Client Story: Angel

The Situation

How many times have you called into a customer service phone line and grown incredibly frustrated? Had to wait 20 minutes and press 10 buttons to get a human? Hung up without resolving your issue? Well, our client Angel wants to make sure that this does not happen to you. Angel designs and implements enterprise Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and call center solutions with the goal of helping companies make their customer service systems fantastic—not frustrating.

Because improving customer service is a huge part of their mission, Angel came to us when they struggled to maintain a consistent corporate content and social media marketing program internally. Angel suffered from a common problem: the corporate blog and social media properties would flourish for a few months, and then get forgotten in the face of other priorities. Content and social media marketing fit perfectly with Angel’s mission—helping companies better serve their customers—so Angel came to Right Source Marketing to provide their employees with some outside motivation, guidance and execution help.

Their plight was very similar to what we hear from many other businesses:

• They had a fledgling blog and struggled with creative and consistent content generation.
• They lacked the bandwidth to gain fundamental knowledge of social media properties and how they should be used for business; therefore, social media marketing was stuck in neutral.
• They did not have an integrated approach to using content marketing and social media marketing together for optimal results.

The Work

Angel had a blog, but couldn’t seem to get it off the ground. It was a constant struggle to get employees to create content, and often the content was highly technical. This technical content was great for Angel’s recruiting efforts, but fell flat for prospective clients who are experts in customer service, not coding.  Angel also struggled to consolidate (and in some cases start) its social media program, with several accounts on Facebook and Twitter. This identity crisis made it hard to distribute content, convey a consistent message, and track results.

After evaluating Angel’s situation, Right Source Marketing started with redesigning and launching Angel’s blog. This new design made the blog easier to navigate and more integrated with Angel’s main corporate website. As the blog was in development, Right Source and key Angel employees held a kick-off meeting to jumpstart the content marketing program. Employees from all departments—sales, marketing, business development and operations—came together to talk about how Angel could use content to grow the business. The meeting resulted in lots of ideas and some highly motivated new authors for the blog.

On a continuing basis, Right Source Marketing works with Angel to brainstorm content ideas, motivate employees to write about those ideas, and edit content to help all employees write like pros. But that’s just the beginning—a key part of the new content marketing strategy was making it easier for Angel employees to share content with their networks and clients. After every blog post, Right Source Marketing creates an email for Angel to send to their employee base with details on exactly how and where to share content. Right Source serves as Angel’s guide for content planning, creation, editing, distribution, reporting, and analysis.

As Right Source Marketing worked to reinvigorate the corporate blog, we also addressed Angel’s social media identity crisis. First, Right Source Marketing consolidated Angel’s disparate social media properties on Facebook and Twitter to avoid confusion and make social media management easier.  We extended the branding to unified LinkedIn and YouTube accounts to help round out their social media presence. Then, Right Source helped Angel turn its core messaging into copy and biographies for these properties, and worked in tandem with the internal team to distribute content, manage social media properties, and track results.

Not only does Right Source help Angel distribute its own content on social properties, Right Source curates relevant content from around the web for Angel to share. Right Source also helps Angel take advantage of social media surrounding conferences and events its staff attends, serving as the behind the scenes team to make posting real time updates easier.

In addition to helping with Angel’s main efforts, Right Source provided valuable insight, support, and marketing horsepower for Angel’s new social media products, Voice for Twitter and Voice for Facebook. Right Source tested the products, gave feedback on product specifications, and created marketing campaigns to promote the product. Part of this effort included working with Angel to place an article on Mashable. Another highlight was the creation and promotion of an IVR North Pole Hotline attached to the @dearsantatweets Twitter account, which let kids and kids at heart call in and tweet their Christmas wishes.

“Right Source not only guides our editorial direction and social media efforts, but advises us on a variety of marketing and business development programs. They’ve integrated themselves into our corporate team in a way that I never would have expected.” - Dave Toliver, Director of Corporate Marketing, Angel

The Results

For Angel, the initiation of interactive marketing and content marketing programs has already helped the company gain more web traffic and customer engagement.

• Within the first three months post-launch, Angel’s blog traffic increased 73% vs. the preceding three months.
• Within the first three months post-launch, referral traffic from the blog to Angel’s main site increased 602% vs. the preceding three months.
• Angel’s Twitter account grew 142% in the initial nine-month period.
• Angel’s Facebook fans grew 194% in the initial nine-month period.
• The Voice for Facebook app surged to over 10,000 monthly active users in under a month.
•  The IVR Hotline for the North Pole received over 2,700 calls and generated over 200 tweets.
• Angel’s bylined Mashable article received 5,232 views and appeared as a “trending” article in the Marketing and Advertising category on LinkedIn.