A Golden Moment For Nexa: HubSpot's First Gold Partner Agency in the UAE

For those of you that know me, you will know that I often have a hard time accepting things the way they are.  Whether this be in business or in my personal life, I always believe things can be different and in most cases, better.  Over time, I've felt more and more comfortable sharing these thoughts with a wider audience and putting my opinions out into the public domain, with an acceptance that I may receive public criticism for my thoughts.  While criticism hasn't been as forthcoming as I thought it would, occasionally the consequences and outcomes of one of my opinions gives me immense satisfaction. This week, I've had an abundance of this and wanted to share this publicly.

It all started in 2014.  February 2014, to be more precise.  I'd just returned back to Dubai from a conference in the US and felt that there was an issue with the way that digital agencies operated.  It frustrated me.  The way that my agency and the majority of our competitors operated just didn't make sense any more and needed fixing.  The problem was that digital marketing had evolved into such a complex mix of activity that had siloed into individual, segmented services.  While this can be seen as a natural occurrence in most industries, for a service driven business like ours, I felt that this approach was not sustainable in the medium to long term.  I felt that clients were not getting the maximum impact from working with a digital agency, given this separated approach to the services provided.  

But I didn't know what the solution was.  I just knew that the current approach was wrong.

Instead of keeping these conversations internal, I decided to go with a slightly different approach (aka the Jerry Maguire  Mission Statement approach) and submitted an article to Gulf News (the most popular newspaper in the region) titled
"Online Marketing Needs a Convergence Push".  

The day it was published, I went to a networking dinner at the Oberoi Hotel in Dubai and was approached by one of the attendees who said that he'd read the article and had shared it with his colleagues as he strongly agreed with my thoughts.  He worked for one of the largest digital agencies in the UAE and for me, was enough of an acknowledgement that I was on the right track.

I knew that the solution focused around content, but wasn't sure of how it could bridge the core digital disciplines such as a website, social media activity, SEO and email marketing.  

It wasn't until October 2014 though that I found a large part of the solution.  It was October 6th (my birthday) and I was in Las Vegas at the Pubcon Conference.  That evening, I sat in my hotel room and decided to test different marketing automation platforms as I felt that these were in some way connected to my quest for a better long term approach.  One of the platforms I signed up to that night was Hubspot and having played around with the system for the best part of 3 hours, decided to call it a night and start again in the morning.  At about 3am, I was woken up by my phone ringing.  "Hi Amit, this is Juan Navarro from HubSpot - can we talk?".  I vaguely remember telling Juan to call back later (or words to that effect :)).  

Anyway, to cut a long story short, HubSpot (both the company and the platform) introduced me to Inbound Marketing.  Inbound Marketing in many ways is a term embraced by HubSpot to help define their business and their positioning within the digital marketing industry, but for those of you not familiar with the term, Inbound Marketing can be defined as being the reason as to why every business should engage in Content Marketing.  In other words, Inbound provides a focal point and tangible outcome of implementing a successful content marketing strategy.  Within a single platform, HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform unites website activity (blogs, landing pages), with social media, SEO, email marketing, sales and incredible tracking that provides real-time insights for a company's digital marketing activity.

For me, this was the solution.  Using HubSpot as the base, we as an agency, could unify our activities for a client with the (huge) added goal of providing sales insights and leads as well.  So within 6 months of the initial sign up (from April 2015), we decided to start offering these HubSpot and Content services to our clients.

This week, two great things (and achievements) have happened to us that have given my team and I huge amounts of pride.  The first of these was an amazing surprise by Marcus Sheridan and George Thomas from The Sales Lion (the most respected independent advocates of Inbound Marketing and HubSpot).  Their hugely popular weekly podcast featured Nexa in the agency spotlight section of the show, which as an avid listener (fan) and follower of both Marcus and George, felt magical.  Hot on the heels of this, was an email that we received today from HubSpot, which both confirmed and congratulated us for becoming the first Gold Partner Agency for HubSpot in the UAE.  

Check out our cool new badges below!

I'll end this article here, but a huge thanks from me to every one of my team that has contributed to our success in Inbound Marketing to date and I personally can't wait to achieve even more with you all!  A huge thanks to the team at HubSpot including Juan (thanks for calling back!) and Romain for all of their support and patience!

By the way, in case you wanted to check out my latest industry 'outburst', you can find it here (Article title: The Broken Advertising Agency Model).