An Online Expert Gets With the Inbound Program
German-based Trusted Shops helps online retailers to succeed by building up the trust and confidence of their customers. However, it wasn’t making the most of the online environment for itself. By 2015, it was still using old-fashioned sales and marketing methods – what little online activity it did do was limited to general email shots and PR on social media. Enter Ali Saffari; a consultant hired to revamp its strategy.
“I told the CEO, ‘if you want to change, you need to explore the inbound approach and also align your sales and marketing teams.’”
Ali had discovered the inbound marketing methodology himself through the HubSpot Academy, and he knew that it had the power to get Trusted Shops the visitors, leads and customers that it was looking for.
“I recommended the HubSpot Marketing Platform because I knew that it was the only software in this space that had all the features that Trusted Shops would need to be truly successful. It’s a complete solution that allows you to implement inbound in a comprehensive way.”
The CEO agreed, and Trusted Shops signed up with HubSpot in October 2015.
Attracting Potential Customers With Content That Converts
Ali says that he got started by overhauling Trusted Shop’s website. “At the time, it was in bad shape; we needed to make it more clear and attractive to visitors, so we decided to transfer it over to the CMS Hub.”
The next step was to create personas. Trusted Shops had already defined a couple of customer types, says Ali, but they were more based around the kind of people they were rather than the challenges they faced. He arranged interviews with 50 of the company’s existing customers and came up with new personas.
Creating the content that would attract these new personas was a priority, and it was something that he was determined to get right.
“We had to do an in-depth analysis of why people are accessing our content and what is of interest to them. We didn’t want to publish some no-brainer whitepapers that would disappoint; we invested a lot in pulling together a collection that would attract and delight potential customers. Each piece of content is now divided into topics that we know are of interest to the persona and their stage in the buyer’s journey.”
Ali set this new content up on Landing Pages, adding Calls-to-Action (CTAs) and Forms to gather data on visitors. Most of the articles that Trusted Shops publishes on its Blog are linked to these Landing Pages and are accompanied by short videos that summarise the content that is available for download. This, says Ali, encourages visitors to delve deeper into the site.
Trusted Shops then nurtures its leads with Workflows and the Email App and uses the HubSpot software’s SEO features to boost website traffic and increase its visibility as a company. With the Marketing Analytics, it can get a bird’s eye view of how every marketing action it takes has performed, and adjust its strategy accordingly.
The sales team is seeing the benefits of the HubSpot software as well.
“Once a lead is nurtured, they are assigned to a salesperson; the HubSpot leads are in high demand because our reps know they are interested, and they convert at a higher rate. Everyone is keen to get their hands on them,” explains Ali.
A Holistic Approach That Pays Dividends
The results that Trusted Shops has seen through its use of the HubSpot Marketing Platform are remarkable. Its website has been turned into a lead generation machine – website visitors are up 30% every month, while leads have increased by a massive 200X.
“The holistic approach to inbound marketing that we have implemented gets results,” says Ali. “It’s not only the platform itself, but it’s also how you go about the whole strategy. Compared to last year, our revenue has increased significantly.”
Looking ahead, Ali wants Trusted Shops to continue to make even more use of the inbound methodology company-wide. One part of the sales department has already moved onto Sales Hub, and the other teams will make the switch themselves by the end of the year.
“Cold calling leads isn’t efficient, so we are in the process of shifting from an outbound to inbound sales organisation. Inbound leads are nurtured until they are ready to be called so that we can have a simple, highly-qualified conversation with them. Within the next two years, my goal is to have 50% of our leads coming from inbound.”
For Ali, the most significant benefit that the HubSpot software has brought about is predictability of revenue.
“Before, we lacked visibility, but now we have insight into the whole funnel, we can estimate how much revenue we are going to make each week, month and quarter. The HubSpot software allows us to be accurate and predictable in our forecasts, and that is hugely valuable for us.”
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