The Housing Hive

Digitalising end-to-end processes and how this can be transitioned in the social housing space

In this session, we welcomed Jon Stanley (VP of Marketing) at Caesarstone UK & EMEA - a global designer and manufacturer of premium quartz surfaces. Jon talked us through their digital transformation over the past 18 months when they became a Prodo client. 

Jon evaluated the web traffic the business was getting when he first came in and found the traffic to be artificially high - they were receiving 50,000 hits a month on the site but there was no CTA’s or lead capture from a marketing perspective to convert these numbers. 

Caesarstone then embarked on a new marketing strategy - an Inbound Marketing strategy, using Prodo as their client to deliver the strategies and HubSpot as their platform to drive their prospects into leads, their leads into customers and their customers into their biggest promoters

The results have been phenomenal for the business. They are a truly recognised brand within a competitive market space. They sell B2B but consumers are now asking for Caesarstone by name to tradesmen building their market share month to month.

Jon made a very strong point that Digital Transformation does not need to be complex; his advice to any business is to be clear in the expectations from the get-go. 

Building out your personas is essential in understanding your customer's digital journey. You need to understand who you are talking to and how they think. Another key piece of advice from Jon is to benchmark against the age we live in, not the sector you work in or the competition. Everything has moved to digital and you should aspire to keep moving along with the times. 

Insights from Christina Hamilton, Marketing Manager at GJW Direct

GJW as a business were marketing themselves and interacting with their customers in a very traditional and offline way, making their cost-per-acquisition high, their support only available during office hours, and generally a little behind the times. The customer base & target customers were reluctant and cautious about online methods. Chrissy & GJW were facing very similar challenges to many in the Social Housing sector - shifting their customers online in order to enhance their experience and operate more efficiently.

Using their Umbraco-based website & portal, in combination with HubSpot’s suite of tools & Prodo’s strategic partnership, 2 years on, GJW has made huge strides towards their target. Over 10,000 of their contacts are now registered to the MyBoat portal, they’re converting their leads to customers and supporting their current customer base 24/7 through the use of digital!

Insights from outside the housing sector

We were joined by Russell Carter, Senior Product Owner at Health Shield, who spoke to us about utilising digital to support staff wellbeing - and Health Shield's product Breeze which is soon to be fully launched.

Russell talked us through the fact they've found mental health, financial situation, physical health etc. all correlate generally when it comes to wellbeing. Breeze aims to cover these areas. The platform brings in expert content from other sources as well as from Health Shield themselves.

How to adapt to virtual

We were joined by Sian Bennett, Head of Music & Events Marketing at Mustard Media, who talked us through how the events industry has inevitably had to quickly adapt to the current situation, which has resulted in the launch of their Virtual Event Lab product!

The ABC's of digital transformation

This week's guest speaker, Steve Dungworth, from Golden Marzipan took us through his ABC of topics relating to working in social housing:
 
💥  Agile - We discussed how friction in work has altered since the outbreak and how specific it is for each of us.
🌎  Big Data - Housing Associations have enormous amounts of data, it's often not arranged and presented in a way which it can be utilised to enhance service delivery. 
📱  Channel Shift - Targets in this area for Housing Associations are often unrealistic. 

How to embrace digital solutions

Our panellist Gary Haldane from Kingdom Housing explained they’re planning to introduce remote working as a preferred long term strategy, moving away from the traditional workplace and embracing digital solutions to enable them to achieve this