As a digital agency, we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about the value inbound marketing provides. Not only is it more efficient, but it’s also a great way to build trust and form real relationships with your ideal customers from the very first interaction. As we looked for ways to demonstrate this to clients, it occurred to us that our own success story was the perfect illustration of how inbound marketing works, and why it works. Thus, we put together this case study to share the impact inbound marketing has had on our business in just twelve months. The rest is history!
The Challenge
A year ago, eCity was a leading digital agency relying on traditional sales methods to generate new business. In a world where automation had become the name of the marketing game, we were still generating the majority of our leads through one-on-one relationships from account managers. And while we weren’t looking to replace our existing relationships, we knew this method simply couldn’t scale to meet our growing business needs. We were spending too much of our business development efforts on prospects who weren’t ready to move forward with a project. And then the light bulb went off. What if we found a marketing solution that would scale beyond relying on personal relationships and help us focus our attention on the people that would be a good fit with us and were ready to start a project? For us, that solution was inbound marketing.
The Process
We started our process by looking at the technology platforms that could facilitate the content publishing, social listening, and lead generating activities associated with inbound. HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketo are the three leaders in this space, but there are several other options as well.
After reviewing the options, we decided that HubSpot would be the best fit for our agency. We based our decision on the following factors:
- Ease of implementation
- Intuitive dashboard
- Ease of integration into our workflows
- Support to provide inbound as a service
Implementing HubSpot proved to be relatively quick and painless for us. On the technical side of things, implementation was as easy as adding a bit of code to our existing website. More challenging was making time for our team to write content that showed our expertise and addressed the concerns of our clients. This involved writing blog posts and premium pieces of content, creating landing pages, and crafting email campaigns. These content efforts took time and also forced us to take an empathetic view of who our ideal customers were and what concerns they had. This process has proved invaluable to us in the long run as we strive to provide relevant, helpful information to our target audience.
The Result
388% increase in website visits
Almost as soon as we started publishing content on a weekly basis, we experienced an increase in website traffic. Publishing blog posts regularly also had the added benefit of providing us plenty of ammunition for social media and email campaigns. Soon, our organic traffic (shown in green) was up significantly, and we were generating steady traffic from other sources, such as social media and email marketing, as well.
Organic Search increased steadily month over month
After establishing a regular publishing schedule of two blog posts per week, we saw traffic from organic search rise dramatically. Rather than spending money on traditional interruptive marketing methods, we were attracting customers to our site by publishing the right content in the right place at the right time. Our ideal customers, and the search engines, took notice.
We went from generating virtually no leads from our online marketing efforts to over 70 per month
Most importantly, adding premium content to our website that requires users to input an email address saw our leads from our website rise from just a few per month up to several each day. HubSpot also made it easy for us to create an automated process to nurture these leads through the buyer’s journey. This freed up our time to focus on building relationships with the right prospective clients and delighting our existing clients with exceptional work.
The Takeaway
It’s now been over a year since we took the inbound marketing plunge, and we couldn’t be happier with our decision. Our social media engagement is up significantly, website traffic has tripled, and we’re now generating a steady stream of targeted leads. Perhaps the biggest benefit of all since implementing HubSpot has been the ability to see who is on our website and how they are engaging with our content. Not only does this help us see which content is most valuable to our ideal customers, but it also provides us crucial insight into when prospects may be ready to move forward with a project. Using this data, we’re able to provide a more personalized method of outreach and nurture leads according to what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in. This has allowed us to save time and money previously spent on outbound methods and refocus those efforts on qualified leads who are interested in buying.
If you’re interested in learning more about our experience or hearing about how we could apply the same strategy to your website, we’d love to tell you more.
