Building an Inbound Strategy from the Ground Up

Usabilla hired Cassandra Michael as head of marketing in 2015 and tasked her with building a new team and an inbound strategy from scratch. Previous to this, the company hadn’t been doing much in terms of marketing its products – it had been blogging and posting to Twitter and running some straightforward email campaigns. Cassandra knew that she needed a more cohesive, planned approach and a marketing automation platform that would allow her to implement it.

“When I joined Usabilla, I seized the opportunity to use the HubSpot software. I had been very impressed by a demonstration of the product, and I was also a fan of the HubSpot blog. The HubSpot Marketing Platform had advanced functionality, great customer support and it is made by the company that created the inbound movement. We couldn’t go wrong.”

Cassandra wanted to position Usabilla as a thought leader in the voice of customer industry. To do this, she first had to set up the HubSpot software and begin to lay the foundation for executing the marketing strategy.

Setting the Scene for Success

Cassandra’s first step was to import all of Usabilla’s contacts into the HubSpot Marketing Platform. Then she began creating Landing Pages and CTAs for the company’s ebooks, product demos, articles and user guides so that the company could generate leads.

Usabilla has added smart forms to the company’s landing pages, and it uses the progressive profiling feature to learn more about its leads without asking them the same questions over and over again. This means that when the marketing team uses Workflows to automate communications with prospects, it can tailor these communications. Follow-up emails take into account the lead’s location and their stage in the marketing funnel but are also personalised based on the answers they have given to the profiling questions.

Cassandra is a power user of HubSpot Analytics, as it allows her to track the efficiency of the entire marketing strategy. “It gives me a quick and easy way to report to management every week. For example, if I see that the conversion rate of a landing page has dropped, then I can find out why and tweak it accordingly.”

Incredible Gains Within 12 Months

“We’re growing a lot as a company,” explains Cassandra. “A year ago, we had a team of 25 people; now there are 50 of us, and we’ve opened a New York office.”

Web traffic has increased dramatically, leads have been boosted by 2X, and 40% of the company’s revenue can be attributed to inbound marketing. Cassandra says that these gains show no signs of slowing down. “Thanks to the HubSpot software, inbound leads are now twice as likely to turn into deals, and in the past 90 days, we’ve boosted our new contacts from social media by 140%. Our content is attracting lots of attention. One of our ebooks, ‘UX Fundamentals: Interaction Design’, had a landing page conversion rate of 56% and generated more than 5,000 downloads in only three months.”

Looking to the future, Usabilla plans to ramp up its use of some of the HubSpot software’s advanced features, including A/B testing for its email campaigns, landing pages and CTAs. It also plans to make the switch to the HubSpot CRM.

“The interface is straightforward to use, and it will provide better marketing and sales data. As well as this, I like the way HubSpot continually updates and improves its products.”

In the longer term, the company has its sights set on expanding its operations even further “We’ve achieved triple-digit revenue growth over the past year, our team is increasing, and we recently got an award for being the fourth fastest growing company in the Netherlands. We are committed to keeping this momentum going, and we are going to use the HubSpot Marketing Platform to help us to do it.”