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Customer story

Gapps

Building a growth marketing strategy & clarifying the offering

About Gapps

Gapps is a digital work partner that provides cloud software consulting, licensing, implementation and support for companies looking to level up their tools and processes. 

Their ultimate goal is to help their customers work smarter, easier, and more sustainably. In other words, to help their work flow. 

Our adventure with Gapps began in 2021 with a Hubspot website implementation project. In 2022, they chose us as their marketing partner.

During our time with Gapps, we’ve built a rock-solid marketing strategy, nailed down their ICP, and begun working in agile sprints, focusing on a growing part of their business: continuous services.

Services provided

Marketing strategy
ICP research, positioning, messaging

Starting point

What Gapps needed help with

  • Gapps has traditionally been a strongly sales-led organization, with marketing playing a significantly smaller role until recently. 
  • If Gapps wanted to meet their goals and expectations of marketing, it was too much for a small in-house team to do alone.
  • They were looking for a nontraditional marketing partner (that’s us!) who would go beyond awareness and acquisition tactics and build a strategic marketing mindset into the entire funnel.

Why they chose Advance B2B

  • They previously worked with us on their HubSpot website implementation, and they liked it, so it was a no-brainer 🧠
  • Gapps also wanted to leverage all of HubSpot’s capabilities (which we just happen to be great at!)
  • Our non-traditional marketing approach, the frameworks we use, and our ways of working were a big plus.
  • The range of specialized expertise in the Advance B2B team made Gapps confident that we could tackle the trickiest of marketing challenges.
 

"We were finally able to make certain business decisions that had not been so easy for us in the past"

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Building Gapps’ first strategic marketing strategy

As a largely sales-led organization with a more traditional marketing style (working in campaigns with long-term marketing plans) working with an external partner that uses an agile methodology, works in sprints, and doesn’t plan exact tactics months in advance could have been a challenge. 

But luckily, things have been running ultra smoothly because of two things:

  • Gapps team’s eagerness to learn and move towards an agile ways of working not only in their marketing, but in their growth operations as a whole. 
  • The Advance B2B team clearly communicated at every step of the way, making sure the wider Gapps team knew how our agile marketing operations would run. 

Pinpointing Gapps’ ideal customers

As part of our marketing strategy process for each and every customer, we:

  • run an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)  workshop,
  • interview our customer’s best customers,
  • present a detailed ICP that can be used across the customer’s business.

The ICP work brought the most value mainly because it helped Gapps make tough decisions as a company – about who their ideal customers are, why it’s important to focus on them, and how to let go of preconceived ideas about what their customers want or think.

"One of the most important things that happened during the strategy phase was that we were finally able to make certain business decisions that had not been so easy for us in the past.” 

Niko Kultalahti
Head of Marketing

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Working as one team

We mentioned above that Gapps chose us because of our working methods; one of those methods is that we don’t have project managers for our strategic marketing customers.

This means that customers collaborate directly with the team of Advancers working on their marketing, including a dedicated Marketing Strategist, Content Marketing Strategist, and Paid Acquisition Specialist. There are no non-marketing project managers or intermediaries in sight.

The result of working this way? Niko says it best:

 

"The best part of working with Advance B2B is that there's no project managers. We’re just working together as a team of marketers – and everyone just gets it. It feels like we have our own Gapps team, and then we have our extended team together.”

Niko Kultalahti
Head of Marketing

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Top highlights

Alongside developing a comprehensive marketing strategy for Gapps (including content, paid acquisition, and Google Search Console audits, as well as defining Gapps’ ICP), the Advance B2B team started to work away on some initial marketing activities and fixes, like:

  • Product pricing and packaging 
  • New Health Check for Your Google Workspace campaign (EN+FI)
  • New service page for Your Google Workspace (EN+FI)
  • CRO adjustments to the Gapps website

Let's have a talk!

If you’d like to talk to us about working together, your best bet is our calendar below. Find a time that's most convenient for you and simply book it! You'll be booked with someone from our sales team.

Alternatively, you can fill out this form and we’ll hit you back with an email within the next 24 hours (unless it’s the weekend or a national holiday, in which case we might take a tad longer, you know how that goes).

* if you're interested in working for us, visit our careers page!