Inbound Marketing & HubSpot: What Local Business Owners Are Saying
Posted by Samantha Coren on Thu, Jul 29, 2010
At PullnotPush I get to teach small business owners the ins and outs of inbound marketing. It's refreshing to talk to people who are so dedicated and immersed in every aspect of their business. One thing is for sure though - running your own business can take up quite a bit of time.
The beautiful thing about HubSpot is that it gives the small business owner a one stop shop for managing a web presence and channel for new customers. I was eager to find out how small businesses outside of the ones I currently work with were fairing in the world of inbound marketing with the big orange sprocket.
To quench my curiosity I spoke with the heads of three local businesses from different parts of the US who are involved in different industries. All three of them are current HubSpot customers. Here's what they had to say:
“Prior to HubSpot (April 28th 2010) we practiced traditional advertising that included radio, outdoor (billboards), magazines/programs (professional sports), and a non-structured email campaign. We did absolutely no SEO or Inbound Marketing prior to our launch with HubSpot.
Our landing pages have been an awesome tool to help build our email list and the blog has not only helped with SEO, but after the first 90 days we have over 220 subscribers via email and RSS. We also use the social media tool to engage the community when one of our brand keywords populates and submit all of our articles to the social media outlets that HS provides. Our social media reach has increased by 3000% since becoming a HubSpotter.
By using the Keyword Grader along with the Competitor reports we have been able to target more long tailed keywords” with lower volume that our competitors are not targeting. This has led to 187 of our 583 keywords being ranked in the Top 100 and improved our search traffic by 382% since HS launch.
Our content creation really has been focused on our blog for not only SEO, but to become a “Trust Agent” in our industry and for the city of Nashville. This has also helped with Link Building as we have increased our inbound links from 67 to 364 since June 1st.
HS makes it so easy that we spend less than 5 hours per week on our entire social media and blog campaign and about 2 hours per week with on page and off page SEO."
"360 Signs started in September of 2008. We are a commercial sign company providing design, fabrication, and installation of many type of business signs: lobby signs, directory signs, floor, wall, and window graphics, monument signs, building sign, vehicle wraps, event signs and many more. We sell only in the Austin, TX area and are fortunate to have achieved a great deal of success during our first two years.
We rely on personal networking, networking groups, and the internet to drive our new business and repeat and referral business to come from current clients. We relied on paid search for our first 18 months in business and thought we did quite well with the amount of leads we were getting. Our website has generated over 50% of our business to date.
We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of leads, over 200%, since I started using the HubSpot tools. We have added two sales reps to handle the extra leads. I have been particularly pleased that we have landed some larger accounts off the web, not just small businesses.
We are ahead of many of our competitors in terms of optimizing our website and improving our page ranking for a company our size. We differentiate ourselves on design and service since it is impossible for us to make signs that someone couldn’t get at other sign companies in Austin. The website helps position us properly and attracts customer that value service and quality."
"Test Drive Technologies was
started to help used car & truck buyers to make an informed decision on what they are purchasing. We are the eyes, ears and hands of our clients that find themselves in the automotive market. Before HubSpot we were solely relying on organic search & free classifieds.
There are so many tools on HubSpot that I use every day. I particularly like the social media engagement tool; it is easy to use and monitors the keywords that I find relevant to the automotive industry. This not only keeps me on top of what is going on but also what the consumer base thinks is happening. I also find the CMS at HubSpot very easy to use.
Our blog is what is making us stand out above our competition. We are able to post our findings for each of our inspections right on our blog much like a case study without the particulars of dealer and buyer information. Having these results on our blog will allow our potential clients to see what we do, how we do it and what we find in some vehicles.
Most of our competition is all about pay per click advertising. Our blog is what is bringing in most of our customers which also allows us to pass this savings on to our clients."
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