform-agnostic		
			Our only vested interest: your success.		
																										
		We love Hubspot. We’re a HubSpot Solution Partner, and we’ve worked with plenty of clients who are killing it with HubSpot. That said — we’ve also migrated many clients to other CRMs that better serve their needs. That’s why a core part of this complimentary service is advisory. We’ll dig deep and answer three key questions:				
					
							
										Is HubSpot really what you need?
									
								
										If yes, which products do you really need — Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, or all of the above?
									
								
										Professional or Enterprise? (We don’t want you to overcommit to redundant features.)
									
						
			Because there’s one thing we hate: 		
			when cash-strapped startups overspend on products they don’t need. 		
			Plus, More Benefits		
			We pass on the savings to you		
																										
		As a HubSpot partner, we earn commissions when we facilitate your subscription.				
			And we give those right back to you.		
		To demonstrate our vendor neutrality, we credit the bulk of those commissions back to our clients’ accounts. That means you could enjoy up to an additional 15% savings on your HubSpot costs if you become a paying client later in our relationship.				
			Criteria		
			Are you eligible for this complimentary service?		
			If you are a B2B startup that		
					
							
										Is pre Series B
									
								
										Relies on a strong sales-led motion
									
								
										Wants to move from founder- to team-led sales
									
						
			…then you are a strong candidate. 
We’d be happy to meet with you and see if we’re a fit. 		
			
							
									Apply for a Spot
					
			FAQs		
			Frequently asked questions		
								Who is NOT a good fit for this offer?							
								Companies that are beyond Series B, or that operate at the enterprise level. Those startups require a deeper and more time-intensive approach. Our HubSpot for Startups offer works best with smaller teams who are migrating to a CRM for the first time.
								What if we need additional support beyond the scope of this offer?							
								We’d be happy to provide that support. We offer HubSpot admin as a service: HubSpot Admin Lite: Up to 6 hours/monthHubSpot Ops &amp; Maintenance: Up to 16 hours/month
								What’s the catch? Does this offer come with strings attached?							
								Nope. (Yes, we know that’s hard to believe!) The only thing we may ask is for your help with the Proof of Involvement, a digital link that either Salween Group or HubSpot can provide (if we were involved in advising during the sales process). That earns us the commissions we credit back to you, as well as the points that keep us in the HubSpot Partner Program.
			A poor HubSpot setup can cripple your growth for years. 		
			Empower your sales, marketing, and customer success teams  with expert HubSpot onboarding — for free (a $1500 value). 		
		We’d be happy to learn about your setup and see if this special startup programme is a fit. Apply now via this form, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a no-obligation chat.

### Branding

Branding is the first thing we audit when talking to a new or potential client, and it should be. Your brand defines who you are as a business and differentiates you from your competition.


People come to us at different points on their brand journey. Some have mature, well-defined brands, while others are starting from scratch. Most fall somewhere in between. We start by working closely with you to understand your business goals and objectives, research your domain and your competition, define your user personas, and create user journeys that will form the basis of your marketing strategy.


Our branding and brand management services include:


Brand discovery and articulation


Logo ideation and design


Typography and colour palette


Ready-to-use brand toolkit


Bespoke marketing collaterals


Event and exhibition design


A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.— Seth Godin


For those starting from scratch or going through a brand refresh, we work at the C-Suite and senior management level to define and articulate your brand through one-on-one meetings and workshops, and then codify that essence into a brand identity and positioning framework aligned with your business goals and objectives.


Brand guidelines, websites and landing pages, social media strategy guides, and all brand collaterals and content are informed by that framework, giving your brand a clear and consistent voice and look and feel across all channels. That consistency engenders trust.


Your brand is your company's most valuable asset, but the perception of your brand by your customers, your employees, and even your competitors defines that value. That's where using smart content to build brands comes in.


With the foundations of the brand properly laid, we look at your most important digital asset, your website.

### Omnichannel Marketing Strategy &amp; Consulting

The power of our process lies in its simplicity. We start by working closely with you to understand your business goals and objectives, research your domain and your competition, define your ideal customers, and create buyer journeys that will form the basis of your marketing strategy.


We create an integrated digital marketing strategy across earned, owned, and paid media, crafting a channel and content mix and cadence that supports the tactical and evergreen campaigns we create to grow your brand.


[elementor-template id="47450"]


With strategy and goals in hand, execution can see us working alongside your staff for specific campaigns, or acting as your fractional marketing team, complete with a fractional CMO.


Optimisation means our work is never done, with data feeding back into strategy and execution in an iterative process designed to improve engagement and promote content that resonates with your audience.

### Persona &amp; Customer Journey Development

Understanding who your ideal customers are allows you to focus your marketing resources on where they should have the most impact on revenue.


Your Ideal Customer Profile is a generalised representation of a company that is a good fit for the solutions you provide and uses firmographic data.


Buyer Personas are generalised representations of people, the stakeholders at your ICP involved in the purchase decision and are typically represented through demographic and psychographic data. In B2B marketing, there are often multiple buyer personas per ICP.


Together, the ICP and Buyer Personas are a powerful tool. ICPs define whom to target, while buyer personas inform how to communicate with the individuals involved in decision-making.


The Buyer Journey&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


The modern buyer journey is not the linear path visualised in the traditional marketing funnel model. Just because someone downloaded an eBook or watched a webinar doesn’t mean they are ready to buy.


In fact, the 95-5 rule tells us that 95% of our target market isn’t ready to buy today. Only 5% is.The Buyer Persona and Buyer Journey inform your content strategy and marketing channel mix and can include offline activities such as conferences and tradeshows.


Omnichannel marketing allows you to be in front of your prospects no matter where they are in the customer journey, educating and informing them so that when they are ready to buy, your brand and your solution are top of mind.


Continuously validating those models using data from your CRM and feedback from your Sales team allows us to optimise the customer journey.


And market better.

### Data Analytics &amp; Dashboard Development

Digital marketing is inherently measurable, but you can quickly drown in the sea of data that modern online campaigns produce. We distil that information into insights that inform your marketing decisions.&nbsp;


We integrate data from multiple sources into our bespoke data dashboards, offering our clients 24/7 visibility into everything from paid campaign performance to website traffic to social media engagement.&nbsp;


Full suite of Google tools integration, including GA4 and Google Tag Manager (GTM)


Bespoke data dashboards with 75+ integrations for 24x7 insights&nbsp;


Real-time competitor bench marketing&nbsp;


Custom monthly reporting&nbsp;


Our experienced marketing operations practitioners optimise your campaign and visitor tracking to give you the cleanest, actionable data. 


Real-time monitoring is complemented by monthly reporting and quarterly strategy reviews, providing insights into the data that drive content strategy and help optimise your marketing spend.


The modern revenue operations (RevOps) function lives on data from sales, marketing, and customer success. Our marketing operations team can integrate the relevant data sources to give senior management the visibility it needs to drive growth.


We can also work with your existing Business Intelligence (BI) teams and tools to ensure the impact of marketing on revenue is transparent.


  &nbsp;&nbsp;

### Email Marketing &amp; Marketing Automation

Despite the rise of social media, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to nurture leads and turn them into customers. Good email marketing turns those customers into repeat customers and advocates.&nbsp;


The numbers back that up. &nbsp;


81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.


64% of B2B marketers say their email marketing strategy was effective for meeting business goals in 2021.


77% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted over email — more than double any other channel.


We use the best email marketing design and distribution tools and integrate them tightly into the customer journey.&nbsp;


Newsletter creation &nbsp;


EDM design and distribution


Contact list management, segmentation, optimisation, and hygiene &nbsp;


A/B testing &nbsp;


HubSpot Solutions Partner&nbsp;


Agency Partners of ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp


[elementor-template id="44731"]


If you have an existing Email Service Provider (ESP) or Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) we can provide copy and HTML designs for newsletters and campaigns such as drip and nurture campaigns.


We can also provide or manage your MAP through our managed MarTech services, looking after everything from list hygiene to segmentation and scoring.

### Managed Martech &amp; CRM

Marketing Operations connect the people, processes, and technology behind modern marketing, helping marketers deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.&nbsp;&nbsp;


But managing and capitalising on the technology used and data generated by modern marketing teams is an enormous challenge. There are literally thousands of software solutions available to help, and the wrong choices can lead to siloed data, incomplete reporting, and inefficiencies that can hinder your growth.&nbsp;


To meet that challenge and solve for simplicity, Salween Group offers a fully managed marketing technology (martech) stack as part of our retainer services.&nbsp;


 We've built that stack on a core set of tools which we then further optimised for individual clients based on their resources and requirements.&nbsp;


It starts with a good Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and CRM.&nbsp;


HubSpot&nbsp;


HubSpot is a popular all-in-one solution for your marketing, sales, and customer success teams. &nbsp;


It seamlessly integrates a comprehensive set of must-have marketing tools and a MAP with a sales CRM and service ticketing solution in a powerful, easy-to-use cloud-based SaaS platform.&nbsp;


It has a large, connected ecosystem of apps and off-the-shelf integrations. &nbsp;


We use HubSpot to run our agency's own marketing and sales.&nbsp;


Salween Group is a HubSpot Solutions Partner, and we work with our clients on the implementation, training, and daily operations of the tool. &nbsp;


If your sales team has an existing CRM they love such as Salesforce, we can integrate HubSpot's marketing tools so both marketing and sales are still working off common data sets, just at different points in the buyer journey. &nbsp;


A brand's most important digital marketing asset is its website, and a WordPress website from our managed web services offering integrated with HubSpot is a powerful tool for inbound marketing, demand generation, and demand or lead capture. &nbsp;


ActiveCampaign&nbsp;


Unlike HubSpot's all-in-one solution, ActiveCampaign is primarily an email marketing and marketing automation platform. It does include a very basic CRM and can be a good choice for clients that don't have the immediate need for HubSpot's feature set, or who have an existing Sales CRM but need a simple MAP for the marketing department.&nbsp;


ActiveCampaign is also a leaner product than HubSpot and offers a lower barrier to entry both financially and in terms of training. It can be a good starter choice for leaner organisations and is also an excellent tool for limited tactical campaigns.&nbsp;


We are an ActiveCampaign Agency Partner and can offer it as a managed service. It integrates well with WordPress and Salesforce. &nbsp;


Transparency and Trust&nbsp;&nbsp;


Modern marketing and revenue operations are very software-driven processes, and our marketing operations specialists use software tools to orchestrate campaigns.&nbsp;


But we are not a software sales business; we are an inbound and content marketing agency.  We usually bundle the software we use in our retainer fees, but there are cases where the client should have ownership of the tool, particularly the CRM.   


Through some of our partnerships, we get commissions. To demonstrate that we are suggesting the best tools without bias, we transparently pass those back as cost savings to our clients.&nbsp;

### Web Design and Development

We consider a brand's website to be its most important digital marketing property. It is the only member of your marketing and sales team that works 24/7/365 across the globe.&nbsp;


But many companies don't have the time or the resources for the attention a modern site requires and end up doing expensive and resource-intensive "refreshes" every 2-3 years.&nbsp;


There is a better way.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="44695"]


Web Design and Development as a Managed Service&nbsp;


We take the hassle out of managing and maintaining a website by offering website design, hosting, technical support and content updates as a managed service, ensuring your website is always fresh, functional, secure and reflective of your brand and your message.&nbsp;


As a managed service, we use a data-driven, agile methodology of continuous improvement for your website, focused on the customer experience. Some also call this process data-driven design or growth-driven design.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Modern, fresh responsive web designs&nbsp;


Enterprise-grade hosting and global CDN&nbsp;


CMS management&nbsp;


Landing page design, hosting, and A/B testing&nbsp;


Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)


Custom copywriting and content creation through our Content Studio&nbsp;


As the centre of your digital marketing efforts, we tightly integrate your website with your social media channels, your email marketing and CRM, and our bespoke data analytics dashboards.&nbsp;


The tactical use of paid search, display, and social ads pointing to specific landing pages complements our ongoing SEO work to drive organic traffic to your site and get your message in front of targeted audiences where they live online.&nbsp;


Your site is securely hosted on an enterprise account at one of the world’s best managed WordPress hosting providers. Daily backups, a Web Application Firefall (WAF) and 2FA are standard, and our regular maintenance plan includes plugin and WordPress core updates.


Prefer to manage it yourselves? No problem! Our “build-and-handover” web design and development option is there for you.


Why WordPress?&nbsp;


We've shared the pain of our clients saddled with expensive "enterprise" solutions that crippled their ability to be nimble or niche website platforms where support is hard to find.&nbsp;


Our managed WordPress website services are a solution to those pain points.&nbsp;


WordPress is the world's most popular CMS (content management system) and powers more than 40% of the websites on the internet. It is open-source, scalable, and highly customisable and is our platform of choice for the websites we design, build, and manage for our clients using our in-house teams.&nbsp;


Its popularity means that there is a massive pool of talent that can support your website, and it integrates with almost everything you would use in sales and marketing operations, from analytics to your CRM.


Bridging the Gap Between IT and Marketing 


There are a few legacy or enterprise organisations where IT controls the brand website and is less than responsive to the requirements of modern marketing. That is a sad reality, but it doesn't have to hold marketing back.&nbsp;


We’ve introduced a solution for several clients where marketing controls and manages a subdomain, a separate but linked web server such as go.mybigcompany.com.&nbsp;


We run a WordPress instance on that subdomain and can publish landing pages in multiple languages and even microsites for products, events, or personas.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="44126"]


There are off-the-shelf solutions that enable publishing landing pages to subdomains, such as Unbounce and Leadpages, and HubSpot offers that option, too.&nbsp;


But we've found the power and flexibility of WordPress and its ability to integrate easily with the rest of your RevOps tech stack make it the best long-term choice.

### Paid Media

Today's customer journey is no longer a straight line from awareness to purchase. People bounce from one digital touchpoint to another across a variety of channels and devices. You need to meet your customers where they are, on their terms.&nbsp;


We use paid ads across search, display, and social networks to amplify your organic reach and hyper-target specific personas&nbsp;


A good paid media strategy understands user intent, is data-driven, and is an iterative process of continual improvement. We work on optimizing your ads and the content they link to for user relevance, so each interaction is meaningful to both the consumer and the brand.&nbsp;


We have multiple team members who are Google Ads-certified and meet Google’s standards for account management best practices. We have specialists in Search, Display, and Video ads, and our team is experienced in producing optimised ad creatives that lead to clicks and conversions.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="44246"]


Microsoft Advertising, formally known as Bing Ads, is a great compliment to Google Ads for Search Engine Marketing, and it can offer better ROI due to its generally lower cost per click.&nbsp;&nbsp;


There are also some data points that show the average Bing user to be in an important age/income demographic. We use Microsoft Advertising to target users on Bing and the Microsoft Search Network (Yahoo, MSN, etc).&nbsp;


Paid Social can offer better audience targeting than search and display ads, even down to a user level if you have a customer list and your customer's consent.&nbsp;


In B2B marketing, LinkedIn is the social media channel of choice. Using LinkedIn to amplify your content can get your voice heard by potential customers and partners that might otherwise be out of reach.


LinkedIn offers advanced audience targeting features not found on other platforms, as well as a variety of ad formats. If account-based marketing (ABM) is your thing, we have you covered with LinkedIn marketing. &nbsp;


Facebook ads and boosted posts can work wonders in B2C and in certain markets in Southeast Asia where Facebook is the internet. Instagram ads are great for highly visual brands and are managed through your linked Facebook ad account.

### Customer Experience &amp; Events

We treat event marketing and field marketing as value-added, engagement-driven services that can be a core part of any integrated content marketing strategy.&nbsp;


Participation in panel discussions, forums, and seminars can demonstrate your team's thought leadership and showcase your brand's insights and capabilities.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="44029"]


The right event is both a networking opportunity and a content marketing resource. Through on-site content production, our team of content strategists, video producers, and marketing specialists amplify your stories for a wider audience online, long after the last guest has left the room.&nbsp;


Full suite of trade show support services&nbsp;


Bespoke event ideation&nbsp;


Event marketing &amp; management


Panel curation&nbsp;


Virtual events&nbsp;


Why just participate when you can take centre stage?&nbsp;


From strategic sponsorships to pop-up events at major international summits to bespoke workshops for targeted audiences, we use events to build your brand well beyond the events themselves.&nbsp;


Our event and field marketing toolkit includes email marketing for pre and post-event nurture, event microsites, managed RSVP systems, and on-site photography and video production.&nbsp;

### Social Media Marketing

We build sustainable social media strategies around the channels that matter for your particular business, creating and curating content for your targeted online communities and personas.&nbsp;


Social channel strategy and profile optimisation


Social media publishing and monitoring&nbsp;


Multimedia content studio&nbsp;


Community management


Employee Advocacy programmes&nbsp;


You do not have to be on every channel, all the time, and our house view on social media is the same as other types of content; less can be more when your content is engaging and properly targeted.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="47315"]


LinkedIn for B2B Marketing


For B2B brands, LinkedIn is the social media channel of choice. The platform is closely approaching one billion members, growing at a rate of three new members every second, making it the world's largest professional social network.&nbsp;


Keeping your LinkedIn company page up-to-date and active is a must, with stats showing active pages see five times more engagement, including 7x more impressions per follower and a whopping 11x more clicks per follower.


We optimise and manage your company page and create and post content relevant to your target audience.


We also work with brands on employee advocacy programs, engaging with a company's thought leaders to help build their personal brands and LinkedIn profiles. That provides mutual benefits to both the brand and the employees.


Pay-per-click advertising on LinkedIn allows for hyper-targeting prospects based on their role, job title, company, seniority, and geographic location. It can perfectly complement a brand's organic presence on the channel.     


Tools and Analytics


We use some of the industry's best social media management tools for scheduling, social listening, and analytics.


Collaboration features for social content production can include multi-step approval procedures and read-only content calendar views to keep all stakeholders in the loop.&nbsp;


Our community management services can range from providing you with the tools and experienced guidance your in-house team needs to better monitor and engage your followers, to a full-on programme where we manage everything for you in your brand voice with clear policies, procedures, and escalation guidelines.&nbsp;


We can also work directly in your tools such as HubSpot, ensuring complete visibility and attribution tracking for your social campaigns.&nbsp;

### B2B PR &amp; Media Outreach 

Traditional media has changed, and your approach to PR and earned media needs to change with it. A mention in the Wall Street Journal is not what it used to be.&nbsp;


Through intelligent media outreach, we identify opportunities that will get you seen and heard. Our strong media networks and relationships get your story into the right hands.&nbsp;&nbsp;


From strategic sponsorships to eye-catching story angles, the journalism pedigree of our senior management team means we can advise and assist to get your message covered where it matters.​&nbsp;


Integrated communications &amp; PR


Press release writing and distribution


Media training 


Brand monitoring and reputation management 


Crisis management&nbsp;&nbsp;


Our approach combines traditional story-driven PR with targeted media outreach to modern digital distribution channels such as news and industry websites and social media.&nbsp;&nbsp;


From writing and syndicating traditional press releases to distributing snackable videos, the goal remains the same: to tell your story and get measurable results.&nbsp;


Media Training&nbsp;


Sitting in front of a broadcast video camera can be unnerving. We ensure that you are fully prepared for media opportunities and exude the confidence needed to build your brand.&nbsp;


We provide essential media training for our C-suite clients using a fully equipped broadcast team, giving you the ability to see first-hand how you sound and how you look. You build your authenticity as you build your confidence.&nbsp;


Collaborate on core messaging and quotes


Get the training and practice you need to make a great impression with the media


Communicate with greater clarity and confidence&nbsp;


Avoid common mistakes

### Podcast Production

Feeling left out of the podcast rush?&nbsp;


There are over 5 million podcasts on Spotify alone, and with YouTube adding dedicated podcast spaces to its platform, growth in the medium will continue.&nbsp;


So our house view is that it is never too late to start a podcast, but like all content channels, you have to be specific about what you are saying and who you want to say it to.&nbsp;


In B2B marketing, that works in your favour as you are not directly competing with the mass market for an audience. You are hyper-targeting listeners with the highest potential return on your investment and delivering value to your niche by being informative and educational.&nbsp;


Our broadcast news production pedigree means we can take the tools and the time required to produce a professional podcast off your shoulders.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Podcast strategy&nbsp;


Series project management&nbsp;


Guest booking and communication&nbsp;


Recording and editing


Cover art and channel graphics design&nbsp;


Distribution and syndication&nbsp;


Recording can be at our fully equipped studio in downtown Singapore, fully remote, or a hybrid of the two.&nbsp;


And through content repurposing, your podcast can be adapted to become a blog and social media posts.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

### Video Production

Our company was founded by a team with a strong background in broadcast journalism and award-winning videography. That gives us a significant technical and creative edge over marketing companies that outsource their video, or video production houses that try to double up as marketers.


Our in-house video production capabilities are used to create videos and motion graphics that are impactful, memorable and eminently shareable.&nbsp;


Corporate videos&nbsp;


Event coverage and post-event highlights


Motion graphics&nbsp;


Explainer videos&nbsp;


Cinematic storytelling videos&nbsp;


Product and training videos&nbsp;


Social media videos


Vlogs and video podcasts&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="43958"]


Corporate Video Production - Quality Matters


While the rise of TikTok and the post-pandemic acceptance of webcam productions have made less-than-perfect but authentic video posts the norm in some circles, that needs to be the exception, not the rule. 


Production values matter, and that is how you can stand out.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


Like all brand messaging, you fight to get seen and heard, so that first impression needs to be a positive one. Our team has collective decades of experience in broadcast news and current affairs. Visual storytelling is in our DNA.&nbsp;

### Content Studio

Content marketing is at the heart of what we do, and at the heart of good content marketing is good content.&nbsp;


But in a world where "content" can be churned out for next to nothing by offshore blog mills and DIY "creator" tools using AI, how does your brand stand out in that sea of noise?&nbsp;&nbsp;


It is simple. Publish better content.&nbsp;


Brands need to publish content that educates, informs, or entertains people, not content solely targeted for search engine algorithms.&nbsp;


You need to create and distribute valuable content relevant to people, your targeted audience and the algorithms will catch up.&nbsp;


Our approach to content strategy sees us creating content for every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to conversion to advocacy.&nbsp;


Publishing and amplifying that content across multiple channels ensures it can be seen by the right people, in the right place, and at the right time.&nbsp;


[elementor-template id="43990"]


Going Deep&nbsp;


A challenge B2B markets face is creating content with depth... at scale. Lifestyle copywriters are everywhere, but B2B writers with the domain knowledge needed to craft content that is relevant and engaging to your target audience are harder to find.&nbsp;


As former journalists, we are curious by nature and are seasoned in digesting and explaining complex stories.&nbsp;


Our Content Studio incorporates our content strategists, copywriters, and graphic artists working as a cohesive team to produce on-brand content that resonates with your target audience and differentiates you from your competition.&nbsp;


Blog posts&nbsp;


Specialised B2B and B2C articles&nbsp;


Newsletters&nbsp;


Infographics&nbsp;


E-books&nbsp;


White papers&nbsp;


Creating a Sustainable Content Strategy&nbsp;&nbsp;


A sustainable content strategy doesn't mean it is focused on saving the planet, it is focused on saving your brand and your sanity as a marketing lead.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


We've seen too many orphaned blog sections of websites and stagnant social media channels that should never have been activated in the first place. An abandoned channel is a broken promise.&nbsp;


Smart, sustainable content strategy ensures that does not happen.&nbsp;


Cadence comes up in discussions early in our relationships. The discovery process looks at what you and your competitors publish and post and what gets engagement.&nbsp;


We then work on content pillars and a publishing cadence that not only makes sense but can scale.&nbsp;&nbsp;


Sharing is Caring


We find that the brands that are most successful at content marketing have a strong brand story and, most importantly, a culture of helping and sharing.&nbsp;


Sharing quality content with the goal of being helpful and educating is the new long game.&nbsp;


Brands that share their ideas, knowledge, and domain expertise to serve their audience are the ones that thrive.&nbsp;


Our role is to help you turn those ideas into words, videos, infographics, and into invitations to speak.&nbsp;

### Content Planning &amp; SEO

Content planning is the bridge that connects strategic objectives to concrete actions: it provides an actionable framework that enables brands to effectively communicate their value proposition and engage with their target audiences.


With a strategy in hand, planning takes shared content calendars that give everyone visibility into what needs to be done by whom and when.


Published content from our Content Studio, be it public articles and social posts or gated content, is then measured for engagement with data feeding back into iterative strategy. Test and learn.


SEO


While SEO has become a dirty word in some circles, the core tenets of Technical, On-page and Off-page SEO are still relevant.


Our team utilises modern tools and best practices to optimise our content for discovery, for being found and for being shared.


Technical SEO for our Managed Web Services clients is managed by our web development team, who ensure everything from site speed to meta descriptions follow industry best practices.


On-page SEO is a part of the content creation process where we are ideating content ideas based on user search intent, focusing on the buyer and his journey over legacy keyword tactics.


Off-page SEO sees us creating eminently shareable content. Earned media and backlinks come from newsworthy stories and thought leadership content. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;