The Need for Change
Eight years ago, Tiffany Rivers, VP of Marketing at iOffice, didn’t leverage technology for marketing and sales activities and worked as a one-person department until she found HubSpot. Tiffany recalls that the company had a website, but it was just an initial stage of marketing. "I was a one-woman department and needed tools that would help me get our message out, attract new, relevant traffic, and convert those visitors through the sales funnel," she adds.
Even after they started using HubSpot, they were still creating content on their WordPress blog, and did not have a complete picture of its performance concerning all of the inbound marketing activities they were doing in HubSpot. They did not have data to understand who was reading their posts and how deeply engaged their audience was. Without those insights, it was difficult for the company to dedicate time and resources for generating these posts. As content creation is a primary piece of their inbound marketing strategy, they knew they had to solve the problem that these disjointed systems were causing.
Recently, she made the decision to fully transition everything to HubSpot, using the new COS and leveraging all the potential the platform has for the other companies that iOffice manages. Tiffany sought out help from Orbital Alliance, a marketing agency that specializes in web redesign and is a HubSpot Partner. iOffice was seeking a single platform for their hosting, marketing, and blogging needs. They conducted their due diligence in their consideration for a new platform by reviewing both MODX and WordPress.
Becoming an industry leader and reference for innovation
HubSpot allowed the company to have an intuitive process to nurture its leads and do so much more. Now, iOffice is regarded as thought leaders in its industry and recognized as an innovative force for their marketing strategies. "Our competitors copy our messaging, ads, and website design, and a number of them have even become HubSpot clients because they have seen what it has done for us," Tiffany says.
The marketing activities push all new leads and contacts to the sales funnel from HubSpot. To ensure that all representatives receive leads promptly, they use the lifecycle stage feature within HubSpot with workflows set up for accurate syncing. This way, the marketing team can see which sources bring more high-converting leads and a higher return on investment.
As a parent company, iOffice manages other three brands: Teem, ManagerPlus, and Hippo. Some of these companies have been using HubSpot for a while and are leveraging their tools for longer, while others are recently adapting their processes to the platform. ManagerPlus moved to HubSpot recently and started some inbound marketing activities, so the teams are excited to see the results in a year or so.
Teem is in the process of moving from WordPress and SalesForce CRM to HubSpot. Although the tech team is having a hard time with the migration, they are optimistic about the outcome. "Hopefully, we will launch in the next few weeks, and I anticipate it being a much easier flow. I appreciate the new security measures HubSpot has recently launched, which has enabled me to ensure leadership that IT isn't needed," Tiffany says.
Using HubSpot's marketing automation platform, the parent company manages 6 websites, 20 social accounts, 4 blogs, 2 podcasts, and numerous personas. For them, being able to access all four brands using one login and password has been immensely helpful and impactful. The platform makes it simple to onboard team members and easily train them on best practices.
"It's simple for my entire team to use, yet powerful enough to show ROI to leadership. We've increased our marketing output ten-fold through the use of HubSpot. Sales leadership is impressed by the sheer volume of campaigns we are able to launch, and they are equally impressed with the results," Tiffany celebrates.
How iOffice used the COS to Drive Results
Marketing Improvements
After attending HubSpot's flagship INBOUND 2013 conference in Boston that highlighted the importance of personalization and announcement of the new Content Optimization System (dubbed COS), they knew exactly what they needed. HubSpot's COS is a content management system that enables marketers to easily build websites personalized for every visitor and optimized for every device.
Alden O'Connor, of Orbital Alliance, frequently talks about the problem in today's website hosting space, a problem that HubSpot's COS solves for. "Websites [today] aren't designed for the future. Websites shouldn't be a hindrance for marketing, but a tool for marketing success."
Moving onto HubSpot's COS unlocked the gate for iOffice's inbound marketing strategy to really take full advantage of the platform. There are several features that Orbital Alliance implemented to support one of iOffice's new goals of achieving higher search engine rankings for their blog posts.
One particular new feature to the COS and the blogging tool is Keyword Tracking. This is something Orbital Alliance is particularly thrilled about because it saves writers so much time! This new feature counts the number of registered keywords, from HubSpot's Keyword Tool, within the blog's title and body. In addition, it allows the writer to quickly click on those counts to see which keywords are being used and additional important SEO intel. The keyword-tracking feature helps ensure iOffice's content team that they're focusing their time and energy on the correct terms they're aiming to rank for in search engines.
Creating valuable keyword-rich content on their blog is only a piece of iOffice's strategy and is the first step towards their lead generation plans. From the post, they direct their reader towards various calls-to-action, such as signing up for an upcoming webinar or downloading an eBook on a related topic. On the subsequent landing pages, iOffice gathers lead intelligence using HubSpot's "smart" Form fields created with simple drag and drop technology. These smart fields automatically remove themselves when the marketing team already has information they're asking for, such as Job Title, which helps improve their lead conversion rates because their forms are cleaner and faster to fill out.
Web Development
The COS is also a great success for their web development team. "People don't pay enough attention to their websites nowadays. You can make the site, and then three years later, you have to go through a big expensive redesign to update it. With HubSpot's COS, it keeps websites fresh and current."
By "keeping it fresh", O'Connor is referring to the ability to easily swap out content or optimize specific content on the site per visitor, hence the name Content Optimization System. O'Connor plans on using the COS primarily on iOffice's blog. The COS gives them the power to optimize the blog content based on the reader's lifecycle stage set in iOffice's HubSpot Contacts database.
O'Connor was the primary developer of iOffice's new website. When iOffice came to Orbital Alliance, they gave them a three-month timeframe to migrate and redesign onto HubSpot's new platform. The migration was accomplished in less than one month because the features were intuitive and easy to use. This was particularly impressive because this was O'Connor's first time building a website on the new COS. A specific feature stood out was HubSpot's template builder, which helps users more efficiently construct site pages, landing pages, emails, and blog templates.
The template builder, like many HubSpot features, sports drag and drop technology that is easy to use. Although the COS offers a developer the option of coding a template from scratch, it also offers the template builder as a way to structure your HTML and easily apply CSS styling.
Looking Towards the Future
Now that iOffice is hosting their website on HubSpot's COS, they are significantly better aligned to execute on their inbound marketing strategy. They look forward to continued growth through personalization and better engagement with their leads and customers.
As for Orbital Alliance, they continue to help their clients migrate onto HubSpot's COS, as they firmly believe it gives their clients the full package and will be a long-lasting solution through an ever-changing environment.
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