As we move into the new financial year, after all the fun number crunching is over (that was painful!), it’s a good time to sit back and reflect on the year that’s been. What have been the lows, the highs, the learnings? What could your business have done better, and what should you do more of this year?
Mogrify is no different – we’ve had our ups and downs. It’s the same in all organisations – especially if you are a growing business. We’re going to be a bit self-indulgent for a change and share some of the highlights from the year we’ve had as well as take a look at what’s to come. Yes, it momentarily goes away from our ethos of writing useful articles and it’s blatant self-promotion, but hopefully, it reinforces for you that Mogrify is a company going places. We’re a great partner to entrust with your marketing, and we hope it encourages you to continue recommending us to your network.
1. Our team has expanded and continues to do so
This year saw a couple of significant hires for us, including our new Senior Marketing Manager who all our customers will meet in due course. Joanne Marston brings an immense amount of knowledge having worked in marketing for over 15 years in the UK and Australia. She specialises in marketing strategy, campaign marketing and building engagement and community. We are so excited to have her on board, so if you come across her, please say hi – and make sure you connect via LinkedIn!
2. We built out our video capabilities
We knew early on in the year that we needed to build out a team to deliver high-quality custom illustration and animation video, as well as face-to-face film. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. Not only this, but we kept having brilliant ideas for video content! So we now have a team of specialists – some of which are amazing illustrators and animators, and some of which are amazing videographers. Making IT look glamorous can sometimes be a difficult task, but somehow our team manages it.
3. Our customers won awards / got acquired / had mergers
We get excited when our customers have successes. That’s why we’re so happy when we hear they are winning awards – which happened several times this past financial year! Whether these are Microsoft awards, or industry awards like ARN, or business awards, we do feel genuinely inspired by the transformational work they do, and love that we’ve played a small role in that story – especially if we wrote the awards submission!
For a couple of our customers, this year saw some big mergers, and one of our customers even got acquired, which was a big goal of theirs. Even if we play the smallest part in these goals being realised, it’s an exciting time for us all. Being part of your team during those times grows Mogrify’s expertise and knowledge of the industry.
4. Our content continually gets fantastic feedback
We always knew there was a gap in the market for producing great content – it was a big reason for starting Mogrify. We didn’t know how quickly this part of our business would grow, but we think this is in part due to our mantra – to produce quality content inspired by customers’ internal knowledge – rather than adding to the noise with cheap, generic, 3rd party-researched rubbish.
We’ve recently hired three more writers to join the team to meet this growing demand so we hope to service more customers via our Content Creation-as-a-Service module in due course.
5. We are building technology
They say that businesses often grow to resemble their customers, and our commercial model is a testament to that. This year we’re taking that transformation a step further – we are building a marketing technology platform unlike anything else on the market – more announcements will follow towards the end of the year so watch this space!
6. We are becoming more structured internally
This point is less about the success, and more about the learnings from the year that we believe will contribute to our success in the year ahead.
At the Australian Microsoft Summit in November 2017, one of our Directors attended a session with Ben Shapiro talking about the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and it was kind of game-changing. As a start-up, and as a fast-growing company, our structure around our yearly plan, our quarterly goals for each member of staff, and our tracking of those goals often were left by the wayside as we concentrated on client delivery. Adopting EOS will be a big focus for us this year.
7. Accountability – driving the Mogrify vision
Our vision for Mogrify is to be at the forefront of a change in how B2B marketing services are delivered to organisations. We take our inspiration from you, our partners, and our customers less so from other sales and marketing organisations.
There are a few mantras that we use internally to keep us driving towards that vision. One that has come up more and more in everything we do is the idea of making ourselves ever-more accountable to customers. There’s no place for us to hide if we don’t do a good job. Our business is built on retained customers, not one-off projects, which means that everything we do is geared towards creating fruitful long-term relationships.
With improvements to our internal workings, new hires and new technology, you can expect Mogrify to move even further towards our vision.
8. We built out – and continue to build out – new services and product lines
Keep an eye on us for extensions to our service/ product lines. We’ve already mentioned video, but last year we also became a Hubspot partner and have built out various marketing automation-related products. Using our ‘Accountability’ mantra, we also developed a totally new way of managing websites for a handful of our clients where they only pay for what they use. Furthermore, we’ve also begun really ramping up our distribution and promotion capabilities. Look out for more announcements over the coming months to discover how these new services can help you.
We’re so excited about the year ahead – additional staff, new capabilities, products and services – all designed to help you.
At Mogrify we consider ourselves lucky to work with amazing businesses and people like you. We’re grateful for all your support as we transform modern marketing for your business and the industry as a whole. Thanks for sharing our journey.
If you’re looking for additional help this financial year and want to see how you score across core marketing areas, take our quick (and free) online B2B Marketing Assessment.
