Interview with Paul Lima, founder of Lima Consulting Group
Why did you partner with SmartInsights?
When I started Lima Consulting Group (LCG) in 2004, I put an emphasis on establishing and implementing digital marketing best-practices. After servicing over 500 customers, LCG has an entire series of workshops and best-practices that the marketplace has come to expect from us. I was looking for resources to grow our best-practices library and frequently returned to the solid frameworks from David Chaffey, founder of SmartInsights (SI). We have a similar approach.
David Chaffey founded SmartInsights after having published the book, Digital Marketing, which is used as a base textbook in masters level programs. As I was approached by several universities to assist in their first Digital Marketing classes, and in building out our best-practices knowledge management database within the firm, I thought there were opportunities to collaborate in applying his models to our customers and having the SI community benefit from our models as well.
Within the first phone call with David, he seemed to think so too and our organizations immediately went to work to identify how to make a partnership happen. This is just the beginning of our partnership, we have a lot more announcements to come after our launch.
What does SmartInsights do really well?
David’s team is really strong in identifying best practices for digital marketers and documenting them in easy to understand ways. The strength of his approach and the materials you can find within the Smart Insights website make it easy for any digital marketer to immediately get to work using the e-books, power points, excel templates, word documents, and the many methodologies. As a matter of fact, we incorporate many of these tools within Lima Consulting Group as a way to leverage best practices across our customer base.
How can this partnership help me as a digital marketer?
There are three types of psycho-graphic segmentation’s in the marketplace. Delegator’s, Validator’s and Do-it-Yourselfers; all of whom can benefit from the SI and LCG partnership. If you think about the home improvements market, for many years Home Depot and Lowe’s really tapped into the marketplace to reach Validator’s. If you think about their taglines; “You can do it, we can help”, and “Let’s build something together”, they were appealing principally to those that had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to accomplish, but who wanted a trusted adviser to help them avoid mistakes and to get the job done right the first time.
Delegators – Digital marketers that are overcommitted but need support in developing, deploying and optimizing one part of their digital marketing initiative, or the entire roadmap can work with LCG who can provide training, consulting, and of course, the execution to augment your agility. LCG provides access to the SI tools as part of our engagements and we use our internal LCG frameworks as well as the SI frameworks to help you reach your digital business objectives.
Validators – Digital marketers that want help in formulating the digital marketing strategy, or some aspect of it with the help of a trusted-advisor. LCG can easily and quickly spin up the stakeholders through training, workshops and consulting. That typically begins with us working on an initial engagement to deploy the Digital Transformation Maturity Model for a three-five year time-horizon. From there, we can work on as much or as little as your organization needs us to help your execute the plan.
Do-it-Yourselfers – A free or full-access subscription to SmartInsights to over 150 tools would help digital marketers accelerate planning, training and execution. You have a local partner to answer questions now that LCG is the first certified partner in the Americas from SI.
Even in organizations where the Digital Marketing team has the capacity and capability to fully develop, deploy and optimize a full digital marketing transformation, we have found that many of the executives that manage digital teams need a little bit of guidance and education in order to properly fund these types of initiatives. Digital Marketers can use LCG to assist them as evangelists and change agents.
What kind of firms can best use the benefits of your partnership with SmartInsights?
If Digital Transformation is important to you, then it’s important to us.
The main criteria we look for in our clients:
Eager to provide best-in-class customer journeys across web, mobile and apps,
Data Driven
Understand the value in planning and strategy
Aspire to adopt Agile Methodologies if not already in place
Are investing in digital technologies and methodologies
LCG serves organizations as small as $5 million in annual revenue all the way up to global organizations.
Access to much of the content within SmartInsights, including the blog and many e-books, are free. For those organizations that just want access to the materials, subscriptions start as low as $1,000 per user per year.
