Having worked in the digital space since 1999, almost before the Internet as we know it, I have been around since Google was only 6 months old. I have gone through two dot bombs and have seen the commercial realities of what works online change year to year until now, with digital now becoming the largest channel globally for advertising spend.

What I love about online is that it is always reinventing itself. People can develop into experts in months but become obsolete even faster. However many best practices have stayed true – including my focus which is to always have a user-centric approach.

Throughout my career I have been lucky to work with some of the top brands (and unknown ones), transforming them into the top players online. That includes managing digital marketing and technology teams on the corporate side for Vodafone, TVNZ, APN finda, Yellow Pages, GrabOne and NZME, as well as countless government, B2B and retail brands in both NZ and Australia.

I have worked on all sides: agency, digital agency, start-up and corporate. Through this experience I have seen a lot of promises and I have formed a lot of battle scars: with big projects that go on forever, silver bullet products that take five times more time and money than what you signed off on, technology teams that work in silos, and personal agendas that derail delivery and every best intention.

Who dares wins

In an ever-increasing immersive digital environment that is changing daily. In order to keep up with customer expectations, fast, effective and on budget delivery is critical.

The winners are those who are quick to market, who learn and adapt as they go, and those who focus their messaging and personalise their service to serve their customers’ needs. I want to help people win. 

I formed Hype & Dexter because I wanted to help businesses realise the benefits of effective digital best practice and help them to compete with the big boys. I love being able to make a difference and working in this market I can offer support and influence to truly help businesses achieve growth and sustainability.

I am a self-confessed process geek. In almost every enterprise I have dealt with, I have found they have run into a wall when it comes to maintaining quality while scaling their business. With Hype & Dexter quality at scale has been my focus from the beginning. We live by this approach internally, to ensure our team has the highest level of support from our management team, as well to position ourselves to adapt in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Steps to delivering a great digital inbound program

My standard approach to fulfilling a great digital inbound program that delivers:

• Define the vision of digital for your organisation
• Determine SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic, Timely) goals for your digital activity
• Calculate your digital ROMI (that’s Return on Marketing Investment, not me)
  i.e. how many dollars you need to earn for every dollar invested in digital marketing
• Understand your ideal customers – research and create personas of your ideal customers, understand what makes them tick
• Design and map your customer buyer journey
• Carry out keyword research and define your key topics to form your content strategy
• Make beautiful creative and messaging that resonates with your ideal customers
• Create lead magnets in the form offers (e.g. white papers, calculators, ebooks, checklists, videos, coupons, etc) that your customers will want to get their hands on.
• Put it all into action:
  • Advertise and promote your content and offers in the channels where your customers live, work and play
  • Create landing pages and messenger bots that work with your advertising, search results and socials posts that are focussed on conversion and creating leads
  • Retarget visitors with the right messaging at the right time in the right place
  • Nurture your leads to educate and excite them about your organisation, products and services – build credibility and trust with these contacts
  • Empower your sales teams by providing them quality nurtured leads, at the perfect time to convert
  • Remove the manual from your business so your team can focus on the important conversations and experiences
• Constantly cultivate, review which channels, ads, messages, landing pages, emails, calls to actions, individuals, personas, workflows are working. Constantly test, refine, then test and refine.
• Stay agile and adapt, fail fast and try new things - don’t over-invest as, by the time you spend hundreds of thousands and months bringing a new idea to market, you may have already missed the bus

Through our tools and partnerships with leading marketing and sales automation software providers, we aim to simplify and remove manual pain points for delivering digital marketing campaigns. We drive leads and help our clients nurture and convert those leads into customers.

We automate wherever possible so our team and our clients can focus on the important stuff

At Hype & Dexter, we eat our own dog food. As a SME focusing on B2B ourselves we use HubSpot to manage our inbound marketing campaigns, as well as our internal delivery and sales processes. When onboarding new clients we use workflows to automate task creation and assignment to ensure nothing is missed and every client has a consistent experience. We use templates and snippets to automate our messaging and sales process.

I have adapted the classic Scrum Framework (which I have successfully implemented in a number of software teams) to fit a marketing environment. We deliver fast, quickly adapt to our client needs and continuously seek feedback – just how I like it! This allows us to deliver full inbound marketing and sales automation cost-effectively and in weeks rather than months.

See what we do and how we do it. We've created a funnel that takes you through the Inbound Marketing experience – and reveals how we're doing it along the way. Want to know our secrets? There are none! See how it's done by starting our crash course in Inbound Marketing today.