When Spot On won the 2014 HubSpot COS Website Design Award, it wasn’t just for their beautifully-made websites. That’s because marketing doesn’t start with a website—it starts with a strategy that can attract, engage, and delight customers at every turn. And that’s where Spot On shines.
Founded in 2012 by Susie Kelley and Rebecca Graves, Spot On has become a tight team that thrives on building close relationships with clients. Spot On doesn’t just look for one-off client engagements. Rather, they focus on delivering services that get clients to return again and again, becoming long-term partners in the process.
Building these kinds of close relationships isn’t just about consulting on a high-level strategy. Spot On works alongside clients to make marketing dollars really count. And for inbound marketing to truly deliver business results, Spot On needs to deliver high-quality content designed to drive leads and conversions.
“Today, a company cannot exist on web pages alone,” said Rebecca Graves, VP of Client Success and Marketing Strategist for Spot On. “We help clients create digital marketing strategies that bring customers to their websites, ready to buy. Without content to fuel the inbound marketing engine, our expertise in digital strategy and web design might not deliver the results our clients demand.”
The Challenge: Meeting Content Creation Demands with a Small Team
For many digital marketing agencies, scaling to meet the demands of new customers means continuously hiring new talent. But that puts many agencies in a tough position—how do you manage the ebb and flow of demand while supporting an ever-growing team?
Spot On has avoided these problems by maintaining a small team and remaining hyper-focused on client relationships. To meet content production demands without a massive team, Spot On had to find the right approach to outsourcing.
“Finding the right balance for our content production team was always a challenge,” said Rebecca. “We took care of some content creation in-house, but that wasn’t enough to keep up with client demands. As we looked for freelance writers to scale content production, the process became overly complicated.”
For a while, Spot On was creating content in-house, spending valuable time searching for qualified freelance writers (and vetting them), and working with a freelance platform all at the same time. The best way to meet the content needs of every client was to simplify this approach to outsourcing.
The Solution: Simple Outsourcing with a Content Community Platform
Spot On was already taking the time to build a content community to meet client demands. However, the amount of time and effort it was taking to get the job done was becoming unacceptable. That’s when Rebecca and the Spot On team started searching for a streamlined solution.
Since June 2017, Spot On has used the nDash platform to build a content community. Now, account coordinators can avoid complex outsourcing projects and find expert writers for any project.
“The original freelance platform we were using promised to solve all of our outsourcing needs for content creation. But it wasn’t enough,” said Rebecca. “The writers we found on that platform weren’t meeting our client’s quality expectations. With nDash, we never have to worry about that problem.”
Before nDash, Spot On had to take some content creation in-house to ensure certain clients’ needs were met. That took time away from the team that is better spent on strategic marketing tasks. By building a content community they can trust, Spot On can reap the benefits of outsourcing without falling into the pitfalls that many other agencies experience.
And as a result, they’ve only strengthened their client relationships.
The Results: Inbound Marketing That Works for Clients
“Many potential clients come to us and say that inbound marketing just hasn’t worked for them,” said Rebecca. “For many brands, it seems like inbound marketing is just about sending a bunch of content out into the world and hoping for the best. And it’s frustrating when they don’t see results. With our nDash content community, we’re able to change their ideas about inbound marketing by delivering real business results.”
Digital strategy, conversion-focused web design, and quality content all combine to help Spot On drive qualified leads for clients. For one client, Spot On was able to increase visitor-to-conversion rates by 72.5%. And for another, after switching to the nDash content writers, blog views increased by over 73% in one quarter.
As a HubSpot Agency Partner, clients come to Spot On expecting transformative inbound marketing results. For a long time, content production was a roadblock to that kind of success. Now, with an nDash content community, Spot On account coordinators and marketing strategists get the support needed to meet (and exceed) client expectations.