Challenge
Atlanta, Ga.-based Safe Systems, a provider of compliance-centric IT services for community banks, was founded in 1993 to ensure financial institutions are kept up to date on current technologies, IT security risks, regulatory changes and FFIEC guidelines. Safe Systems engaged William Mills Agency (WMA) to manage and create marketing content, increase brand awareness and generate new business prospects for its sales team.
“The majority of our long-time customers are concentrated in the Southeast (where Safe Systems has been located for over 20 years). Recent survey results show that community bankers seek referrals from peers they trust, primarily through local user groups or conferences. In the past, this has been a challenge in ‘spreading the word’ outside of our immediate geographic area.
We are starting to overcome this challenge through the content marketing strategy we launched with the William Mills team in late 2015. We use content and SEO to help prospects find us online when they need us. With this strategy, we are no longer confined by our borders, and have seen visitors to our website from over 95% of the country, including states where we currently do not have any customers,” said Christine Filosa, CMO of Safe Systems. “With a small internal team, we could not do what we do without them. I consider our WMA team part of our team, and even include them on our departmental org chart when I conduct orientation for new employees. The WMA team leverages its writing skills to help us produce content every single week without fail. The team is highly knowledgeable in the inbound methodology and has been integral implementing our marketing automation platform, HubSpot.”
Services Provided
Safe Systems enlisted WMA to design and manage a comprehensive content marketing program. The agency provides the following services as a part of this initiative:
- Leveraging its industry and content marketing expertise, WMA developed a comprehensive content marketing plan that supported Safe Systems’ strategic goals and objectives. The WMA team regularly reviews content marketing results and updates the plan consistent with Safe Systems’ ongoing business objectives.
- WMA collaborated with Safe Systems’ team on search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and initiatives to push the company’s content to page one for targeted keyword search results.
- WMA works closely with Safe Systems’ marketing team to create blogs and white papers focused on its flagship product, NetComply One, a network management system for community banks, and its portfolio of technology, compliance and security products to help raise awareness among community banks.
- WMA deployed Safe Systems’ marketing automation software, HubSpot, and strategically manages the platform, as well as its integration with Salesforce.
- The agency executes Safe Systems’ social media communications to increase visibility about the company’s marketing activities.
- Additionally, WMA provides support for the company’s out-going outbound marketing campaigns.
“William Mills Agency was able to quickly get up to speed on our business and outlined the specific steps we needed to take to improve our brand awareness and lead generation efforts,” said Filosa. “Their team guided us on how to best implement our marketing automation system and has created compelling and optimized content around our solutions to help ensure greater visibility among the community banks we serve.”
Results
“Although both our teams were familiar with the content marketing strategy, I really feel like we built it from scratch together, with immediate results. I will never forget when we finished and shared our marketing dashboards in Salesforce with the WMA team. One team member said they had waited their entire career to be able to measure the activities we were measuring, and had reached the ‘holy grail’ of marketing. I would have to agree with him; the numbers don’t lie. And, everything within the strategy we do we can measure – using CTAs (or Call to Action) buttons that convert visitors into prospects and ultimately new sales.”
Safe Systems has seen a significant increase in both its website visitors and leads as a result of its content marketing program, progressing from an average of 4,276 monthly website visits and 31 leads per month, to an average of 7,927 monthly website visits and 181 leads per month (an 85% and 483% increase respectively). The content marketing program has yielded impressive SEO results to support Safe Systems’ flagship product, NetComply One, with more than 15 keywords relating to the product now ranked in the top three search results for Google. Most importantly, over a 12 month period we published 48 blogs, and a half dozen white papers, case studies and videos. This resulted in over 1,100 marketing qualified leads delivered to their sales team and nearly $6 million in revenue for Safe Systems.
“With WMA’s guidance, we now have the ability to track true marketing ROI and monitor our prospects from lead to customer.” Filosa said. “With the help of WMA’s content marketing efforts, we generated more than 1,100 unique sales opportunities in 2016, closed more customers and generated additional revenue.”
Safe Systems' Inbound Marketing Growth story earned the agency a 2018 Q4 HubSpot Impact Award. Read the story here.
