Kalungi helps fertility clinic give life to marketing

When it came to promoting PFCLA’s services, they realized that they were the ones in need of help. To use their own language, they needed a “marketing surrogate,” an agency that could step in and do the work they couldn’t do themselves.

Enter Kalungi.

With expertise in product positioning and go-to-market strategies, plus results-oriented inbound and outbound divisions, Kalungi has helped dozens of companies scale their marketing efforts through a series of short-term engagements. Companies receive the benefits of a full-time marketing department without having to staff one.

The problem: strong companies but weak marketing

Miles Collins and his wife Brittany became the new management team for PFCLA and Hatch, serving as President and CEO respectively. Their IVF clinic and egg donor/surrogate agency have very strong reputations, but marketing support was severely lacking.

“The existing SEM agency created a new website, but it wasn’t up to our standards,” said Miles. “We brought in another SEM team, but they didn’t have the expertise to track leads or measure ROI. We tried hiring a marketing vice president but that turned out to be a big flop.

“In short, we quickly realized we needed better systems and an integrated marketing effort right from the start.”

A need for visibility and speed

“My most important near-term objective was visibility and speed. By spending money on different growth avenues without a very good way of tracking success, we were potentially wasting a lot of money. So, we needed visibility quickly.

“We explored hiring our own CMO and other agencies. But we couldn’t find any one solution that could address all of the areas we needed to complete in order to get set up properly. Hiring different firms with their own specialty wound up looking piecemeal.

“In reaching out to our network, we learned that Kalungi had the breadth and depth we needed to accomplish what we wanted when we wanted. It also was extremely important to us that we received great feedback on the agency from people we trust.

“When you talk to a lot of agencies you get that face time with the founder or the CEO and inevitably, they are extremely knowledgeable and charismatic and you think, ‘Boy. This is going to be great.’ But then they push your account off to someone who is not anywhere close to that caliber and you don’t get so much time with the people that know their stuff. That was definitely a concern.

“Through the vetting process, it became clear that the caliber of the marketing managers at Kalungi below the C-level was still pretty exceptional and we wouldn’t need to have constant face time with the founders to actually be working with people who knew what they were doing. That was big for us.

The marketing to-do list? Done.

“We had quite an extensive marketing to-do list. We needed a marketing system that gave us visibility into the ROI and success of different marketing initiatives, whether ad words, print media or conferences. We wanted help with a strategic marketing plan.

“We needed to rebrand our egg donation and surrogate service (into what became Hatch). And new websites for that brand and PFCLA, as well as accompanying SEO.

“If that wasn’t enough, we also needed hands and brains to execute building a system, creating content, doing social media posts and experimenting with a lot of avenues that we didn’t have the manpower to do to see what worked and what didn’t.

“Kalungi has provided services across the spectrum, from crafting a marketing strategy to helping us understand our customers and their needs. The team totally rebuilt and redesigned our websites. They put in a marketing automation system, created content specific to our customers, and made significant improvements to SEO and conversion rates for the visits we do get to our sites.

“They also helped us create a marketing calendar with webinars and events they helped us set up. So, I would say the scope of services has really run the gamut on what you could expect from a professional marketing consultancy.

“One thing I didn’t expect is that we’ve made such great progress that we’ve been able to back out of the strategic function and continue on the execution function at a lower cost. We’re on our fourth quarterly engagement, cruising along at this different capacity but still making strides.

Like having your own marketing team

“What’s great about Kalungi is that there’s a high degree of professionalism amongst everyone on the team. It feels like having your own marketing team, and that has allowed us to accomplish quite a lot.

“Our organic traffic sessions for PFCLA have gone up astronomically, our new set of keywords has moved our average ranking up nearly 40 points, and people who are coming to us for services frequently say how the website built so much trust for them.

“As for me, my biggest gain was not losing time. To get to the systems we have and to learn what works and what doesn’t could have taken us a very long time. In a business that’s fast-moving and in an industry that’s increasingly competitive, we didn’t have time to sit around and wait to figure all of that out on our own. We needed to expedite that process.

“Kalungi helped us do that, which was extremely important to us.”