Words worth sharing

A wide spread outage has caused several Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, and WhatsApp to be unavailable. If your business solely relies on these platforms, it's time to consider expand your online presence.

ChatGPT, Bing Search, and Generative Search aren't just buzzwords; they're the reality of online visibility today. Ignoring AI is like ignoring the internet itself. But fear not, marketers! Embracing AI can propel your website to new heights.

We've leveled up (again). Get a behind-the-scenes look into the process of refreshing our homepage and enhancing our website. Ready to elevate your website? Join the scroll revolution and connect with us!

Here at Sangfroid! we think a lot about the "UX of data" within an organization (so much in fact, that I even attended a Segment user conference and wrote down my takeaways for you [linked here]). That is, how accessible is data, how clean and interpretable it is, and how it suits the needs of the team. In this article, we're tackling why HubSpot is a candidate for that use case for growth teams, the reporting available and how to make it visible and actionable.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and digital marketing are like peanut butter and jelly...inseparable. The two disciples work together to drive customers to your business, and ultimately drive growth. While the concept of CRM is not new, its evolution and the technologies driving it have transformed the way businesses approach customer interactions.

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We often find that even the savviest growth stage founders and management teams underestimate the scaling impact that a proper CRM and marketing platform can have on their business. It's one of the biggest tech stack mistakes we see.

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Any digital marketer worth their salt knows that the ability to leverage powerful tools is paramount to cutting through the noise and standing out from the pack. HubSpot, with its comprehensive suite of integrated marketing, sales, and service software, is like using a machete to cut through the noise, while competitors use butter knives.

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Having a unique and tailored online presence is crucial for the success of any business, including dental offices. We offer a distinct advantage over "dental-specific" marketing agencies that rely on generic website templates and strategies.

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In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, women entrepreneurs are taking the world by storm. We recognize the incredible power of strong, ambitious women, and we're here to support you on your journey to success.

Learn how to implement CRM software for emerging industries like cannabis, CBD, and psychedelics. Discover 5 key considerations for success with HubSpot.

Sangfroid Marketing Studio: a premium agency for professional services. Read our law firm case studies on paid media, brand overhaul, and website building. Contact us for digital marketing and branding services.

Boost your alternative medicine business with HubSpot CRM. Sangfroid Studio explains why a CRM is essential for personalized marketing, compliance, and scalability in emerging industries like hemp, cannabis, and psychedelics. Learn how HubSpot can help streamline operations and keep up with the pace of a rapidly growing market.

Our benevolent marketing overlords at Google are at it again—a new update to the search algorithm is punishing sites that are producing content only for the purposes of appearing in search engines. Here’s everything law firms and other professional service providers need to know, and how savvy lawyers can use this to their advantage.

Many experienced attorneys reflexively blanch at the idea of self-promotion. After all, prestigious law firms have long relied on word-of-mouth referrals to advance their business—but in today’s world, with so much of life lived online, a firm’s digital presence can make or break its reputation. Neglecting your firm’s online presence can atrophy a stature that’s been decades in the making.

Not using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the biggest growth mistake we see most law firms making. A CRM is powerful business software for any customer- or service-oriented business to track your accounts, clients, marketing, sales and revenue and more. For our mission to automate law firm intake, a CRM is absolutely the backbone of the law firm’s technology toolkit. The Customer Relationship Management software ties together all of the other essential tools in a law firm’s stack, including e-signature, billing or time tracking software, specialized case management tools, and an answering service. 

Agile is an approach to product development that was born in the software industry. Whatever the context, Agile operates on four core values: Keeping human beings at the center of the work; Generating adaptable, flexible products; Embracing collaborative, goal-oriented workflows; Responding to change rather than fixating on solutions. Agile Marketing is revitalizing SEO by adding flexibility, structure and precision. This inherently leads to: Meeting the need for speed by economizing workflows; Combining knife-edge creative with test-driven experimentation; Driving up content quality by centering on human beings; Building data-informed relationships with consumers; Building data-informed relationships with allies; Embracing growth-oriented, rather than traditional, marketing

The underlying benefit of Agile marketing is that it calls on quickfire techniques to help you make the most of SEO investments and catalyze a slow-to-smolder strategy. 

Here at Sangfroid!, we work with many professional service providers. Across the board these are savvy entrepreneurs working to grow their businesses and specialists in their fields. Another thing they have in common? Almost all midsize growing firms are making at least one error that is hampering their growth. As an Agile growth team, our mandate extends beyond our clients' SEO, to ensuring they have the proper technology toolkit to win and capitalize on the leads they generate. 

Drafting a go-to-market plan isn’t just about integrating your products or services with your consumers’ lives as they exist today. It’s where you engineer a new framework for envisioning the challenges they face and, as a result, a progressive, unrepeatable solution. This guide will outline five  steps for creating a plan that every disruptor should implement to launch on solid footing while staying light on their feet.

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Thorough and early product instrumentation is a recommendation we make often for the founding technology teams we work with. In that vein, these scrappy teams usually want to know how much time and effort it takes to implement that instrumentation.

In my experience, a client asking this question is really after two different answers: First, how should I prioritize this among my other pressing development priorities? Second, since as a marketing team we rely on a client’s engineers to implement a spec that we draft, they are also probably wondering, “I’m paying them, how much of this do they need me to do?”

In this new blog series we explore some of the best reads on the Sangfroid! office bookshelf. First up is Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Creatives who thrive in an agency environment are collaborative by nature. Their ideas are strengthened and refined by running them through the gauntlet of peer review. Whiteboards covered in varieties of handwriting and suggestions provide the roadmap for success. But in an effort to keep everyone healthy by distancing them from each other, we’ve essentially taken away their greatest tools for producing their best work. No more whiteboard sessions, no more huddles around monitors. Just Google Meets and sweatpants.

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A recap of our Austin Design Week event Data & Design: Creating in a Post-Cookie World.

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The removal of third-party cookies changes the way businesses and advertisers all over the world target and engage with their audiences as well as how the data from billions of Google users (you and I included) are used by businesses.

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One of the first tasks in rolling out a growth marketing and product analytics tech stack is to develop an instrumentation plan. This is an opportunity for the various teams at your organization to agree on what user data and events should be collected in order to evaluate your marketing and product’s performance.

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The path to a perfect design is rarely a straight line. Read about how we came to realize the design for our new website through the eyes of our resident graphic designer, Caitlin.

At the beginning of 2020, Sangfroid! was an ambitious agency with a dedicated team of four. As the year unfolded, and the challenges rolled in, the company began to grow. So much so that that very same team of four, is now a skilled band of 11. With each addition, the dynamic of our team evolved. By the time we grew to our current size, we felt the need for some internal soul searching. We ask ourselves, “Does our current brand continue to represent our maturing agency? Or have we outgrown it?”

At some point every brand reconsiders itself. That can happen for any number of reasons, from the launching of new products or a change of ownership, to outdated logos or sagging sales. Perhaps a brand needs to distinguish itself from the competition, focus its offering or simply get some much needed publicity. Regardless, if your brand is looking in the mirror pleading for a makeover, keep reading, this will help.

For us in an agile studio, points are as concrete a unit of measurement as inches, minutes, or dollars — but for those new to Agile or agency billing, points can rightly feel like a lot of handwavy hot air. Using points and agile in a growth marketing agency is one of our core theses as a firm, so I’m here to once and for all demystify this mighty means of measurement.

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When you think about building a successful brand, it’s highly unlikely that your first thought is of little trees in ceramic pots. Why would it? On the surface, bonsai and branding have virtually nothing in common: one is a centuries-old tradition passed down between generations and the other is a consumer-focused product developed on a considerably shorter timeline. But dig a little deeper and the similarities reveal themselves.

Two of the most common questions I get from founders are, first, when is the optimal time in business growth to hire an agency? And second, is retaining an agency akin to creating a new position that will exist indefinitely, or a time-boxed service that they should plan ahead to offboard?

Mission statements are immensely valuable tools for any organization. These short, sweet, and to-the-point phrases not only have the potential to serve as a sales and marketing tool, but more importantly, provide a philosophical compass to be used when making just about any decision.

Here’s my take on branding — there’s no silver bullet one-way to do it right. Instead, we’re all benefitted by drawing on all the best thinking available. Knowledge is power. And systems of knowledge become systems of power and value.

I had the good fortune of seeing a market opportunity up close very early in my career — namely that most agencies were rather unsophisticated in the way they pursued metrics for their clients.

A quick Google for marketing advice, and you’ll receive a flurry of marketing buzzwords, influencers, and opinions from everyone and their mother coming at you from all directions, making it hard to cut through the noise and determine what your small business really needs.

Every day I have the privilege of working with founders and entrepreneurs — tremendously brave folks who put everything on the line to create something new. But when it comes to organizing the stack of tools that power their growth marketing initiatives, many are making the same avoidable mistakes.

Introducing Agile to our growth marketing team was a revelation of productivity and process. I found it well-suited to managing the tight turnarounds of marketing campaigns and setting and reflecting on performance goals.

A question our agency has received often during these trying times is “should I even be marketing right now?” As hard as it is to change a strategy that has been in the works for months or rewrite all of the copy for a campaign, it is vital right now.

It’s been about a week since I made the trip from Austin to San Francisco for Segment’s user conference, Synapse 2019 — just long enough for the presentations by speakers from Y Combinator, IDEO, Udacity, IBM, Forrester, Instacart, and more to marinate and begin bursting out of me.