HubSpot Internet Marketing Case Studies

Working together with their certified HubSpot partner, @webplace, Sofia Salon & Spa used HubSpot tools and inbound marketing to more than triple traffic from their local Boca Raton area. 

By implementing an easy to use content management system and building targeted calls to action, the spa has translated these increases in traffic into more than 200 leads in less than six months from a site that before was basically a static phone book listing.

Read the full inbound marketing case study on @webplace's blog.

About Valant Medican Solutions

Valant Medical Solutions is a medical software company that provides psychiatrists and other mental health professionals with a web-based electronic medical record (EMR). Soraya Hareez, Valant’s director of marketing and communication, shares the success her company achieved with HubSpot.

Industry	Tenure
Health Services	6 Months with HubSpot Medium

Challenge: Chaotic Records and Reliance on Paid Search

Before Valant started with HubSpot, the company had a hard time accurately tracking marketing initiatives. Soraya's team was keeping multiple spreadsheets of keywords and the progress they were making. Additionally, Valant relied heavily on PPC ads to drive traffic to their site.

Solution: Integrated Measurement Tools and Lead Intelligence  

HubSpot enabled Valant to create integrated reports of progress across different marketing channels. Tracking and measurement tools, such as the Sources application, help the company keep track of performance in terms of traffic and leads from individual traffic sources. As Soraya said, “HubSpot is a way for us to do everything together, and HubSpot does the calculations for us.”  

Valant reduced reliance on paid search by expanding organic traffic and capturing targeted leads with HubSpot lead intelligence. Landing pages and lead nurturing helped the company design distinct strategies for specific types of leads.

Results: Enhanced Lead Nurturing and Reduced PPC Spending

• Increased leads from 4 leads/month in Sept. to +130 in Jan.
• Doubled organic traffic and increased conversion rates
• Greatly reduced paid search ads  

Valant’s successful use of lead nurturing helped the company increase its lead pool to hundreds in the last three months. Conversion rate for organic search skyrocketed and enabled the company to focus on long-term marketing strategies rather than depend on short-term paid search. “We have eliminated ad words from the mix,” Soraya said.

Thus, HubSpot’s integrated lead management, optimization and measurement tools helped Valant design a successful lead generation strategy. “The best part about HubSpot is its ease of use both on the software side and also on the support side."

Case Study PDF

CMS Products is a storage and data security company located in Costa Mesa, California. CMS's marketing specialist, Gary Stockton, explains how the company developed its online presence with HubSpot.  

Marcus Sheridan, of River Pools & Spas,                          describes his journey from internet newbie to expert inbound marketer with the help of software and advice from HubSpot.  This small business owner took control of his site with HubSpot's content management and blogging tools, resulting in a globally read blog that is a lead generation machine!

Highlights:

• "I have the most well known blog in the swimming pool industry"
• "My website gets views from . . . 10 countries a day"
• "We spend very little with Google Adwords now because we have such tremendous organic (free) search success"
• "Our site is chock-full of photos, videos, articles, lead capture forms, etc. Frankly, customers RAVE about it."

"Simply put, Hubspot has transformed my business completely and it has helped me realize that even a computer dufus like me now has the tools available to be a web designer."

Read the full post on the Sales Lion blog.

Mark Gibson, of Advanced Marketing Concepts, chronicles his company's first year using HubSpot in a year-end blog post.  This specialist marketing consulting business has seen leads jump from one per year to 12 per month using the inbound marketing concepts and tools introduced by HubSpot.

Read the full post on Advanced Marketing Concepts Sales & Marketing Performance Blog:

Highlights:

• "If you actively use HubSpot as a blogging and social media integration platform, HubSpot works as advertised"
• "We began climbing organic search rankings almost immediately, purely through blogging on a weekly basis"
• "We needed a conversion vehicle to capture interested visitors and added our professionally developed white-paper on 30th. September, and have been averaging about 12 inbound leads per month and will close our first new clients as a result of these leads in the next month."
• "What we're going to do differently in 2010 ... Set up lead nurturing within HubSpot" ... and more ... read on to find out!

Industry	Company Size	HubSpot Tenure
Legal Services	20-40 Employees	6 Months on HubSpot Medium

• Attracted 150+ leads & 7 new customers in the past month
• Increased online traffic by 3900% in five months
• Reached a 7% conversion rate from visitors to leads in November
• Expanded international market to over 70 countries
• Drew 457 inbound links from over 70 domains

   

  Karen Pollak is an immigration attorney who provides legal advice about United States immigration law to a wide range of global clients. For the past several months, her phone has been ringing with customer questions, her inbox filling with inquiries, and her website attracting large volumes of organic traffic. “I know that the main reason for using HubSpot is to gain more customers,” said Karen, "and we definitely are."

  Challenge: Limited Online Visibility

  Karen’s previous marketing initiatives included speaking engagements, articles and, most of all, word-of-mouth promotion. Though her company had a professional website, her services were not easy to find on the Web. “We had no visibility,” she said.  

  Solution: Optimization & Targeted Landing Pages Drive Traffic & Leads
  

  Michael Pollak, the company’s marketing consultant, selected HubSpot because it was "easy and intuitive to use" and would increase their visibility online. He soon realized that the software could help to not only optimize blog posts and create landing pages, but also reduce the company's dependency on paid search. "We wanted to wean ourselves off this [PPC] by using HubSpot," he said. Now, the attorneys have invested what used to be their PPC domestic budget to launch a TV campaign for a more organic marketing strategy.

  Immigration Options migrated to the HubSpot CMS and shifted the focus of its marketing initiatives from paid ads to attracting organic traffic. The platform, which integrates various measurement and optimization tools, proved especially useful for the attorneys’ global market. The Prospects report, for instance, offers data about the location of each visitor.

  The Keyword Grader, Michael noted, is the company's most fundamental tool for connecting with immigration law clients. “Having that tool to monitor the keywords and help us design our content throughout the site, blog and landing pages, has really helped our position online, and has resulted in considerable amount of leads,” he said.  

  Michael also regularly uses the Marketing Analytics, which give him full control over the marketing campaigns. “We want to have the ability to measure what we are doing to really figure out what is working and what is not working,” he said. The Competitors section, for instance, gives him insight about the strategies of other immigration lawyers.

  Results: Increased Organic Traffic to Replace Paid Ads

  In July, when Immigration Options started using HubSpot, it had only 53 website visitors. By November, that number increased by 3900% to almost 2,500 visits per month. In addition, Google referrers have grown from 27 in July to 542 in November. The website attracted online traffic from over 70 countries including South Africa, Algeria and Israel.         

  

  The company also significantly increased blogging efforts to elicit leads, placing a compelling call to action and landing page under each blog post resulting in an average 17.93% conversion rate for 17 separate landing pages.
  

  

  In the social mediasphere, the attorneys have been engaging with the community, answering legal immigration questions and connecting with potential customers. 

   

  Since they got started with HubSpot, Karen and Michael have significantly expanded their international market. Above all, they have developed long-term marketing strategies--finding where their customers live and how to attract them organically.

Industry	Company Size	HubSpot Tenure
Health Services	10-20 Employees	1 year with Small Business

Results:

• Transitioned from a brick-and-mortar to an online company
• Drew about 500 visits on its blog in the last 30 days
• More than doubled Google Referrers in 6 months
• Appears on first page of Google for over 20 keywords
• Attracted 304 inbound links from 55 domains

Full Life is a weight management service that provides weight loss coaching and healthy living coaching. Full Life offers a Gold Standard Award winning HMR at home program, the number one weight loss program used in medical centers nationwide, as well as home delivery of HMR Weight Loss Foods. 

Previously a brick-and-mortar company, Full Life successfully transitioned online with Hubspot and, in the last six months, has more than doubled its Google referrers. "We are coming up first and that is where we want to be," said Natalie DeAngelo, a personal coach at Full Life. "For us, being a really small company, that is really exciting."

Challenge: Transition from Brick-and-Mortar Clinic to Online Service

For ten years, Full Life owned and operated an HMR clinic in Boston's South Shore community. They promoted their services through mail marketing, postcards and product discounts. As the company shifted online and moved its network nationwide, it faced a challenge—how do you change the business platform without losing the old community, but attract new customers?

“When we transitioned our clinic to completely online we really wanted to make sure that this personal touch was there,” Natalie said. “Weight management, weight loss, healthy living—it is a personal thing,” she added.

Solution: Integration of Social Media Marketing 

Social media seemed like the right solution to this problem. “We really wanted to use social media to continue to foster our community, to get people talking about their different weight management strategies and healthy living strategies,” Natalie said. So when she came across HubSpot’s social media kit, Natalie helped get Full Life on board with the Small Business software.

“We worked in a clinic for years, so we didn’t have a lot of experience in online marketing,” she said. That is why HubSpot’s CMS responded to the company’s needs for simple navigation and full integration of different software pieces.

The Lead Generation tool, for instance, enables the company to install downloadable forms as useful resources for customers. Revolving around weight management suggestions, the forms spark interest in both new and old readers. “Not only are we getting new visitors, but the old visitors are coming back,” Natalie said. The Holiday Survival Guide is their most recent, thematic downloadable form with tips, recipes and gift ideas.

Full Life can examine the exact segmentation of this online traffic thanks to HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics. “Every month we take a look at how many people are coming to our website and where they are coming from,” Natalie said. Thanks to these statistics and the Keyword Grader, Full Life has the flexibility to adjust its marketing accordingly. The goal is, as Natalie observed, “to keep on top of our keywords and what our customers are looking for.” 

Results: Doubled Google Referrers and Fostered Blog Community

Since January, when Full Life first got started with HubSpot, the company has quadrupled its visitor traffic from 222 to 860 in October. It has attracted 304 inbound links from 55 domains.

 

In six months, Google referrers more than doubled from 139 in May to 341 in October. Full Life appears on the first page of Google for keyword phrases like hmr recipes and hmr blog.

 

Blogging and social media, no doubt, brought Full Life the desired community touch. The company posts recipes and weight management tips, and encourages the community to interact around these topics. “We are starting to see more and more comments on our blog, which is great because we are getting that community feel that we want,” Natalie said. Unsurprisingly, Full Life has increased its blog subscribers to 200 members and has attracted about 500 individual visits on its blog in the last 30 days. 

 

Full Life has achieved tremendous success with HubSpot because it has recognized one of the fundamental concepts of inbound marketing. As Natalie said, “If people cannot find you online, it doesn’t matter how great your website is. The most important thing here isn’t a fifty thousand dollar design, but really being able to be found.”

Industry	Company Size	HubSpot Tenure
Enterprise Software	80-120 Employees	6 Months on HubSpot Medium

Results

• 407% Increase in Qualified Traffic
• 1,000% Increase in Blog Readership
• Google Page Rank: 32 keywords in top 10
• Over 11 thousand Inbound Links 

Vovici is an enterprise feedback application that offers tools like survey software, panel management and online community solutions to measure customer satisfaction and conduct market research. 

Since March, when Vovici got started with HubSpot, the company tremendously increased lead generation. “We have broken our visit records pretty much every week for the last four or five weeks,” said Roderick Morris, Vovici’s VP of Marketing. 

Challenge: Insufficient Qualified Traffic

Previously, besides print advertising, Vovici concentrated its marketing initiatives in online seminars. However, Rod noted, they weren’t getting enough inbound leads. “We wanted to do a better job of getting found,” he said.

As the company realized that organic search leads convert better than any other leads, Vovici decided to purchase HubSpot Medium software and invest into inbound marketing. “We wanted to optimize our Vovici blog posts for SEO and use our blogging to drive more visits,” Rod said.

Solution: HubSpot Medium Enhances SEO & Social Media Reach

Vovici learned about HubSpot through word-of-mouth and thanks to the recommendation of a board member. Soon enough, the company got onto HubSpot’s CMS and started driving qualified leads to its website.

The integration capabilities of HubSpot’s CMS enabled Vovici to optimize every single element of its webpages and make constant improvements through Page Grader. Using HubSpot’s Keyword Grader to evaluate phrases for better optimization, Vovici now appears on the first page of Google for competitive phrases like demographic questions and survey software. The company also monitors and learns from its competitors' strategies through Lead Grader.

HubSpot’s blogging analytics and traffic reporting also help Vovici improve on its marketing initiatives. “We are very happy with the trend on the blog,” said Rod about the way the company has been using blogging to create thought leadership, enhance its PR and brand awareness, and engage the community.

In addition, Vovici has been building its social media presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and, naturally, Twitter. “We find Twitter has been a great driver of traffic to the blog, and also another great driver of awareness for us,” Rod said about the micro-blogging site. “So we are going to continue pursuing a social media strategy,” he added.

Results: Qualified Traffic Quadruples with Simple & Integrated Software

In six months, Vovici increased new visitors by 70% and increased organic search traffic 407%. 

HubSpot’s Sources tool demonstrates the exact fragmentation of that traffic into organic search, direct traffic and referrers. Based on the graph below, for instance, Vovici has attracted over 25 thousand visits for organic search and over 12 thousand visits for referrers in October.

 Sources -- May-October, 2009

In terms of blogging, Vovici has been tremendously successful. Just in the last 30 days, the company blog has attracted more than 18 thousand visitors, 17,154 of whom arrived on the site for the first time. Vovici blogs about customer surveys and market research, and has gathered over 347 subscribers. “And this is a blog that started with virtually no visitors at the beginning of the year,” Rod said.  

Blogging -- April-October, 2009  

Social media, as Rod mentioned, has driven a lot of traffic to the blog. The Reach graph below shows clearly the ways in which Twitter has been generating visits for Vovici—almost three thousand in four months.

 Social Media Reach -- June-October, 2009  

It is exactly this integration of optimization tools, lead generation solutions, blogging analytics and social media that makes HubSpot appealing to Rod. “You might have to buy two or three different tools to do all the things that HubSpot does,” he said.

Palomar Technologies is a supplier of advanced microelectronic and optoelectronic packaging systems based in Southern California. The company uses HubSpot to not only attract wire bonding and contract assembly services visitors, but to also successfully convert them into sales leads.

Four months with HubSpot's software have brought the business a 20x growth in traffic and leads. "Our goal was 22 leads a month; we are now getting consistently 50 to 60," said Rich Hueners, Palomar's marketing communications specialist. "We are triple what we thought we are going to do," he added.

Challenge

Before April, Palomar worked with an SEO company and attracted some traffic to its site. "The problem was," Rich said, "we couldn't do anything with that traffic." Relying only on search engine optimization and not integrating other components of inbound marketing, Palomar couldn't convert its site visitors into sales leads.

"What we were left with was a website that had a decent amount of traffic but no way to actually capture the traffic, therefore monetize it and turn it into sales," said Rich. "So, in a sense, it was like a really nice car without a stearing wheel, or an engine!"

Solution

Having found out about HubSpot from an IT colleague, Rich did some research and realized the importance of integrated software that would enable him to execute his marketing strategy online without being a “tech guy.” "SEO is 10% of what it takes to be successful and HubSpot takes it to 110%," he said. Palomar is now using a wide range of inbound marketing tools that complement one another and lead to growing success.

On HubSpot's blogging platform Palomar maintains two blogs -- Palomar Technologies' Interconnection Blog and Wire Bonders' Speak. Rich views blogging as a way to increase the volume of content (pages) on the Palomar website, thereby increasing its chances of getting found by potential customers in Google's search results. He also sees it as a way of building credibility in industry-specific topics. "Because this is a niche business, because there are not a lot of people in the world who do what we do, we are often the first stop for any kind of information about advanced packaging for the microelectronics and optoelectronics industries," he said.

Rich also uses HubSpot's page popularity tool to determine where to place landing pages. Thus, he is increasing Palomar's chances of converting site visitors into sales leads and, eventually, into customers.

The link grader tool is another product piece that Rich finds useful. "If I can see who is coming to us and linking to us," he said, "it tells me a lot about how important we are and where we are." This, in turn, helps Rich gain insight into international trends and make product improvements accordingly.

Results

Palomar's monthly traffic has increased almost 20x in the last four month. "It is unbelievable," Rich said. In March, the company site attracted 100 unique visitors; three months later, in June, it attract 1,911 unique visitors

Similarly, Google search traffic referrers have grown 20x in four months. Now, Palomar is ranking number one for over 30 keywords and is on the first page of Google search results for important keywords like wire bonder and LED matrix assembly.

 

The company's aggressive blogging has helped it build authority for itself as a thought leader in a very niche industry. PalomarTechnologies.com has accumulated 1,003 inbound links from over 228 domains.

 

"If you follow directions, participate in your marketing efforts consistently while being smart and watching the analytics, you will put landing pages where they need to be, and, as a result, success will happen for your website and ultimately your business," Rich said.

 

Ivy Lodge is an upscale bed and breakfast located in Newport, Rhode Island. Since the small boutique hotel concentrated its marketing efforts online with HubSpot, it has been steadily growing its website traffic, Google referrers and inbound links. "It is really nice to be able to see the success and I think that fuels our small team at the Ivy Lodge to really stay dedicated and stay on target," said Ivy Lodge's Drew McKenzie.

Challenge

When Ivy Lodge moved its reservations system online two years ago, it expected to see a flow of customers. "What we really found," Drew said, is that our website needed a lot of help." IvyLodge.com needed better optimization to attract more traffic and successfully capture it.

As the site wasn't performing well, Drew invested in Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Soon he realized that $600-700 a month for paid advertising didn't scale well. What he really wanted was his site to appear in organic search results where people actually click. "While ads do work, we wanted to be on the left-hand side," he said.

Solution

Ivy Lodge signed up for HubSpot Owner and switched to HubSpot's CMS. Drew describes the system as easy-to-use and efficient because it "gets to the core of what you need to do to have a website that is very functional and very SEO-friendly."

In the process of better optimizing his site, Drew uses HubSpot's keyword grader and blogging software. He also tracks the performance of his optimization strategies. "HubSpot is great in a sense that it combines all the analytics through the entire suite. We really do monitor that," he said.

Drew uses page grader for his link building campaign and to monitor the optimization of different pages. This practice, he believes, has ultimately led to his site's increase in referrers. "We want to make sure that the effort we are putting into link building is going to be a good one for us," he said.

Drew likes to use the lead intelligence tool and its forum functionality. He has integrated 2-3 forums on the Ivy Lodge site. The forms enable the company to interact with customers and design customized stays.

Results

Ivy Lodge's monthly traffic has more than doubled in the last six months from 2,691 visitors in February to 5,837 in July. "We have seen a really nice steady progression month after month," Drew said.

While in the past Ivy Lodge used to buy keywords through PPC, now the brand is on top of organic search results. It appears on the first page of Google for competitive keyword phrases like bed breakfast Rhode Island.

The hotel's Google referrers have more than tripled in the last six months from 698 in February to 1,905 in July. "All that money that we were paying in Pay-Per-Click, we were able to reinvest in other things," Drew said. In addition, the hotel built strong SEO authority by accumulating 2,005 inbound links from over 300 domains.

"I think HubSpot's methodology of inbound marketing is definitely key to any business, whether it is a bed and breakfast or a travel related business, or if it's any other category," Drew said. He believes that the Web has become an integral part of everyday consumer life. "You have to be there and you have to do it well when you are out there," he said.