ThinkingPhones is a cloud communications provider that’s taking the desk phones out of your office and connecting you through your iPhone or Android device. Founded in 2006, it’s worked with businesses to unify voice, text and conferencing services, connect to other cloud applications and deliver intelligent, mobile-ready apps to their staff and customers.
Because only about 10 percent of the enterprise market has converted their phone systems from to the cloud, ThinkingPhones saw a huge potential market, and knew content was the way to gain the attention of its audience.
David Laubner, ThinkingPhones’ chief marketing officer said the Cambridge-based company operates a “small and lean team” and there was no end to the amount of content it was looking to produce. That’s where Brafton came in.
When did you decide to make the investment in content marketing and how did you find Brafton?
Content marketing is a perfect way for people to “self select” or “self enter” the process and identify themselves as being active in the market for the service we provide. I actually found Brafton by getting ensnared in Brafton’s content marketing machine. I had downloaded some of the documents and white papers Brafton had produced. Brafton had done such a great job in producing the content for themselves, I thought it was only natural to give them a shot in producing ours.
Tell us about the strategic aspect of the partnership?
Often times you’ll come into a project with an idea, an initial starting point, but you don’t have it fully formulated into a strategy. Our Brafton strategist has helped us solidify the myriad of ideas flowing through all of our heads at any given time. It’s really been a help for us to have a resource to bounce ideas off, review our calendar and put things into action.
To excel in content marketing, you have to understand the content along the entire buyer’s journey. Brafton helped us with that initial idea, and pulled it all the way through so it’d truly be a successful program.
How do you provide feedback to your team, and how would you describe the quality of content you receive?
Working with Brafton as a content marketing agency is in one word: simple. Very quick and very responsive. The first thing I noticed about Brafton was that everything was done not only in concert with our own efforts, but was done amazingly fast. Often times when you pick a partner, vendor or agency, you have a little bit of fear that you’re going to be taking on extra work just to manage the agency. With Brafton, you never feel that way.
“From blog posts to videos, the team and the market has been really receptive. In fact, most of the time it comes as a shock to most of the company that our content is produced externally.”
You’re working with Brafton on writing, video, graphics and social. Tell us a little about what it’s like to collaborate on so many fronts with one vendor.
Having one single unified voice is an important thing to help you set your brand apart in the marketplace. When you have one vendor, it helps to get that singularity of voice.
Our initial interest in Brafton was to help us produce written content. Since we’d had such a great experience on the writing front, it was a natural fit for us to elevate and have all of our content produced by Brafton.
“Having one single unified voice is an important thing to help you set your brand apart in the marketplace. When you have one vendor, it helps to get that singularity of voice.”
It was a bit of a surprise to us that Brafton offered social media services, but we were excited to do it. We have enough resources to do what I call “basic social media” monitoring and outreach, but not to the extent that you really need today to stand out. Brafton’s helped us take that to the next level.
How are you gauging your content’s success?
In the digital marketing world, it’s all about attracting people that are actively in the marketplace. So if we look at the past 12 months we’ve been working with Brafton, our organically sourced traffic alone has increased by over 250 percent. And much of that is attributed to the work we’ve done with Brafton.
Learn more about Thinking Phones’ content marketing strategy.
