Concrete evidence of - ROI - is probably the best achievement Inbound Marketing has provided companies in the global market with.
Nearly a decade ago, when digital marketing started to spread like wildfire between any-sized companies worldwide, the global market was interested in getting as many likes, comments, and shares as possible.
But, at the end of the day, companies realized that these objectives were not enough, and gathering millions of likes didn’t change or improve their business performance because their digital marketing strategy wasn’t aligned with the sales strategy. As a result, companies' efforts to build large audiences ended up in nothing beneficial for business models.
In fact, the missing gear for the perfect machine was the connection between marketing and sales. Inbound Marketing, the methodology that builds a bridge between these two areas, and most importantly, contributes to a company’s ROI (Return of Investment).
How does Inbound Marketing help improve ROI?
Well, the global market offers countless cases of success. What is interesting is that Inbound marketing is a methodology that is suitable for almost all businesses of any origin or size, be they public or private.
Let’s check out 5 good examples of successful ROI cases that show us how an Inbound Marketing strategy can be easily adapted to different companies:
1. Randstad: 4 times more leads
This Netherlands-based company is currently the world’s 2nd largest recruitment firm. “However, by 2015 – Hubspot explains - it was still heavily relying on outbound marketing tactics. Its website had huge traffic volumes but low search engine rankings; it offered visitors compelling content to download but had no effective way to capture and nurture leads. Randstad realized that inbound marketing would be crucial to its future growth.”
Randstad’s content manager, Anthony Hodge, says that “the old website had a basic lead capturing function, but at the back end, it was very remedial. You would have to spend most of your time organizing the data, and there was no verification process for downloads.”
“It was very clear from the beginning – Hodge adds - that we should partner with HubSpot. Once our website was built, and we had created a full calendar of content, I was ready to take the plunge.”
The next step for Randstad was “to use the HubSpot software to offer visitors content that was personalized to them and their stage in the marketing funnel, through the use of Landing Pages, Forms and Smart CTAs. As well as this, Anthony also used the Workflows App to organize those leads and nurture them with targeted campaigns. As a result, Randstad now has a list of personas that are verified and continuously improved. As a result, it is building relationships with clients in ways that were not possible before,” Randstad explains.
The results? The executive states that “we have dramatically increased visitors to the site - growing by 56% each year, but more importantly leads from Randstad.com increased 4 times”.
2. University of Southern California: 40% conversion rate
This is a pioneer in online graduate education and, according to Hubspot, “USC wanted a new approach to graduate student recruitment. The Price School of Public Policy had long relied on paid advertising to attract prospective students to its online graduate programs. However, low application numbers, underqualified candidates, and rising recruitment costs led the school to replace its outbound recruitment efforts with an effective, cohesive inbound marketing strategy.”
“USC adopted HubSpot’s Content Optimization System (COS) and marketing automation software in September 2014. Their focus is to leverage HubSpot's inbound marketing tools to power admissions and enrollment for the Price School of Public Policy’s online graduate Master in Public Administration and Executive Master of Health Administration programs.”
Due to this Inbound marketing strategy, the USC has increased its blog traffic by 75%, and the conversion rates of high-performance assets increased by 40%.
3. The Office Coffee Company: 40% revenue growth
“The Office Coffee Company was established in 2011 by Richard Doherty and Jim Devlin, who wanted to share their love of great-tasting, ethically sourced coffee with businesses around the UK. Initially, they used only traditional outbound methods to build their fledgling business. Still, after realizing the impact a good website and SEO could have on their lead generation activities, they decided to take a leap of faith and transition 100% to inbound marketing,” Hubspot explains.
“As an early-stage company, their primary goals were to build brand awareness and effectively capture leads. Using HubSpot’s keyword tool and page performance tools in tandem allowed the Office Coffee Company to optimize their search ranking with ease.”
“To attract more visitors – Hubspot adds - the team began blogging 4 times a month with HubSpot's blogging app (…) With the fundamentals firmly in place, the team focused on converting those visitors into qualified leads. Using HubSpot’s landing pages app allowed them to gate their valuable content behind forms and build up a detailed profile of their lead database. This simple approach helped improve the sales team's effectiveness in prioritizing whom to follow up with and when. Consequently, the team is finding that over 70% of their leads that avail of a free onsite coffee tasting session are converting to customers,” Hubspot explains.
Results? 74% growth in traffic per year and 40% revenue growth.
4. Hipos.com: 9000 new contracts in the last 18 months
This a Mexican company dedicated to mortgage and real estate. “As a fast-growing start-up, Hipos.com – Hubspot states - needed a solid marketing and online sales strategy to establish their brand within the marketplace and generate leads for both their agency and their bank partners.”
“The company looked to HubSpot's all-in-one marketing and sales platform to attract, create and close new sales opportunities. A key part of their success was HubSpot's training and education of their marketing and sales teams. With the help of a partner agency, they also established their entire website on the HubSpot CMS, then managed to convert it into the new HubSpot COS version themselves.”
Due to implementing all these Inbound tools, organic visits within the first 18 months increased 380,000.
5. Vivonet: Landing page conversion increased 10 times
“Vivonet couldn't attract quality leads – Hubspot says- They were using ineffective lead generation channels that produced mostly unqualified, low quality leads. As a result, their sales team was spending far too much time contacting uninterested people.”
So their marketing goal was “to generate high converting leads for the sales team. Unfortunately, before HubSpot, their website didn’t bring in enough leads. As a result, Vivonet had to turn to less-efficient lead acquisition channels to meet its aggressive lead goals. However, these leads weren’t high quality, so the sales team stuck contacting the wrong people. So Vivonet turned to inbound marketing with HubSpot to resolve this problem by generating quality leads via their own custom resources such as their website, blog, email communication, etc.”
Hubspot also explains that currently Vivonet “is now focused on efficiency. Because of all the testing, Vivonet is doing with their content; they’re no longer getting bogged down in low-quality leads.
“Our sales team spends less time with unqualified leads and more time helping qualified leads find the right solution,” added Richard. Using HubSpot's Lead Management tools, Vivonet segments their lists based on their customers' lifecycle stage in the sales process. Then, they use the Email Marketing tool to send these leads the most appealing content for them, depending on their lifecycle stage.
For example, in the restaurant industry, it’s tough to get hold of restaurant owners. So Vivonet is using HubSpot's Marketing Automation to trigger lead nurturing campaigns that automatically begin a series of emails after their sales team has not been able to reach the owner via phone calls.”
The results so far? 10 times increased landing page conversion and 100% of the growth of online leads.
As we can see, Inbound is suitable for a wide variety of companies that need to connect marketing and sales teams to have better ROI results. What kind of marketing is using in your company? Would you like to share some results?
