"It's like night and day. In the past three months, we've doubled our traffic and tripled our leads. All of our new business is coming through the web, thanks to HubSpot."
About Makana Solutions
Makana Solutions offers sales compensation solutions to small and medium sized businesses. Sales commissions and bonuses are often the second largest expense after salaries and Makana Solutions provides self-service online software to help businesses streamline the process of building more effective sales compensation plans to motivate the best sales behavior. Makana Solutions was founded in 2004 and Art Gehring joined in 2007 to oversee their marketing efforts.
Challenge
Makana Solutions offers a subscription to online software, so it was logical to find customers over the Internet. Their key goal was to generate more traffic and leads online and sign up more visitors for a free trial and then upgrade them to their paid product. I had found a lot of tools to help with different pieces of our Internet marketing strategy. "Before HubSpot, we were using a collection of tools to manage our search engine marketing. We had a keyword tool, we had a traffic measurement tool, we had an inbound link management tool, the list goes on and on. It was very inefficient in collecting all that information and with the small team that we have, it just wasn't effective."
Solution
"We found HubSpot on the Internet," Art described. "We noticed right away that this was the integrated tool that would enable us to execute successfully on our strategy. As a small marketing team, we really needed something that was fully integrated like HubSpot; it provided all the capabilities that we needed and then some." Art evaluated other products and services, but none of the others provided the education or the integration that HubSpot offered.
HubSpot is now the center of Makana Solutions' marketing strategy. Art uses every aspect of the software, from the content management tools to the integration with Salesforce.com included in HubSpot Professional. Art loves how HubSpot streamlines the process for managing the website: from the moment he wants to create a new page, he can do the keyword research to identify the best keywords to optimize around, easily edit the page content and metadata, and measure the effectiveness of his optimization. "I use the capabilities within the content management system to do all the key optimization, whether it be the title tag, the description tag, the keyword tag, it's all right there and I'm no longer dependent upon an outside resource or third party resource to do that for me." Art checks his HubSpot data every day to see the website traffic, leads, and sales they are getting from their website. HubSpot's event tracker also helps Art track which campaigns generate which results. "When we get a burst in traffic, we know what has caused that, so we can start to analyze which marketing vehicles and which marketing activities are most productive to us so we can repeat that and grow that business."
HubSpot also allows Art to monitor his competitors by allowing him to track their traffic rank, keyword rank, and other factors that contribute to their online presence, such as inbound links.
Art also frequently uses the landing page capability within HubSpot. "We're often creating very targeted campaigns that are based on a specific download document so HubSpot makes that process with their content management system very easy to create a new landing page. I can do that in less than an hour on my own without any outside help. The form builder is very intuitive... We're constantly tweaking the forms and I can modify the forms to request more important information really within minutes."
Art's HubSpot forms also automatically integrate with Salesforce.com, importing leads and lead intelligence data such as how the lead found the website, their browsing history, and more. "HubSpot has provided a lot of benefits to us in terms of not only providing targeted traffic much more cost-efficiently and effectively, but also it's helped us streamline our whole process since we are using the Salesforce integration. We now have the leads get directly delivered to our sales people within Salesforce. They have all the key information that they need to decide which of the leads they're going to call first. We're making our sales people much more productive." The Salesforce integration has also benefited his marketing efforts by allowing Art to leverage the HubSpot lead intelligence data within Salesforce to target campaigns to specific leads based on their activity. Art reports that their marketing campaigns have been far more effective. Art can easily analyze the effectiveness of his marketing campaigns within HubSpot. "One of the things that we're really excited about in the Salesforce integration is the fact that the sales that we do make will be reflected back in HubSpot so the marketing team can look at what campaigns and what activities were really effective and make sure that we repeat those because we can see not only the traffic and the leads, but also the actual sales that we made based on any specific activity."
Overall the implementation of HubSpot at Makana Solutions has been quick and easy for Gehring's small marketing department. "It's extremely easy to use," Art says. "I've basically been able to figure it all out by watching a few webinars and learning on my own. And when I can't figure something out, I find the HubSpot service excellent. They are never too busy to help me with a question. I never feel like I'm asking too many questions. They're a great team that really deliver."
Over the past 3 months, Makana Solutions doubled their website traffic and tripled their targeted leads. "It's like night and day," Art says. "Every month we're probably growing our traffic and leads by 20 or 30 percent." Art has also seen an increase in terms of organic search engine traffic, reporting that website visits from organic Google traffic has tripled in five months. "A good reason for that increase in Google traffic is that for the keywords that really matter to our audience and drive targeted leads for us - sales compensation plans, sales compensation plan, sales compensation planning - we're ranked in the top 10 in Google for all of those." HubSpot has really become the center of Makana Solutions' marketing, Art says that all of their new business is coming through the web, thanks to HubSpot.
Art's advice to those considering HubSpot: "Stop considering and start doing! HubSpot is the right tool for you so just get it because if marketing on the Internet is important to you, HubSpot will deliver the results that you need."
Results
- Increased website traffic by 200% in three months
- Organic search traffic tripled in five months
- Leads generated increased three-fold over the past three months, and percentage of website traffic that converts to leads has doubled in the same time
- Now ranking on the first page of organic Google search results for key search terms, including "sales compensation plan", "sales compensation planning", and "sales comp plans"