The best technology in the world is likely the one that you never notice. Steve Jobs once said “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” When you think about your iPhone, you don’t think about how to do something.You just do it. You play your music, make your call, or like a photo.
The iPhone delivers an amazing experience by fading into the background. This is good technology at work.
In the crowded marketing automation space there are a lot of tools to choose. Our favorite platform is HubSpot. We love HubSpot because it gives us the tools to deliver a personalized inbound experience for our clients. At the end of the day, this is what it is all about.
This is a story of how we partnered with a great company to help them deliver more contextual marketing messages to their prospects. Like the iPhone gives you the capability to simply interact with your world, HubSpot gave us this capability to do great marketing.
The Background
We recently had the opportunity to partner with Select International, an employee assessment and screening provider in Pittsburgh area. Select International helps their clients find the right hire, the first time.
Together we worked to better educate each of their six target personas by creating an personalized experience. This level of individual personalization would not have been possible without the use of Smart Content inside the HubSpot CMS.
The Challenge
Select International was no stranger to inbound marketing. With an inbound-savvy marketing team as their guide, they have activated the entire organization to participate with inbound efforts. A consistent commitment to blogging, creative content offers, and insightful webinars brought in a steady stream of traffic, leads, and sales.
It was all blue skies and roses until that one ill-fated day: the website redesign. After launching their brand new website on the HubSpot CMS, the Select team noticed something startling. Leads had taken a nose dive, traffic was slowing, and the mobile experience left a lot to be desired.
It was at this point that Select started chatting with GuavaBox. Together our goal was to create an Inbound GamePlan that maximized their current content library, clearly identify for the first time their target buyer personas, and design an inbound marketing system to bring it all together.
Creating a Personalized Inbound Experience
It is important to lead every website redesign with strategy. A redesigned website is only a tool after all. It needs to operate within a larger strategy that centers around your company’s goals.
Even though the Select team members were long-time practitioners of inbound marketing, they had never been able to clearly identify their buyer personas. Through our Inbound GamePlan process, we identified six unique Buyer Personas.
With the Buyer’s Journey as our guide, we dove into their stories together to better understand they key questions that are being asked in the research process.
Using a Content Map to Guild Each Persona’s Experience
Over the years, the Select team has created a lot of great content. So much in fact, that they struggled to find and share the right content with leads at the right time. It was an overwhelming problem.
We needed to organize this content in a way that made sense. This required a content audit and a content map. It was time to sunset some older and dated offers and create new ones to focused on the common, but unanswered questions that personas were asking.
We plotted the map for each persona and each Buyer’s Journey phase. With six personas and three phases in the Buyer’s Journey, this created eighteen different content combinations.
Within each quadrant we placed three or four different content offers. Each offer was identified to best answer the questions that the persona was asking at the different stages in the Buyer’s Journey.
Once complete, the content map serves as the master guide to setting up the personalized experience.
Setting Up Personalization by Segmenting the Database
Creating a personalized inbound experience isn’t possible without proper segmentation inside the marketing database. To deliver the personalized experience for each of Select’s leads, we built Smart Lists for each persona at each lifecycle stage.
Smart List membership would dictate what content would be displayed to each lead. These lists were built using the contact’s HubSpot Score and self-identified Persona field.
With the six personas identified, we added the opportunity for new leads to self identify as a persona on every form on the website.
Creating a Consistent Content Experience Across the Web
Today’s consumers crave a personalized experience. Sites like Netflix and Amazon have trained us to expect fresh content based on our previous behavior.
We wanted to make sure that every contact had a consistant experience, no matter how they decided to navigate. This meant aligning lead nurturing emails, Smart CTAs, and Smart Content Modules for each buyer persona.
Inbound personalization built around Smart List membership was the way to go. We used list membership to activate:
- The appropriate lead nurturing workflows with an inline message CTA to download the next offer on the content map.
- Display the next offer in the content map at the bottom of blog posts using Smart CTAs.
- Showcase contextual messages and testimonial videos on each industry specific page.
Remember that content map with 18 different content possibilities? This is where things get interesting! That is a lot of content to align.
Why This Project Was So Successful
Select International has a wide range of clients. They span the healthcare, manufacturing, safety, and customer service industries. The content they create and share with this wide audience needs to address their specific needs. Each market has different decision makers involved and asks different questions.
By taking the time to build an Inbound GamePlan together, we were able to identify the Buyer’s Journey for each target persona and create a content map to educate leads through that journey.
It was only by leveraging the power of Smart Content inside the HubSpot CMS that we were able to deliver this experience to Select International’s audience.
Results Were Immediate
Within one week of launching the new website, leads were up by 17%.
A spike in lead conversion like this didn’t happen by simply adding some fancy CSS or some pretty pictures. It comes from creating a detailed Inbound GamePlan that shares the right message at the right time and leveraging HubSpot’s amazing collection of marketing tools to deliver this personalized website experience to leads.
In addition to increasing the number of leads in the funnel, the Select International team took a lot from the process.
Kristin Paxton, Director of Marketing at Select International said:
“I think one benefit that I didn’t anticipate was how much we learned about ‘why’ things should be done a certain way. As we built out different processes and workflows, Andrew helped us understand why we’d want to set things like this or like that.”
Knowing how to do something is helpful; but knowing why it’s done that way means that we’re able to replicate and scale the process that GuavaBox put in place for us.”
At the end of the day, delivering delight to clients is about more than flashy new tools. It is about leveraging tools like Smart Content in the HubSpot CMS and empowering a team with the right strategy to continue to do inbound.