Challenge: project-based work made proving long-term ROI difficult.
Before using HubSpot, New Breed Marketing was your typical marketing agency that specialized in traditional branding and websites but would take on any creative marketing project that would come their way, whether it be 3D graphics, video shoots, and even radio production.
This type of project-based work was a problem for New Breed, both internally with their team and externally towards clients. Internally, this made their business model hard to forecast. Externally, it was hard for New Breed to justify the long-term ROI of their services without any specialized focus or measurable way to track campaigns.
Patrick Biddiscombe, VP of Sales and Strategy, realized, “For New Breed to continue our growth and the success of our clients, it was critical for us to really push the envelope on what new technologies and tools are out there for ourselves and for our clients.” The answer to that envelope pushing need came in the form of HubSpot, the integrated, all-in-one inbound marketing platform.
Solution: HubSpot’s fully integrated inbound marketing platform.
With all of a client’s online marketing tools constantly exchanging information in one place, New Breed was able to better manage a client’s entire online marketing strategy. This helped New Breed’s value proposition make a significantly greater impact on its clients, as they now had the tools to execute on a full-funnel marketing strategy that can drive and nurture leads. New Breed could now track and measure the ROI of a given campaign or marketing effort across every tool and channel, since all of HubSpot’s tools seamlessly pass data back and forth. More than that, New Breed could now better prove the ROI of a client’s investment in their agency.
How HubSpot’s Content Management System delivers more than a classic CMS.
The release of HubSpot’s Content Hub has allowed New Breed Marketing to take their own and their clients’ marketing to the next level. Built completely from the ground up, the CMS is integrated with the rest of HubSpot’s marketing tools (such as the Blog, Landing Pages, Email, Social media, etc.) to deliver a consistent and personalized experience to prospects, leads, and customers across every marketing channel, including the website.
Creating a strategic, “sales-ready” website.
Before hosting New Breed’s site on the HubSpot CMS Hub, Patrick says, “We were always able to make websites that looked great, but they didn’t really enable a marketing team.” This wasn’t just a problem New Breed was facing; it was one their client’s faced as well, “The real problem is that most people have what is called a digital brochure. Their site gives a great overview of their company, but it’s not really designed to attract and convert.”
With HubSpot’s CMS Hub, New Breed has been able to use the fully integrated platform to build websites that are “sales-ready.” That means the website doesn’t just look pretty. It also takes into account all of the rich lead intelligence that’s been collected about an individual person through each digital touchpoint a lead has with one of HubSpot’s marketing tools and channels.
Through this integration of the website and marketing data, New Breed’s website can adapt and change depending on who is looking at it. This allows New Breed to host not only a beautiful-looking site but one that adapts to its viewers to deliver a personalized marketing experience. Now their website doesn’t just sit there, but actually does marketing work for them.
A more personalized experience for leads and customers.
New Breed leveraged Smart Content, a feature of the CMS Hub, to deliver dynamic content to their leads, adapting to their changing interests and ongoing relationship with New Breed. Not only does their website change based on a person’s interests and behaviors, but it also adapts to whatever desktop, tablet, or mobile device they’re using, delivering a consistent, easy-to-navigate experience.
For Patrick, choosing to launch New Breed and its clients’ websites on HubSpot CMS Hub was a no-brainer. “To have a sales-ready site you need to take into account the different stages of the buyer’s journey throughout the site. What we’ve been able to do with the HubSpot CMS Hub is not only to make your brand look great online but also to serve up relevant content that a person wants to engage with. If your customers are online and leveraging mobile, you need to build your site with responsive design, and HubSpot’s CMS Hub already has that functionality built-in.”
Chris Mathieu, Interactive Director at New Breed, who builds sites on the HubSpot CMS Hub says “The HubSpot CMS Hub has helped us marry our digital strategy into a more holistic approach. Now we’re really thinking about the whole lifecycle of a buyer, and not just one piece of media that may or may not be effective. Instead, we’re really trying to have multiple digital touchpoints with that client to engage them deeper than you would with traditional methods.”
One platform, built for both marketers and designers.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub release has taken the all-on-one offering to a new level, easing the tension between technical designers and marketers.
Marketers finally have control.
New Breed’s Interactive Director, Mathieu, has been with the company for over nine years. He’s witnessed tension between the developer team who designs websites, and the marketing team that executes actual marketing strategy.
“In the early days, you had to be a developer to build or edit a site, so a lot of the work fell on us designers. Marketers were always willing to help, but their skill sets simply didn’t apply. As a company, New Breed didn’t want marketers focusing on developer skillsets either, since at the end of the day they needed to be focused on marketing.”
On the road toward banding marketers, designers, and developers on one united front, Chris points to two different milestones:
“The first milestone was around 2004 or so. WordPress blew up and finally, we could have some people on the marketing and non-developer side contributing some content to the website. Kind of in a scattershot way, but it was a step in the right direction.
The big milestone for us was really HubSpot. Of course, HubSpot CMS Hub can do the stuff that WordPress allowed the non-programmer to do, but HubSpot takes it to the next level. Now marketers can set up campaigns, build funnels, and now they can actually edit their site and create new pages without having any developer skills.”
For marketing and sales specialists like Patrick, the ability to use the HubSpot CMS Hub to execute inbound marketing strategies while still maintaining the integrity of a beautifully designed site is huge. “The HubSpot CMS Hub was designed for developers and marketers, so it really makes it easy for a marketer to do the functionality that they weren’t able to do because they didn’t have HTML or coding skills. Now, not only can we enable our own marketing team, but also our clients’ marketing team.”
HubSpot CMS Hub unifies an entire company towards the same goals.
Using HubSpot CMS Hub has not only removed the tension between marketers and designers but has actually enabled designers to work towards marketing goals. Building a site from scratch with a marketing strategy and integrated tools in mind has completely revitalized the way New Breed’s designers think about designing a website. Chris says, “Building on HubSpot's CMS Hub made us think more holistically and strategically about how the components of the blog, landing pages, the main site, and CTAs were all going to work together.”
Chris says, “I honestly believe our new website on the HubSpot CMS Hub is the best we’ve ever had. We’ve had many websites over the past decade, and I think this is the first one the entire company, from accounting, to design, to marketing, all feel proud of.”
Designers now have the flexibility to build robust websites.
Chris says, “Before we started on HubSpot CMS Hub, one of our team’s biggest concerns was that it would cripple what we wanted to do from a design standpoint.” They adapted their existing design from another platform onto the HubSpot CMS Hub and were thrilled with the results. “There was really nothing we had to sacrifice as far as what we could or couldn’t do with the design.”
Chris and his team of developers have been building sites on WordPress since its debut in the early 2000s, and they were impressed with HubSpot CMS Hub capabilities. “In fact, HubSpot's CMS Hub is very robust and open-ended, while still not neglecting people that weren’t really tech-savvy. From a development standpoint, that’s quite an achievement, to be able to cater to all those audience types and really please them all.”