An Australian digital service provider shares how a data-driven marketing and product development approach is helping drive customer growth
Technology changes
Alongside the operational changes, Hipages has invested in a range of technology platform capabilities and transitioned 15 per cent of its infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services cloud to gain both better scale and website performance.
“If you can get your website to operate faster, you achieve better organic search results in Google and organic conversion rates,” Vitek claimed. “We saw a 40 per cent organic conversion rate improvement as a result.”
In addition, Hipages is using the Cron Jobs scheduler to pull data into its CRM system, and has created dashboards showing conversions, spend and ROI in real time. This gives the marketing team the ability to react more dynamically, Vitek said.
Another focus is mobile, and Hipages has just built an app for consumers off the back of its online consumer product. A customer types in their problem and answers a few questions about the category of work needed to be done. Hipages takes that job, identifies businesses to service the consumer’s local area and category, and lets them know about the job via SMS, app, email. These tradesman respond if they can do the job or not, and the first three responses are sent to the customer.
Where to next
Having established the operational structure, Hipages is now fleshing out the roles needed to drive its growth hacking approach, and is currently hiring two additional product managers. At present, the company has eight engineers, two product managers, one product marketing leader, one data scientist and five in the marketing team.
Vitek said one of the biggest wins has been the collaboration and transparency between teams.
“I’ve worked in places where technology people don’t get on at all with other parts of the business, but engineers here and culturally I think, want to please people,” he said.
“Product managers sit in the middle and balance that connection with marketing, translating the language of the two teams to make it an effective conversation. They’re very big driving forces, pushing things along and facilitating the relationship.
“When they work together, everyone is happy and they feed off each other.”
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