We’re very happy to be joined by Andrea Herbert, Head of Marketing at Aptitude Software, to continue our Meet our Client Series.
For over twenty years, Aptitude Software have been serving CFOs by delivering financial integration, accounting engines and other solutions that are empowering the next generation of finance architecture.
When Aptitude came to us because they had an existing WordPress website that they wanted to improve. They were looking to partner with a team who could provide reliable support and bring proactive creative ideas that would keep their website mooving forward. The partnership started with Aptitude commissioning Moove to create some compelling online case studies; the project was a great success and in 2017 Aptitude selected Moove as their new Web Agency to support their WordPress website. You can read more about our partnership in our case study.
We caught up with Andrea and asked her to share some news from Aptitude Software, what it’s like working with Moove and her role as Head of Marketing.
Aptitude Software is a very interesting and exciting company. It has a very solid foundation built in the last 20 years that it has been providing software to finance departments. All of the clients it has, all of the finance, accounting and sector specific IP has been built back into its software – making it very rich in IP. It’s also very robust – having taken some of the largest companies in the world through multiple audits – it handles the most complex finance department requirements.
The exciting thing for Aptitude Software now is that with the rise in digital, new technology and increasingly complex regulation, Aptitude is seeing a huge rise in the requirement for its software. This has been recognised by Gartner, who have added Accounting Hubs to their finance technology landscape as well as competitors who are busily trying to create something to meet this demand – something we already have. We are excited to be repositioning ourselves to make sure that this product we have been building upon for the last few years is here – and the answer for any organisation wanting to digitise their finance department.
Aptitude has seen very consistent and steady growth over the last few years. We just announced our half-year results which show a 29% increase in annual recurring revenue and a number of new clients across all geographies and products.
This consistent growth has been accelerated by a number of things including; branching out into APAC around 4 years ago, where since we have won a number of significant clients and recently been named one of the top ten finance technology solution vendors by CIO Outlook.
Our North American business has also seen a significant increase in clients. Our acquisition of RevStream in 2017 has also been a contributor to this growth and we recently closed our largest RevStream deal ever.
The IFRS 17 insurance regulation and the lease accounting standard, IFRS 16/ASC 842 have also contributed to our success over the last couple of years.
Aptitude, for a company that has been around for 20 years, has an incredible amount of agility – enabling us to often be first to market with regulatory software. This first-mover advantage combined with our complete dedication to our client success, mean our clients trust us with their implementations – even with the most complex of requirements.
I am very excited about AptConnect – this will be the very first Aptitude community event, where we bring together our clients, partners, prospects and industry experts to showcase our products, talk about the future of finance – and provide a forum for all of us to network together and share ideas.
This year’s event will be held in Boston at the very cool W hotel in November. The theme of the event is creating financial confidence in a digital world, which ties into our company vision statement – creating a world of financial confidence. This reflects our absolute dedication to providing the best software to clients, giving them confidence in us, confidence in their financial data and reporting – but ultimately to give their businesses confidence in their future, based on decisions they make, using data in our systems.
The event is already causing a lot of excitement with our clients and partners; KPMG are a platinum sponsor – and both T-Mobile and HCSC have agreed to speak at the event. The agenda is going to include compelling case studies, sound advice and inspiring thought leadership.
The work we have done with Moove over the last couple of years has included quite a range of projects. From interactive case studies, pillar pages for our products, event microsites and our new investor relations pages. There are lots more too – Moove help us with creating lead-generation Hubspot landing pages, HTML email templates, account-based marketing projects and much more.
Every single project we have worked together on Moove has made incredibly easy for us. You are by far the most responsive agency I have ever experienced in my 15+ years of working in marketing. Whether its strategic guidance we need, for website structure, layout, mobile/tablet users etc, or whether it is very tactical, like creating new microsites, the speed to respond is always coupled with expertise and quality.
The recent investor pages that we worked on together we used an investor PR firm to help us. That PR firm were also delighted with their interactions with Moove which was highlighted to our CFO and board of investors. Moove were able to build the site quickly with minimal input from our side; the output has delighted our CFO who has since shared the link to the whole company.
When you find an agency like Moove I don’t think you would ever want to go anywhere else. Moove’s experience and knowledge of how to work with WordPress is, I believe, second to none. Coupled with the excellent service and general web-design skills – they are our go-to and will remain so for the foreseeable future for any website project we have coming up.
Definitely. Aptitude is at a very exciting stage in its journey – and for all companies these days – the website is that shop-window that people come to, to build up their impression of the organisation. Moove have helped us improve and continue to improve our website usability, navigability, and ultimately increase visitors, length of stay and number of pages per visit. Our focus on digital and desire to increase inbound leads make this essential to support that goal.
For Aptitude, we are up against some pretty big-name competitors. Their marketing teams and budgets outweigh us by large amounts! This makes digital an essential marketing tool for us. We need to be able to reach relevant people, with relevant content at the right time – with the minimal cost and effort.
This year, we implemented an account-based marketing plan. It is the first time we had concentrated a large amount of effort on pipeline acceleration as opposed to lead generation.
This focus has proved to be very effective. We started to build ‘cluster’ campaigns where we would target a small number of similar organisations – all facing similar challenges and apply messaging that was tailored to them. The digital outreach with specific targets, and specific messages has meant we were getting some pretty impressive results. Landing pages, specific adverts, specific content was receiving sometimes over 200 hits from unique individuals at a company. This feels like we are talking directly to them, understanding their issues and answering them, without having to try calling or emailing.
We committed to doing 10 account-based marketing campaigns this year and have been having sales bite our arms off for them after seeing the results. We are up to 12 and it’s just mid-year. The great thing about digital is that we can always learn from results and improve as we go.
I think like any marketing trend, consumers, especially B2B ones, get wise to tactics and it ends up having the opposite effect. For example – paid adverts on search engines – I know a lot of people avoid them and go to the first organic results instead. I can imagine this will get more common across other tactics and platforms.
I also think that digital marketing sophistication is rising all the time, keeping up with technology trends, data analytics and all the technology available may become a task. Sometimes we are all so busy that taking time out to keep up with these things gets pushed to the bottom of our lists – but it’s very important to keep up in a world that is changing so quickly.
For me there is nothing like taking yourself out of the day to day distractions to attend an industry event. Getting away from your inbox for a few hours means you can totally immerse yourself in the environment. I love speaking with other organisations to find out what they are doing in the digital space such as new tools and tactics. You tend to get some really interesting case studies at these events, companies from across different sectors talking about successful campaigns. Aside from that, I am a member of a few LinkedIn groups that often have some snackable content for my commute that I can dip in and out of.
Aptitude is going through a brand refresh at the moment. We are taking some time to go right back to our vision, mission and values, defining our brand guidelines and hopefully going into the future with a strong brand that represent us now as well as where we want to be.
This has been a huge effort. We have run brand workshops and values workshops in all of the Aptitude offices, with over 50% of the staff. We didn’t want to just create something and push it onto the company. We wanted to get to the heart of the company and represent it from within. We are so excited to launch it later this year. Of course, Moove are helping us with the re-skin of the website to align with this activity, something they have already provided some great designs for! Watch this space for the new look!
