It’s been an interesting ride so far using HubSpot and we’ve learned a lot. Since our 3 month reevaluation of our own inbound marketing efforts, the highlight has been the number of organic leads that have come in.
 
Here’s the breakdown:

Traffic

We’re always looking at how our organic traffic is performing and it’s been a steady growth so far. While our overall traffic dipped in July and August, (as it always tends to do) our organic traffic remained steady. Our organic traffic in August was the highest it has been since before Google’s last big update in April. And September is on track to being our best month since we started using HubSpot.
 

Contacts

Our contacts started to increase after month 4. Our organic visits to contact rate went from .9% in June to 4.72% in July, and it has stayed up around the 4% mark since. We are very happy about this.
 

 
Our leads come from all over the map. Out of 35 total contacts 22 were organic searches and out of those 22, 8 were qualified leads. The remaining 13 contacts came from email marketing, social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and face to face networking. 3 of those were qualified leads.
 

 

Clients

We brought on our first HubSpot Inbound account on month 5 and we also brought on a large web account in month 6. Just for the record, these new accounts are due to existing contacts and relationships. While our online presence definitely plays a part in closing these leads, we have yet to close an account solely from our new inbound marketing efforts.

How Did We Achieve This

• • We really pinned down our strategy and committed to who our target personas are.
• • We started rolling out three blogs per week in month 4 and 5. Well thought out blogs take time. By month 6 we made sure to commit to at least two blogs a week and we’ve been really focusing on upping the value of those blogs.
• • In regards to email marketing, we started a bit aggressive with this and we were announcing a blog every week. We started losing readers so we’re now announcing blogs biweekly.
• • We took a look at our top visited pages and decided we could take advantage of the traffic they were getting. Our contact page was one of those pages. We invested some time into it and it ended up being well worth it. Most of our leads are coming directly from our contact page.

Where Are We Going to Make Improvements

The trend that we’re seeing so far is that organic searches are coming to our website and are converting on our contact page. This is not necessarily a bad thing since if we look at from a buyer’s journey, these leads are at the bottom of the funnel and are expecting a phone call. Because we have these leads, our sales activities have increased, and our pipeline is filling up more than it ever has before. By sales activities we mean following up with leads, and definitely not cold calling.
 
The issue we’re noticing is we’re investing quite a bit time in coming up with articles/blogs and we’re not seeing very many conversions that start with a blog post. These blogs are definitely helping with organic search results, we just need to sharpen our conversion tactics to take better advantage of our blog traffic. Here’s what we have in mind:
 

• • Revisit our top viewed blog topics and improve them by adding creatives, statistics, better copy, SEO etc.
• • Revisit our CTAs (Call-to-Actions) and start applying some A/B testing to iron out the flaws.
• • Last, reevaluate the type of articles we’re rolling out, come up with better topics and find out which ones are working the best for us. We also want to make sure we spend some time on a few posts a month to come up with blogs that can become compounding posts.

Internal Improvements

Internally, the biggest improvement we’ve seen in our organization is how we stay on top of leads and are now implementing an actual sales process. In the past, our sales came from word of mouth and relationships. We met people face to face at networking events and nurtured a relationship with them before they became leads and sales.
 
Now that we have a steady stream of leads coming in through our site, we can implement a sales strategy that can be taken care of during business hours. We can do more sales activities in less time, and we don’t have to make it to a dozen after hours networking events every month. (Of course we still network quite a bit, but our business no longer depends on it.)
 
How has your experience been so far with using HubSpot or implementing inbound marketing. Share at the comments!