Starting From Square One
In the early 2010s, Wellers had a limited marketing function, and they knew their business would benefit from investing in it. In 2011, they brought on Chris Thompson to head up Marketing—and he eventually went on to become the firm’s first non-accounting partner.
Thompson had his work cut out for him when joining the company. “At that time, they had no dedicated marketing function,” says Thompson.
Thompson knew that Wellers’ most significant marketing opportunity was in the digital space. “In 2011, I could see that everything was shifting online,” says Thompson. “I was starting to look at the digital side of communications and knew it was the way to go.”
Thompson decided to focus on content. “Before coming to HubSpot, we had started implementing more of a content-based approach to marketing for quite a few years, and that worked well.”
But there were challenges in driving consistent traffic. “However, we'd been a little bit too reliant on a tiny handful of posts for a lot of traffic,” says Thompson. “The competition was building up, and our website was starting to suffer traffic-wise.”
Thompson realised something was missing from the equation. “We lacked all sorts of tools and resources,” says Thompson. He started exploring marketing solutions that would help improve their content efforts—and after discovering HubSpot’s platform, he was impressed.
“HubSpot is not just software. You're buying into a whole marketing ethos around it, as to how to do it, what to do, and why,” says Thompson. “Our team had been learning from your books, the blog, and the host of useful posts.”
However, it took a bit of time to get buy-in from the partners. “Accountants, you know, they need to see clear evidence of a return on investment,” says Thompson, but in 2016, Thompson was able to persuade them to sign off on Marketing Hub Professional and CMS Hub Professional.
The Power Of The Right Platform
Thompson saw an immediate benefit when switching to HubSpot—mainly when it came to getting access to data in real-time.
“When I log into HubSpot, I can see what our vital metrics are on custom dashboards. Data on total sessions, sources and channels are available in real-time,” says Thompson. I can see performance as its happening and progressing from day-to-day. If I send out an email, I could sit there and watch the email stats flow in real-time. This capability was particularly useful of late where we had to send out communications about government support for SMEs during these unusual COVID times,” he says.
Accessing data in real-time gave Thompson the insights he needed to make the right marketing decisions—and having all that data on a single platform saved him a significant amount of time, energy, and hassle.
“Having everything in one place is vital for us. Over a month, we’re talking about days of time-saved from manual reporting,” says Thompson. “In the past, we had a marketing agency to help us out, but we had to request reports and wait for them to arrive. Then, when we used multiple tools, we had to log in several times to generate reports and marry them up. It takes ages. So yes, for us, it’s ten days worth of time savings per month.”
Wellers generate significant amounts of qualified traffic through their approach to SEO & blogging. Many of these visitors become customers after engaging with Wellers’ content, meaning this is a crucial revenue stream for the business.
Thompson has also seen a benefit in bridging the gap between marketing and accounting. Accountants are, by definition, numbers focused. HubSpot’s robust reporting features have helped Thompson’s accounting partners better understand the ROI of his marketing strategy, and how much value the HubSpot platform is driving for their business.
“With HubSpot, I was able to present a clear ROI to the partners, and this helps with securing buy-in for other projects. For our reporting, I've looked at all client wins for the firm and broken them down to which ones are attributable to the website. On top of this, I then looked at fees billed per year for those clients. From there, I've been able to show the true return on investment to the partners at our firm. Having a clear perspective of success is vital!”
Moving Forward With Content—And With HubSpot
As a Professional Services customer, Wellers has worked closely with a dedicated Inbound Consultant since implementing HubSpot, to achieve strategic goals using the platform. Moving forward, Thompson wants to continue building on their success by driving more conversions.
“Going forward, we want to continue to work with HubSpot on implementing best practices, especially on how well we're converting leads on each page, particularly for the top-performing content. We’re also making sure to create more evergreen content, so we're not relying on a small number of posts for most of our traffic. We're trying to spread that out to reduce risk,” says Thompson.
There are also plans to expand the marketing team so Thompson can ramp up their content production even more—and continue driving results. “We need to get another team member on board so we can produce more content and review more content,” says Thompson.
But whatever the future holds for Weller’s marketing strategy, that future is sure to include HubSpot. “If you took HubSpot away, our team wouldn't be able to do what we do. It's essential, it's vital we have this and make use of it,” says Thompson. “It’s like the spine of our marketing. It's a key component.”
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