A Company on the Rise Seeks an Inbound Solution
By 2014, French company iAdvize’s real-time customer engagement platform was rising in popularity. But as the business grew, Maxime Baumard, VP of marketing at iAdvize knew that it needed to change its own marketing strategy to keep pace. Maxime, explains:
“At the time, we were using multiple tools that weren’t synced up with each other, including MailChimp for emails and Unbounce for Landing Pages. We weren’t able to track prospects; we couldn't automate follow-up actions with visitors. Seeing as our main goal was to generate more sales-qualified leads, it wasn’t ideal. I realised that the right marketing automation platform could make all the difference.”
He began to investigate the solutions available, starting with Marketo. However, he felt that “it was a poor user experience”. Maxime continued his research and discovered the HubSpot blog. After requesting a demo, he was convinced.
“That was a wow moment for me – HubSpot is all about simplicity and ease of use, but it had all the tools we needed under the one roof. As well as that, the expertise and vision that the company had around inbound marketing made me certain that I was making the right choice.”
iAdvize signed on the dotted line with HubSpot in Autumn 2014, and immediately began to use the platform to implement a new marketing strategy.
Creating a Lead Generation Machine
Maxime and the marketing team set about creating personas for its different types of clients, who come from both medium and large companies throughout Europe. They populated the iAdvize website with landing Pages containing content such as ebooks, articles, whitepapers and checklists. They also began to use the Social Tool in Marketing Hub for posting to Twitter and Facebook and set up the company blog on the Blog Tool.
According to Maxime, the advanced features in Marketing Hub have made generating and qualifying leads much more straightforward.
“They enable us to personalise our marketing strategy. We use smart CTAs and smart lists to adapt what the client sees to their persona or industry or lifecycle stage. We create a lot of workflows, which allow us to nurture our leads with follow-up communications which are specific to them. Thanks to A/B testing and reporting, we can constantly optimise our Landing Pages, our email campaigns and our website.”
Maxime also synchronised the HubSpot platform with the iAdvize CRM, which means that every marketing interaction – email sends, opens, clicks, form submissions and more – is shared with the sales team. This allows them to have more informed conversations with prospects
“We’ve aligned the sales and marketing departments much more closely since we implemented the HubSpot platform. We have set up lead scoring and our marketing activities – the Workflows, the email campaigns – are leading to more requests for demos. That means that we can hand the sales team leads that are truly sales qualified, and they can contact them immediately to arrange a meeting.”
An Engine that Powers Success
Since partnering with HubSpot, iAdvize has grown significantly. The marketing team has increased from four people to 14, its budget has been doubled, and it has ramped up its content production activities. Traffic to the iAdvize website site is up by 3X, lead generation has increased by 4X, while the sales cycle has been shortened by 50%.
“Our main goal is to make our salespeople happy, and the HubSpot platform allows us to do that. Automation enables us to send the right content at the right moment to the right person, which makes our marketing efforts more personalised and way more efficient. It has led to huge increases in both the number and the quality of our sales-qualified leads.”
Looking to the future, Maxime envisages the HubSpot Marketing Platform will be a vital part of the company’s expansion, and the marketing team will continue to tweak its strategy to ensure success. Good inbound marketing, he says, requires constant vigilance.
“We recently ran an A/B test on a newly designed demo page. We were convinced that the new one was better but started an A/B test to be sure. After two months, we saw there were much fewer conversions, so we optimised the old one and kept it.”
The HubSpot and iAdvize partnership is something of a meeting of minds, asserts Maxime. “The HubSpot DNA matches our own, in terms of the vision we share for providing excellent user experience. The platform has helped us to define a solid inbound marketing strategy and to achieve and track our success.”
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