HubSpot Customer Case Studies

Lynton Web Solutions
Houston, Texas
B2B
11-50 Employees 
Internet Industry

ABOUT THE COMPANY


Lynton Web Solutions is a full-service marketing agency based in Houston, TX. The company provides a range of services for marketers -- technology (CRM integration, eCommerce Integration), design (website design, landing page design, call to action design), and marketing (social media, content, email marketing).



BEFORE HUBSPOT



Daniel Lynton started Lynton Web Solutions in 1999 and is now the company’s CEO. Early on Lynton was a one-man shop, focused on custom web development. 

Lynton's challenges at the beginning were similar to those many young marketing agencies face. For starters, the work load was highly variable. Some months he’d be overwhelmed with work for one client, then he’d finish the project and find himself under capacity for weeks. 

The firm also spent too much time educating and qualifying customers. Since his customers came to him with varied levels of marketing expertise, he often spent time educating them about marketing tactics and the value of his services.

LEARNING WITH HUBSPOT

Lynton Web's success in the HubSpot Service Marketplace didn't come overnight. The company's first step was to become a HubSpot customer. By setting up the software for their agency, taking the time to learn how to use it effectively for their business and embracing the inbound marketing methodololgy that goes hand-and-hand with the software, they established a foundation of expertice that later provided leverage in the services marketplace.

RESULTS AFTER 2 YEARS WITH HUBSPOT

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• Once the Lynton Web team learned the HubSpot software and the inbound marketing methodology, they were able to target far more educated marketing customers, a change that dramatically improved the productivity of their business.

• The HubSpot Marketplace helped Lynton develop long-term retainer relationships with clients. Prior to HubSpot, the Lynton team's business came in waves. With HubSpot, Lynton was able to begin generating steady, lasting relationships with customers. 

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“I would say our most qualified leads come from the service marketplace. For the vast majority of HubSpot customers, it’s the first place they look for vendors. So there’s a huge value in the reputation that comes with being a HubSpot certified partner. Since they’re already a HubSpot customer, they’re an educated customer, so our common ground provides this level of trust to immediately dive into deeper discussions.”

- Daniel Lynton, CEO Lynton Web Solutions

Firefish Software
Glasgow, Scotland
B2B
11-50 Employees 
Computer Software 

"If you're a marketing professional, HubSpot is a great way to concisely demonstrate you and your team's results to executive staff.  Many companies are reluctant to invest in marketing because they have no simple way to measure ROI. HubSpot changes that, making it easy for the decision-makers in an organization to have confidence in the benefits of a strong marketing team - and with that confidence comes results."

- Wendy McDougall, CEO Firefish Software 

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

Firefish Software was born out of a high performance recruitment team. Technology was making racing advances and they saw the potential to change the face of recruitment. Today Firefish Software has become your secretary, your personal assistant, and your marketer. It reminds you of your interview appointments, suggests appropriate candidates for jobs based on your needs, integrates with all your favorite social media, monitors your careers site activity, and funnels the maximum number of candidates back to your website. Firefish Software provides an engine for your careers site, a social recruitment platform, an applicant tracking system, and all the other tools to build a successful recruitment team.

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Firefish was using a variety of marketing tactics but were finding that the overall cost of customer acquisition was much too high for their budget and for a company of their size.

• They were facing stiff competition from much larger, well known companies and Firefish needed a way to gauge how their tactics were working compared to their competitors in order to break through to potential customers.  

• Firefish tried using different marketing programs but had no way to tell which programs were actually effective and were not able to accurately measure the return on investment of each program.

RESULTS AFTER 1.5 YEARS WITH HUBSPOT:

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• Firefish used HubSpot’s Competitor Tracking tool to see a birds-eye view of the market relative to their own strengths and weaknesses. With this tool, they were able to target their marketing activities, develop as a business, and rise against the competition.

• With HubSpot’s Lead Intelligence tools, Firefish was able to immediately discover detailed information about each lead: what they are interested in and whether or not they are close to purchasing. Their marketing team understands which leads should be passed onto sales and which leads they should nurture more.

• Firefish used HubSpot’s Blogging feature to help them drive traffic to their website, spark interest in prospective clients, and provide added value to their existing clients. The tool has allowed them to easily manage their blog posts and monitor what kind of traffic they’re getting. They saved a great deal of time by being able to check all their stats in one place, which in turn made their marketing team more focused and productive. 

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"Without HubSpot Software, we'd have found it very difficult to qualify how likely a potential client was to purchase. With HubSpot Software, we have a good idea of how ready a lead is to buy before the sales team are even involved, meaning their time is used much more efficiently."

Alight Planning
El Dorado Hills, California
B2B
11-50 Employees 
Computer Software 

"We love HubSpot because it is so cost-effective. The software is amazing. Given that SEO and inbound marketing are still relatively new concepts, it is no surprise that the inventors of inbound marketing can make us feel like inbound marketing experts so quickly.”

-Ben Lamorte, VP Sales and Marketing Alight Planning

 

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

Alight Planning provides a flexible easy-to-use budgeting and planning solution that enables finance teams to streamline plans, and more effectively communicate to management. Their service takes the budgeting and planning process beyond spreadsheets with a multi-user system designed for executives, financial staff, and line managers who collaborate in developing financial plans and reviewing financial and operating results. Alight's mission is to become the application of choice for desktop and collaborative financial planning and reporting.

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Alight struggled getting traffic to their website and found that SEO was becoming too much work to manage for a company of their size and were witnessing little to no results.

• They had trouble getting their blog off the ground because they had no way to create or integrate landing pages and calls to actions to get potential customers to specific areas of their website.

• Alight was gaining some leads from their site but were finding that the ratio between bad lead and good leads was much too high. They had no way to direct their content to the right customers to gain better quality leads.

RESULTS AFTER 8 MONTHS WITH HUBSPOT:

 

 

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• With HubSpot's Blogging tool Alight was able to index their posts for the first time, make them shareable, and insert the right keywords in to each post. Due to the changes they were able to make, today their blog is the number one driver of traffic to their website.

• Landing Pages allowed Alight to easily showcase information from white pages to webinars and everything in between. This was a key for them to be able to monetize the value of their efforts to their company executives. 

• Alight used Keyword Grader to lower their spending with Google Adwords by better optimizing their website to rank higher in organic search.

• Competitor tracking allowed Alight to trace what actions their competitors were doing successfully in their marketplace and in turn helped them reshape their approach to marketing. 

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"The training was essential to our success and the follow-up documents that were provided after each section were invaluable."

Acoustiblok, Inc.
Tampa, Florida
B2C & B2B
11-50 Employees 
Industrial Products Industry

"We knew we had to get more web traffic and that more traffic would equate to more leads. We were able to use the HubSpot software to help us with our traffic building initiatives and as expected our leads increased dramatically as our traffic increased!”

-Lahnie Johnson, President and CEO Acoustiblok, Inc.

  

Acoustiblok, Inc. provides a family of sound proofing products for a wide range of indoor and outdoor noise pollution problems. The company, which has orgins at NASA, builds their products in the USA and ships products to over 60 countries worldwide. They serve almost every business and industry including industrial, commercial, residential, marine and transportation. Their products can be found on off shore oilrigs, in office cubes, railway lines, home theaters, power plants, bathrooms, and automobiles. They quiet environments with a wide range of products designed for specific situations.

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Acoustiblok struggled gaining leads and their website was not generating enough traffic for them to achieve the huge growth goals the company had set for itself.

• Overall, Acoustiblok’s brand awareness was stagnant and they were having a difficult time presenting their product on two fronts to both B2B and B2C customers. They continually watched as smaller more versatile companies stole their business.

• The company was using a variety of approaches to their marketing with no clear defined strategy. With a small team they needed to better understand where to best devote their efforts for the greatest return on their marketing investments.

 

RESULTS AFTER 1.5 YEARS WITH HUBSPOT:

 

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• HubSpot's Keyword Grader allowed Acoustiblok to build a better plan for their SEO and helped them evaluate and adjust their content to better fit their customer’s needs. This act made it easier for customers to find them over their competitors.

• Using HubSpot's Landing Pages allowed Acoustiblok to create more effective calls to action on their pages which led to a 40 percent increase in customer transactions in just over a year.

• HubSpot's Marketing Analytics allowed them to better track what their main competitors were doing. It provided Acoustiblok with a way to measure what they were doing against their competitors over time so they could learn and adjust their own strategies accordingly.

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"We love the competitor tracking tool as it helps us to get a view of the marketplace whenever we want or need to see some of what our competitors are doing."

Wired2Fish
Grand Rapids, Minnesota
B2C & B2B
11-50 Employees 
Media Production Industry

"HubSpot really ties the bow for us. We were doing many things right but there were many parts of the site we were failing at or omitting altogether. HubSpot provided the one place to really change our perspective and focus to get where we wanted to be quickly.”

-Todd Hammill, COO Wired2Fish

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

Wired2Fish is a website that highlights the sport of fishing. Their audience includes fishermen of all levels, the companies that support the sport, and the professional leagues where companies showcase their products. Wired2Fish is a digital magazine that includes how-to videos, tackle reviews, radio interviews, and first class photography highlighting the latest in tackle trends and how-to information to become a better angler. Wired2Fish also produces its own television mini-sodes which air on NBC Sports, The Sportsman Channel and WFN throughout the year. Education, entertainment and reader engagement are the driving points behind the Wired2Fish brand. Wired2Fish is the No. 1 resource for bass fishing anglers. 

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Wired2Fish struggled to differentiate between all the marketing tools available in the marketplace. They found it complicated deciding which tools were the right ones for their business model and which ones would be the most effective.

• They attempted many different marketing programs, basically working only on gut feelings. Wired2Fish was experiencing steady growth, but not to the level they were hoping for and with no way to gauge from where it was coming.

• Wired2Fish’s website was not generating enough web traffic in order to gain the number of leads they were hoping for. After using other techniques, they found that the cost of customer acquisition was much too high for the results they were experiencing.

RESULTS AFTER 1.5 YEARS WITH HUBSPOT:

 

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• With HubSpot's Marketing Analytics, Wired2Fish was able to categorize potential customers better and allowed them to focus on individual segments to improve their traffic. Overall, this allowed Wired2Fish to make smarter marketing investments.

• HubSpot's Social Media Tools assisted Wired2Fish in becoming a leader in their social media space. Their followers on Facebook and Twitter are growing at a rapid rate and they experience over 125,000 video views on YouTube per month. With HubSpot they are able to measure the return on time invested in social media and its direct influence on daily traffic. 

• The Blogging tool helped Wired2Fish continually publish optimized content to reach their target consumer base better. Almost instantly blogging became one of their top traffic generators for their site and improved their search engine rankings.

• Wired2Fish uses HubSpot’s Landing Pages and Email Manager together to notify their mailing lists of specific contests the company is holding. This technique has been their top lead generation strategy with their leads increasing by 292%.

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"HubSpot is easy to use, unlike most of the software I have used in the past. HubSpot guides you through everything...you can’t do it wrong!"

CoolProducts.com
Lawerence, Kansas
B2C
1-10 Employees 
Internet Products Industry

"Signing up for HubSpot was a little scary because we were (and still are) honing the user experience, so promoting too much felt like it might be premature.  But it’s clear that it was a good decision for our start-up."  

-Tony Schmidt, CEO CoolProducts.com

Coolproducts.com is a different kind of gifting website, in fact Coolproducts.com is a tool in and of itself, a gift finding tool. The tool, known as the Gift Professor, requires users to complete a survey about themselves and the person they are buying the gift. It takes into consideration factors like the recipients' age, interests, occupation and personality traits. In the end, the survey generates gift ideas from around 50,000 products featured on their website. They consider themselves the eHarmony of gift finding tools. 

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Coolproducts.com struggled to drive potential customers to their website. Because of the way the company showcases their product line, over 50,000 products in 700 categories, they needed an in-depth SEO plan so customers could find the right product category and therefore their website if they were using a search engine like Google

• They had problems getting users to understand the benefit of their value proposition (a matching technology that creates a tailor made gift suggestion page based on recipient’s attributes) and in turn create accounts on their website before actually using their products

• The company had been blogging about their gift giving matching services, but were having difficulty finding fresh new ways to present their product to gain new leads

RESULTS AFTER 4 MONTHS WITH HUBSPOT:

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• HubSpot's Landing Pages and calls to action allowed the company to improve new visitors experience and encouraged them to explore the website. This enabled them to track activity of the visitors and more easily convert leads into customers

• The Blogging and Social Media Tools enabled CoolProducts.com to create a voice for their company to reach potential customers more effectively and to easily share their content

• HubSpot's Lead Management tools assisted the CoolProducts.com team to more effectively nurture prospective customers through email campaigns by showing them which products initially brought customers to their site and how to leverage that data to reach them 

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"We are so much further along the path to reaching a tipping point. The 30,000 visitors who have looked at our site and the 1,500 who have subscribed, have taught us a great deal thanks to analytics.  HubSpot taught us to create landing pages that convert visitors into leads. "

Photo Credit Picture One: Nick Krug

Global Plastic Sheeting
Vista, California
B2B
1-10 Employees 
Industrial Materials

 

“It's nothing less than a miracle what we have been able to achieve because of HubSpot.”

- Nana Hinsley, Director of Marketing, Global Plastic Sheeting

 

 

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Before HubSpot, as a one-year-old company, they had to rely on a web designer to build and make changes to their website. The initial build took a full six (6) months.

• Once the website was live, Global Plastic Sheeting struggled to drive traffic to it. Their more-established competitors ranked higher in search and had more brand recognition. 

• Needed a way to dramatically boost their search engine ranking, increase website traffic, and convert a substantial percentage of that traffic into happy customers.

   

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• HubSpot's Website Management tool allowed Global Plastic Sheeting to take control over their website and easily build numerous pages that helped to show off their vast product lines and increase the volume of keyword-rich content associated with their brand

• They used HubSpot's Keyword Grader to understand what terms people were using to search for their product. This valuable insight helped them to gain Page One rankings on Google for 137 of their keywords

• With the help of HubSpot's Lead Nurturing tool, Global Plastic Sheeting customized their email marketing campaigns to better address the specific needs of prospective customers visiting their website—and convert more of those leads into happy customers

RESULTS AFTER 2 YEARS WITH HUBSPOT:

 

“We have landed business from all over the world.  We have made so many people happy by having what they need for their particular project. I honestly don't know if we could have made it in this economy without utilizing all the advice from HubSpot through their platform."

Florida Institute of Technology
Melbourne, Florida
NON-PROFIT
200-500 Employees 
Higher Education

“I said I wouldn’t take the job unless they bought HubSpot, because I couldn’t do what I said I could do without it."

- Nancy Grossbart, Interactive Media Manager at the Florida Institute of Technology

 

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Had trouble identifying who was actually visiting their website

• Extremely long forms limited their ability to convert prospective students to applicants

 

RESULTS WITH HUBSPOT:

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• HubSpot Landing Pages made it easy to create short, simple forms that resulted in a big boost in leads and prospects  

• HubSpot Analytics enabled Florida Institute of Technology to see how their website was performing overall, which marketing activities were generating the most traffic and leads, and where to increase or cut marketing investments

• HubSpot Lead Management helped the marketing team at Florida Institute of Technology more effectively nurture prospective student leads, and boost their conversion rate 

 

“What I love about the HubSpot product is that everything is all in one place."

National Institite for Fitness and Sport
Indianapolis, IN
NON-PROFIT
200-500 employees
Health, Wellness & Fitness Industry

 

 

“One of my favorite things about HubSpot is its ease of use. I can go in and manage what I need to manage, and I don't have to feel like I need to speak a different language to do it." 

—Bethany Garrity, Director of Media, NIFS

 

BEFORE HUBSPOT:

• Struggled to drive traffic to our website

• Had no social media presence

• Hired [& subsequently] fired marketing agencies that cost a lot, but achieved

  very little

 

 

RESULTS WITH HUBSPOT:

 

HOW DID HUBSPOT HELP?

• HubSpot Analytics helped NIFS clearly see which marketing activities drove the most visits, leads, and customers, enabling smarter, more effective marketing investments

• Keyword Grader helped NIFS identify the best keywords to focus SEO efforts on, resulting in dramatic improvements in their search engine rankings

• HubSpot Lead Management helped NIFS identify, analyze, and manage incoming leads effectively

 

“I think the biggest result we have noticed with HubSpot is our searchability. We have picked up a number of requests for proposals, from businesses who never would have paid attention to us initially, because we were able to raise where we sit in the search engines."

 

 

 

Aclipse is a staffing agency that connects and recruits enthusiastic college graduates with the best teaching jobs in Asia. We sat down with Rebecca McNeil, Marketing Director at Aclipse, to talk about how her company grew monthly organic traffic 100 percent, as well as saved $2k per month with inbound marketing and HubSpot.

Industry: Staffing & Recruiting | Employees: 14

Tenure: 1.5 Years using HubSpot

Challenge: Increasing Reach Online and in Social Media

College graduates today are constantly adapting to new technologies and they don’t respond well to traditional advertising. Marketing to them requires a different approach—a challenge Aclipse was facing.

“We were spending a lot on a direct advertising approach, so we had a lot of jobs posted on the job boards and we also spent a lot on Pay Per Click (PPC) ads through Google,” said McNeil.  While these activities were still important to the company’s marketing mix, relying on them solely was proving ineffective to increasing the amount of talent attracted.

“The biggest pain was that when we weren’t utilizing inbound marketing, which social media is a big part of. We weren’t reaching our target demographic (recent college graduates). They are very fluent in social media,” says McNeil.

Realizing a solution was needed, McNeil evaluated HubSpot to help her manage new marketing techniques and expand Aclipse’s presence in social networks. Specifically, McNeil was looking to improve lead quality and increase reach in social media to better target college graduates.

“We were getting plenty of leads from job boards and PPC ads, but they were low quality,” says McNeil.

“I felt that social media and inbound marketing was the missing piece to generating higher-quality traffic, so I turned to HubSpot to help improve our lead quality.”

Solution: HubSpot Sources, Landing Pages, and Lead Nurturing

Attracting talent that wasn’t “ready to buy” was also a missing component of the marketing funnel. Commonly, students visit the website out of interest but aren’t ready to apply for a teaching job. Because applicants were the main source of leads, Aclipse was missing the opportunity to capture interested prospects and nurture them over time until they were ready to take further action.

“Landing pages and lead nurturing campaigns enable us to reach out to people who are clearly interested in teaching English overseas even though they haven’t actually completed the application yet. If we didn’t have lead nurturing I think we’d miss out on a lot of great opportunities.  People need a lot of information before they’re ready to commit," says McNeil.

HubSpot also helped Aclipse reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary PPC spending. "HubSpot’s Sources tool is what led me to stop doing PPC ads all together."

Once we started using HubSpot and more inbound marketing techniques, we noticed that the amount of traffic and leads actually increased, and as a result, we decided to cancel PPC ads, which saved between $1,500 to $2,000 per month. And I wouldn’t have discovered that without having the analytics to see what sources where driving the most traffic to our website.”

 

In addition to software success, HubSpot’s customer support team has been readily available in case Aclipse had any questions.

“Customer service is great because I love follow-up from a real person. When we email a support ticket, which isn’t often, we get a response very quickly. We’ve had only positive experiences with customer support."

Results: Increased Traffic, Reach and Quality Leads

By blogging and focusing on social media and inbound marketing, the amount of traffic and quality leads increased. “Since we started using HubSpot and its inbound marketing tools, our leads that come from organic sources have increased and the quality of leads is better,” says McNeil.

Especially, Aclipse:

• Saved between $1.5k to $2k per month by canceling PPC spending
• Increased monthly social media reach by 50%
• Achieved 33% overall landing page conversion rate (5x higher than the average)
• Monthly organic traffic increased approximately 100%

Overall, Rebecca McNeil says her company has had great success with HubSpot. “Inbound marketing has transformed our business.  It has allowed us to increase brand awareness and recognition even though we are a very small company and cannot rely on traditional media and advertising,” says McNeil.

”Our target audience is on social media. We needed to be on social media. They read blogs. We needed to be writing them. Inbound marketing is 90% of our marketing efforts and it's what we rely on. Before HubSpot, our brand awareness wasn’t nearly as big as it is now.”