Supercharged with Commerce

Marketing Association, leading New Zealand's marketing community, undergoes a digital transformation. The outcome? A revitalised online platform that effectively reflects their established legacy in advancing marketing excellence through dynamic learning and development programs. 

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The Marketing Association is an organisation that aims to help NZ marketers' be brilliant' by facilitating learning and development initiatives such as workshops, training, certifications, and events.

The Marketing Association struggled to provide digital marketing leadership to the New Zealand community. It relied heavily on manual processes, and its original legacy system presented many challenges that restricted digital expansion.

CEO John Miles stated that "as we were evolving, we could not make the necessary changes within the system to handle scale. The main objective in bringing on a new system was to ensure a seamless service to improve internal productivity and our members' experience."


The challenge

The Marketing Association needed to modernise their website and retention platform, make it easier for staff to manage communications, and allow memberships to be sold online (instead of their original paper-based process) and automatically renewed.

The Marketing Association held a wealth of data within their legacy system. However, this system was highly proprietary and hard to integrate with other systems or host plugins that would make their process more agile and allow them to communicate with members as expected. Their lack of back-end functionality hindered internal productivity, which caused the team to find endless workarounds, resulting in the double-handling of data and wasted time troubleshooting problems.

The solution

To help lift the Marketing Association's platform into the 21st century, we initiated a multi-hub solution focused on automation and system efficiency. After months of scoping, business process mapping, data analysis and requirements, the project was ready to go. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. After a nine-month hiatus, it was full steam ahead again. This delay meant the Marketing Association could now take advantage of the (then newly released) 'custom objects' feature in HubSpot CRM.

This silver lining resulted in a more streamlined configuration of the new system, meaning that the entire membership platform could be migrated to HubSpot with a seamless eCommerce integration with WooCommerce. This integration dynamically generates content through HubDB and forms the backbone of all marketing activities.

"A huge part of our time in complex projects is spent scoping the business requirements and mapping out new processes, well before any build or configuration occurs," says Project Manager Hugo Venter. "This thorough approach allowed us to plan for the complex migration needed for this project and manage the client's expectations."

The result

"The Marketing Association initially tried to do everything manually, but complexities in managing projects, events, tickets, and data, and how they communicated with members. Instead of having an all-in-one system, we developed a tech stack by splitting the eCommerce function into its own dedicated platform, entrusting HubSpot to be a source of truth for all marketing comms and designating Xero to be the source of truth for their financial services.

"We used more recent, more up-to-date systems and entrusted those systems to do what they do best," said Hugo. "Sitting at the back of everything is HubSpot. We created an entire ecosystem through custom objects that would allow the M.A. to better tailor their communication to their marketers based on their specific activities, life cycles, and journey. One of the most extensive enhancements that HubSpot made to its platform was the introduction of custom objects. Without these, it would have been impossible for us to transform this scale for the Marketing Association."

Membership Manager Debbie Curtz says, "it was important to partner with an agency who could clearly translate the digital processes that were happening and show us what we needed to do to make sure the project was delivered on time and on budget. That was the strength in working with Engaging Partners."

The impact

The Marketing Association trusted Engaging Partners and HubSpot to lead them through the necessary transformation, to bring their platform into the 21st century and future-proof it for scale. Through a complete website migration and the integration of a custom-developed API to their WooCommerce-powered eCommerce site, the Marketing Association now has a fully automated membership process that has drastically improved internal process efficiency.

John-Miles

John Miles

CEO,
Marketing Association

We're thrilled with the outcome. We now have the ability to deliver personalised experiences, targeted communications that create sales funnels, automation, reporting dashboards, and simplifying processes to help the team be more productive. It's fantastic and everyone is excited.

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