BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and your role there.
BayCreative is a full-service B2B [business-to-business] marketing agency based in San Francisco.
I am a co-owner of the agency.
CHALLENGE
What was the business challenge your clients were facing that initiated the need for this platform?
The main goal was to be able to nurture prospects more effectively through an automated marketing solution. We wanted to be able to capture more people that were visiting the BayCreative website and be able to send content to them on a regular basis depending on their different type of persona.
SOLUTION
How does your company implement this platform or software?
HubSpot is integrated with our website, which is built in WordPress. We don't build our website on HubSpot. They have their own content management solution, but we've elected to use WordPress instead. The forms that we have on our website are integrated with HubSpot, and our campaigns to drive traffic to the website are utilized landing pages that we have built in HubSpot. When we do a Google AdWords campaign, it jumps to a HubSpot landing page. We use the landing page creation tool as well as social media and blog publishing tools that it offers.
Once you have a blog written, then it makes it easy to propagate that blog to your social media properties. We use it for a context database of our prospects and our clients. We use it for email marketing campaigns.
We do drip campaigns and nurturing campaigns via email marketing to our prospects and to our clients. All this we do for both helping to run the BayCreative as well as several of our clients have asked as to manage similar type of content distribution as well as lead generation, and we do that through HubSpot as well.
There's a variety of different metrics that we can get on HubSpot ranging from the traffic that's visitors of our website or a landing page to who's clicked on it, to if they've opened an email and have responded to an email. We know how many times a page has been seen. It's similar to Google Analytics in that we can capture a lot of intelligence from it, understand the performance of a certain campaign, and be able to adjust it if performance isn't up to the levels we want it to be. It also lets you weigh the prospect based on certain criteria that you've set. If a prospect is coming in and fills out a form, and it's from a certain type of company and a certain type of job title, and they've visited a certain number of pages on our website, we can set a criteria for how that prospect is weighed, and so we can then customize campaigns for prospects that have different weight classes or weight levels. If somebody is classified as a very strong prospect and maybe they have a weight score of 80, we can send them a different type of email nurturing campaigns than somebody that's less attractive and has a much lower score.
Was your company considering other platforms? Why this platform?
We were considering Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot. We went with HubSpot because they had a very helpful sales team and customer support team that onboarded us very closely and spent a lot of time with us to make sure that we had set up the HubSpot solution correctly and we were using it correctly. Then, they also had just a plethora of content available that was relevant to helping us not only use HubSpot, but also sell it to our clientele.
We are affiliates of HubSpot. We get a commission for every time that we sell HubSpot to our own clients. They did a great job of empowering us with the right messaging and the right sales tools to go out and engage with our clients and get them to buy into HubSpot as well and then manage their HubSpot accounts.
On an annual or monthly basis, how much does your company spend to utilize the platform?
We spend around $800 a month on it.
FEATURES
Were there any software features or tools that really impressed you?
HubSpot is very customizable, and the user interface is very easy to use. It makes it very easy, for instance, to create many different landing pages that are very customized for whatever campaign you're doing. You can create landing pages based on the characteristics of the prospects that you're going out to. If somebody has viewed Google AdWords and they hit on a landing page, we can have it go to multiple different types of landing pages based on different campaigns that they've seen, based on geographies that they are located in and on different services that we're trying to sell. I think what's great about HubSpot is that it's very flexible. It allows you to customize whatever you need to customize very rapidly and then does a great job of tracking performance very effectively.
Looking back, are there any areas of the software upon which you feel could be added or improved?
One of the challenges that we've had with HubSpot in some of our clients is the price point. There's a lot of pressure from newer companies like ClickFunnels, for instance, that have a lower price – at $99 a month – that don't have all of the features and functionality that HubSpot has, but have about 80 percent – enough for you do the job, but the price point is much lower. We've lost some accounts because we've tried to implement HubSpot and sell them HubSpot, and it's just too high of a price point. I think that's one of the things that HubSpot could benefit from – to have a lower price offering.
Do you have any results that you can share that come out of your use of HubSpot?
From our own business, we've seen the number of what we would call warm leads – a good quality lead – increase by about 300 percent year over year for the last three years because of HubSpot. The more we get to use it, the more we understand the benefits it can provide and how to customize it better, the better off it is. I think we're doing a good job also of keeping the leads that we get – that they're just more valuable to use – because we're able to nurture them more effectively using HubSpot.
Do you have any recommendations about using the tool?
I think one of the most important things is that you need to have a resource for it. It's a very sophisticated tool that can do a lot for you, and you get what you put into it. I think one of the things that we learned is that we tried using HubSpot where a number of us were using it and trying to run the business using HubSpot in our spare time. It really does take some allocation of resources to be dedicated to being the administrators and users of HubSpot because, if you don't to that, you're either going to set things up improperly or not get all the benefits that you possible could out of HubSpot. I think that's one of the things I'd recommend: don't be surprised once you get this solution that it definitely takes some time in there to set it up and customize it properly. Ongoing, it's a good idea to have a dedicated resource that will ensure that you are using it as effectively as possible.