Client Story: Informous

The Situation

Historically, Three Stage Media and its predecessor BD Metrics provided interactive marketing solutions to trade shows and conference organizers. When the recession started to alter this landscape, Three Stage Media had to pivot to survive and thrive. Len Ostroff came in as the new CEO with the goal of leveraging Three Stage Media’s development and product design expertise to form a new line of business. Three Stage Media needed to plan, design, build, and market an exciting new product with limited time and resources.

While Three Stage Media had ideas and development talent, they realized that they did not have the marketing expertise and execution resources necessary for success. They decided to seek outside help to research, decide upon, and build a strategic plan before pursuing a new direction.  In addition to this initial plan, Three Stage Media needed continuous execution of marketing tactics to attract an audience of industry decision makers and turn that audience into a revenue stream.

The Work

Three Stage Media talked to a number of firms, but Right Source Marketing stood out because of its unique model, which combines experienced marketing leadership with execution resources. Not only did Right Source Marketing become Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer, they became Three Stage Media’s entire outsourced marketing department.

Initially, Right Source Marketing assisted the Three Stage Media executive team in product planning, marketing strategy, and program development. Together, Right Source Marketing and Three Stage Media honed big ideas into a product: Informous, a connection platform focused on helping industry buyers find the solutions they need, and suppliers market the solutions they provide.

On an ongoing basis, Right Source Marketing served as an integral part of Three Stage Media’s team, participating in weekly management meetings on site, identifying Three Stage Media’s highest marketing priorities, developing goals and metrics to use as key performance indicators to the internal team and VC funders, and taking action to meet and exceed those goals.

Right Source has achieved or surpassed every goal we’ve identified.  More importantly, they helped us develop the system and metrics we use for tracking and reporting on those goals.  They played a crucial role in our transformation into a lead generation business.  Our success is their success.” -Len Ostroff, CEO, Informous

The specific marketing tactics Right Source Marketing executed for Three Stage Media team include:

• Integrated marketing efforts to support every aspect of the business, from sales to product development.
• Implemented a comprehensive content marketing strategy, involving the entire Three Stage Media team in blogging and content distribution.
• Advised the team on email list building and deploying email marketing campaigns targeted to Informous’ various audiences.
• Managed and reported on extensive search engine efforts, including complex search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns.
• Performed all aspects of social media marketing through advising the integration of social media into the product, managing multiple Informous Twitter and Facebook accounts, and mentoring employees on using LinkedIn.
• Worked with both in-house and outsourced web design and development talent to ensure that all web properties associated with Informous are both attractive and effective.
• Reported and interpreted analytics results with a focus on both explaining high level trends and attention to detail.
• Continuously adjusted based on data and analysis.
• Assisted with presentation strategy for investor and board meetings.

The Results

While working with Right Source Marketing, Three Stage Media executed on a strategic plan that resulted in a new round of venture capital, and a company name change to Informous.

Serving as the Informous marketing team, Right Source Marketing helped Informous:

• Overtake established industry sites in only 6 months time on key performance indicators such as unique visitors and organic search traffic.
• Drive traffic from over 7,000 keywords on search engines, 300 sources, and 138 countries within the first 3 months in production.
• Attract hundreds of companies in the packaging and plastics industries to participate in Informous as content providers.
• Build the Informous blog into a respected source of industry news, marketing advice, and business guidance, as shown by site traffic metrics and social media reach.
• Connect industry buyers and sellers through building an industry-specific audience and then turning Informous into a plastics and packaging lead generation engine.
• Use Informous’ aggressive marketing to attract and support the onboarding of dozens of national and regional sponsors.