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Hi, please could you tell us a bit about your current position and how do you manage to combine the diversity of the tasks your role involves.

Hi Maria! First of all, thanks a lot for this opportunity to share a little bit about my experience. I am the business developer at Sétima, we are a software development company based in Portugal. I manage sales, marketing and all customer related activities. This comprises a lot of different things, which on a daily basis means prioritising.

There is a lot being said about the importance of the alignment between Sales and Marketing. Speaking from your experience, why do you think communication between these teams is so crucial?

We believe the alignment must come from within the organisation, all departments should translate the company’s culture. That’s why recruiting is crucial for us. We are the development team of our clients. We want to communicate this through our marketing channels. We want to be close and connected. It’s one of the benefits of working with a smaller development company. Though, looking from the outside it seems like sales is just my department, it doesn’t work that way. We are all responsible for several departments. I believe everyone sells inside the organisation, if you have a project manager, developer, designer speaking directly with the client they are selling your services. If we see something in the layout that doesn’t work for users, we share our views with the design team. We are all responsible for what goes out and having clients satisfied. It can’t be a one man show.

Your company is based in Portugal. What markets do you cover and how does it reflect on your marketing activities?

Our clients are from several different markets: Portugal, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, US… So we have chosen to speak in English in our social media. Besides location, we have different target segments for our audiences:

• Recruiting which is trickier in the IT sector;
• Clients who want to develop products from scratch which normally are not from the technology sector, therefore the importance of speaking to them in a way they understand;
• Clients who want to simply hire extra resources normally have further knowledge of what they want and need.

It’s hard to find a strategy that has quick results for all our target segments so we try to keep it casual and reflective of the kind of service we believe in.

What do you believe is the biggest value you bring to your clients?

I believe reliability, understanding, peer to peer communication are positive aspects. Often developers speak too techy and with expressions people can’t understand, we try to meet clients halfway, understand what they do and how and why, in order to generate products that actually bring value to them. That’s what we love to do, bring things to life that actually make a difference. This engagement is priceless because clients understand our commitment to making their views happen.

Tell me a bit more about your team?

Over the last few years we’ve managed to triple our development team with people that reflect our company’s culture. Our team is mainly developers, with expertise in different technologies: react, react native, .NET, etc. A common trait that unites us all is the willingness to learn. We aim to improve, to do better at each project, be updated. With effort you can learn anything, but character is what it is.

What would you say is your main strategy for your marketing activities?

We do a lot of customer support, focusing on retention. And also some social media, email marketing (but less now). When I’m forced to choose, I’ll invest more time on clients. Retention is the best for finding new clients, because they often refer us to other clients. Projects also do this for us, because leads see what we’ve done for other projects and want to hire us because of that. For instance, we’ve already done three mobile apps for the Saint James Way.

What kind of content do you find most successful?

The type of content we share the most are projects from our portfolio, quotes and sometimes we try to explain our services and technological concepts. The most successful I would say is the portfolio, because it’s the real deal for clients. They look for resemblances on what they want to develop themselves, which is also hard, because we always aim to do better, not just the same. And because not all projects we’ve worked on can be published by us.

Do you use video in your content marketing mix?

We use some animations and videos. Video is very important as a form of communication and generates more interaction from users. We’ve seen the demand grow also from our clients in projects. For technological companies video works very well to show the company’s culture, the people behind the project. It generates good results with hiring efforts. This is something we aim to invest in more in the long term, it has to be something that leaves everyone in the team comfortable. We tend to work more behind the scenes, than in front of the camera. To show pieces of products we’ve found animations with after effects and others can create more emphasis on the product itself.

It’s great to hear you have such a good experience with videos. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.