Year in Review 2021 @ Design Prodigy

2021 was wild.

We gained more Fortune 500 accounts and more than doubled our revenue from 2020, breaking our previous revenue record. Given the business climate of 2021, this was beyond our wildest imagination! We like to thank our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve and continuing to push boundaries together with us.

I took sometime to reflect what worked for us and identified 4 points to share below.

MARKETING AND INNOVATION

We had two types of clients, one hired us for value outsourcing of Marketing Operations; the other hired us to innovate new tactics and marketing processes in order to unlock marketing results. We saw the latter gave us significantly more revenue.

We had Fortune 500 clients referring us as their "Marketing Innovation Team" and "Flexible, Smart and Innovative Marketers". Peter Drucker mentioned that "the two most important functions of a business are Innovation and Marketing" So having both mentioned in a same sentence should augur well for any business.

Our decision to accelerate our upskilling in marketing and digital skills since the onset of Pandemic paid off. The other investment that gave us an edge for marketing innovation was running Ungoogleable Challenge Internship consistently since 2016.

RETAINING AND GROWING OUR TEAM

I counted our blessings and biggest of them all, was having majority of the core team that survived our 2019 turnover upheavals with us.

They were truly super "soldiers", with extraordinary resilience and productivity. I am so blessed and honoured to be able to fight through this pandemic with them. Turning up with their best everyday, rain or shine, always growing without limits, owning their role and taking care of our customers like their own. How sweet it was when we learnt that this team's efforts resulted in our record revenue this year.

This core team was the "proverbial seed" of our transformation. Even in the most trying period of the pandemic when there was zero deals, to the time deals started to come in, things just worked with little to no friction. No drama at all.

I took it further to "enshrine" what I observed to be the winning DNA of this team as our Company Values.

Towards the last quarter of 2021, confident of our growth and also to prepare for our renewal, we managed to raise and train our next cohort to better prepare for 2022.

I want to wish the new cohort the very best; to learn from the very best and to serve the very best, so as to fulfil the very best of their professional self.

SYMBIOTIC PARTNERS

Seriously, our partners were really cool. Being an marketing agency with a strong special interests in Enterprise B2B means we were a natural fit for many B2B Marketing Technology providers. These partnership worked really well, allowing us to bring fresh innovative approaches to our clients' pain points. At the same time, working with these partners helped us with new businesses.

I think it helped that we really enjoyed it when our best of class solution recommendations were successfully implemented. It gave us the feeling of being useful as we helped the company digitalised effectively during this period of uncertainty and being able to help them advance their digital marketing maturity. There was no better joy than seeing customers being confident in preparing for recovery or seeing customer enjoying material improvements with automation and data.

B2B enterprise marketing was understandably a niche community, so any opportunity to learn from each other were valuable. For example, together with Adobe, we organised a round table session with 13 marketing leaders. From the participants feedback, it was well received. We thought we should do more of this in 2022, but in a smaller more intimate setting of perhaps 8 marketing leaders instead.

We received a lot of friendship, encouragement and support from our partners. All of them best of class and full of very smart people driving the future of B2B marketing. I really hope together we could help more ambitious B2B enterprises transform to fighting fit modern marketing machine.

Big thank you once again to Marketo, Adobe, Oktopost, Saleswhale, Integrate, Meiro and ReverseAds for your support in 2021. We are already working on upping the game in 2022.

BETTER SKILLS = BETTER RESULTS

My investment in Prof Mark Ritson's Mini MBA in Brand Management and Marketing, which also helped framed Prof Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow as well as Binet and Field's Long and Short of Marketing, continued to pay rich dividends for both our customers and ourselves. As a late convert from a digital marketer to a properly trained marketer, I felt an immense upgrade of my ability to better diagnose and strategise before tactical executions.

For example, Design Prodigy focused on targeting certain Fortune 500 accounts but we were taught that there would be spill over effects on other B2B enterprises and SMEs. Which happened exactly for us and it turned out very well for the following three reasons:

1. There were not many Singapore based B2B marketing agencies with Fortune 500 experience that could help these enterprise jump the maturity curve.
2. Local enterprises were encouraged to undergo deeper and more transformative digitalisation and were supported by generous Government grants.
3. Local enterprise marketing challenges were way less complicated than the Fortune 500 and coupled with greater marketing responsibilities, we could consult and execute at more holistic level to deliver the results.

This was one of the earliest evidence for me that being properly trained marketer + being a marketer trusted by decision makers resulted in more predictable business growth. This SME grew their overall online enquiries by 24% in pandemic year and more satisfyingly, all channels reported an increase in conversions. This was mainly due to key recommendations to work on their Brand building by increasing their budget ever slightly while other competitors were cutting budgets in anticipation of pandemic recession. From their recently compiled 2021 numbers, both digital conversions and derived revenue continued to increase from 2020. Further, judging from their increased share of branded search, 2022 should be looking bright for them too.

In case you might be thinking I'm writing this as a humble brag. My main point of sharing was I am convinced that consistent, predictable results based on solid marketing science was possible and we should leverage more of it instead of spray and pray, by gut feel or based on the latest "blings". While the digital landscape might have evolved to drastically shape consumer buying journey as well as the way we consume information, the 4P (which was very much alive and well) remained super effective with some adjustments in mental mapping. It helped me and my company tremendously from my experience these two years, and I thought it might help someone who was reading this too.

LOOKING FORWARD

One may be tired (still) or had experienced unpleasant surprises in 2021, I am reminded that many of us were undergoing through the same so we were not alone. While mindful that the world remained volatile, I had seen sprouts of hope in 2021. What I saw, consistent with the key learnings of dealing with COVID, is less of ME and more of WE.

Few can survive alone in these times, we can only emerge out of this pandemic together.

Given the flux of change, I liked to invite you imagining yourself riding that wave (with sun glasses and nice tan) and my wish for you was plenty of fresh opportunities awaiting you at each roll, one of which shall unleash your innate talent to the maximum. If you needed sparks of motivations, just know that my two 17 year old interns from Temasek Junior College built an ultimate game for B2B marketers in 10 days. From scratch. With our Brand code.

They named it, Dino Run and I'm still in awe.

When the right talent meets the opportunity, anything is possible.

2022, here we come

In case you were interested in my 2020, 2019, 2018 Year in reviews.