Inbound Found

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the digital marketing director of a B2B quarry company involved in natural stone, quarrying, and manufacturing for architectural applications and residential interior and exterior applications. We have quarries across North America, Canada, and Europe, as well as different business segments like commercial, institutional, residential renovation, memorials, and residential landscaping and hardscaping products.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Inbound Found?

We needed help with our information architecture. We’d created a lot of new content, as well as acquired many websites through company acquisitions, and we wanted to manage that content in a manner that was beneficial to our SEO and UI, especially as we continued to grow.

It was challenging to manage all the new products and market segments we were going after, and Inbound Found was crucial in helping us find the best way to organize and structure all that information.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

As we acquire new websites and create new content, our process with Inbound Found begins with preliminary, exploratory calls presenting the business, including the structure in all of our teams — sales, marketing, product. It is a very holistic overview of every part of our business and our associated brand as they relate to our customers and the buyer’s journey. We also talk about keywords, website performance, and conversions, and look through the site maps of all of our websites. This gives Inbound Found a large, broad overview.

Presenting this large business case up-front allows us to discuss the pain points and the challenges we face, as well as the feedback we’ve gathered from our own internal surveys. We take into account internal stakeholders’ impressions of the UX of the website, too. Inbound receives all of this to begin their review and audit process, and then they use their tools to dig into page performance, keyword queries, and SEO on the backend.

Moving forward, they continue to identify hidden opportunities lying within those pages and sites and advise us on what steps we should take to better organize it for an enhanced UX and search results.

What is the team composition?

I work with Jim (Marketing & Design).

How did you come to work with Inbound Found?

We were referred to them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $200,000 CAD (approximately $160,000 USD) with them so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since January 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We presented Inbound Found with some very specific challenges in some of our business segments that are unique and very niche — they’re difficult to think through. Inbound Found’s ability to go along with us and hear us out to better understand our challenges and then find solutions was incredible.

They’re patient and transparent, delivering great findings of where we’ve fallen short or are missing an opportunity.

How did Inbound Found perform from a project management standpoint?

We work in WordPress a lot together. Zoom and Teams meetings help us communicate as well. They use Nero sometimes to help with visualizing flows and org charts, as well as spin up a lot of wireframing options for websites. Google Docs supports us in organizing information too.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There were some tasks that we wanted to do that Inbound Found could have easily banked as money for a job well done overall, but they never let us pay for a service that wouldn’t return adequate value. That’s unusual for an SEO company. SEO can be hard to drill down into with sufficient detail for a client to understand, but Inbound Found helped us develop a strong enough understanding to make informed decisions. They’re very honest, transparent, and straightforward, and they saved us money, in that sense. We have a lot of trust between us.

Inbound Found has also spent significant time and energy on tasks outside the scope of work because they have a genuine interest in our success. They leverage their knowledge and professionalism to think through a lot of difficult and challenging problems that others wouldn’t be able to access with such detail.

Some of our products are difficult to market from a buyer’s journey perspective, as customers come to us through many non-streamlined paths, which makes it challenging to channel the right lead or contact to our website. Inbound Found has been great at doing in-depth competitor analysis and providing more useful data than anyone else would provide. Having that data to be able to present to stakeholders has been very helpful in justifying their cost as a vendor.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not necessarily. I can’t think of anything right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Inbound Found cuts through the noise. This type of information architecture or SEO work can make you feel like a lot of time is spent theorizing about what you could or couldn’t do, but Inbound Found expedited things, getting them moving along in a shorter time than I’ve experienced with other agencies. I’m always appreciative of them for helping make sense of it all and providing A, B, and C options that are relatively clear so we can begin actioning in a relatively short time frame.

Stakeholders want to see change happen immediately, so time isn’t on your side to do a lot of exploration work. Inbound Found is able to shift gears and change direction quickly, however, as a project might dictate, which allows them to deliver progress quickly. After you establish value, you can transition to longer-term portions of the project. Inbound Found won’t give you a lot of pushback or pull themselves back if the project isn’t what was agreed upon in the beginning. They’ll understand and grow with it.