About Cilk Arts
Cilk Arts is a startup software company based in Burlington, MA. Its software aims to ease the transition to
multi-core computing for software developers and users. It is the product of 15 years of research at MIT.
Challenge
Cilk's Vice President of marketing, Ilya Mirman, faced a unique challenge when he began work at Cilk: The company wanted to time its product launch slightly ahead of the mass market demand for multi-core computing. This made finding customers -- software developers -- "like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Moreover, Cilk was a startup and Ilya was the only employee focused on marketing. He needed a marketing platform that would bring him qualified customers, that he could manage on his own and that fit his startup budget.
Solution
Ilya chose HubSpot. He built his web site using the HubSpot content management system, he began publishing a blog using the HubSpot blogging software, he tracked his search engine performance using HubSpot's Search Engine Optimization tools, he used HubSpot's lead management tools (integrated with Salesforce.com), and he tracked his referrals and traffic with HubSpot marketing analytics.
Ilya's first step was to get the content management system up and running. He found the HubSpot content management tools easy to use and ideally suited for people like himself who are not web designers. "I'm an engineer by training, I'm not a good graphics guy ... I've done some HTML programming but it would be a disaster if I tried to program our website. With the HubSpot content management system -- both in terms of ease of use and the templates available -- it was very natural to get a website up and running."
Once he had the CMS up and running, Ilya turned his attention to keyword optimization. Cilk wanted to take an analytical approach to SEO. "We wanted to understand, what are the keywords that matter -- both in terms of relevancy and the ones that get traffic." Ilya used HubSpot's Keyword Grader to determine which keywords were relevant to Cilk's business, which ones drove traffic and which ones were not too difficult to obtain top rainkings for. Then, using HubSpot's blogging software and content management system, he created content rich with Cilk's target keywords.
Cilk also implemented HubSpot's lead management system. Ilya used HubSpot's form builder to capture leads on their website, and lead tracking tools to see how many times potential customers visited the Cilk website, and what they were looking at. Since HubSpot was able to integrate Cilk's HubSpot account with Salesforce.com, Ilya was able to view all HubSpot's lead tracking data in Salesforce.com, allowing him to see which marketing campaigns were converting best. With this closed-loop marketing insight, Ilya was able to further refine his content development.
Results
With HubSpot software and an inbound marketing approach, Cilk has achieved remarkable results:
- Inbound lead volume has gone up more than sixfold over the past 6 months (monthly lead volume has gone from ~20 in
the summer, to over 120 in December)
- Google search traffic has grown from 200 referrals a month to over 1,000, with page-one Google ranks for non-brand keywords such as:
- Multicore Software
- Multithread Matrix Multiplication
- what is parallelism
- pthread pool
- 292 people have subscribed to the Cilk blog
In addition to steady growth in core marketing metrics, Ilya says HubSpot has created significant improvements in the efficiency of his marketing operation. Before HubSpot, he says, "there wasn't one holistic way that I could see what programs are working, what pages are getting traffic, and then act on it." With HubSpot, he's been able to do that.
Monthly lead volume has increased 6x:
292 people have subscribed to the company blog:
