This webinar discusses how two companies, a plumbing company and an orchid company, improved their marketing results by shifting from traditional outbound marketing to inbound marketing. The plumbing company saw a 27% increase in new customers per month after implementing inbound strategies like SEO, social media, content marketing and lead nurturing emails. The orchid company increased its website traffic by 500% and captured over 7,000 new leads using similar inbound tactics like blogging, social media campaigns, and landing pages to build its brand and engage customers. The presentation concludes with a Q&A section.
2. Agenda
• Introduction – Chris Knipper
• About Kuno Creative
• Marketing Cases - 2 clients
– Strategy
– Execution
– Results
• Questions & Answers
2
Chris Knipper
President
Kuno Creative
@chrisknipper
LinkedIn.com/in/chrisknipper
3. 3
About Kuno Creative
Marketing Company since 2000
• Branding & PR
• Marketing Strategy
• Print
• Outdoor
• Direct Mail
• Website Development
• Internet Marketing
4. 4
About Kuno Creative
Inbound Marketing since 2009
• Getting Found Online
• Creating Great Content
• Social Media
• Monitoring
• Engagement
• Marketing
• Capturing Leads
• HubSpot Certified Partner
5. 5
Case Study 1
Outbound Marketing
• Direct Mail
• Print Ads
• Phone Books
• Radio
• Outdoor
Challenges
• Cost for lists and postage
• Decline in newspaper readers
• Search the internet vs. Phone books
• Not targeted enough
• Not easily measurable
Marketing Budget % Sales
6. 6
New Direction in 2010
Inbound Marketing
Update Strategy
Change
Outbound Marketing Budget % Sales
To
Inbound Marketing Budget % Leads
Goals
• 25 leads = 8 customers
• 1,400 visitors = 25 leads
• Blogs + SEO + Social Media = 1,400 visitors
• 4 customers /month = Positive ROI
7. 7
Integrated Strategy
Outbound
• Direct Mail
• Radio
• Banner Ads
• Email Marketing
RADIO COPY
Eliminate electric bill shock
this summer. Schedule your air
conditioning performance check.
Be a Facebook fan of
Raymond Plumbing, and your
A C performance check could‑
be free!
11. 11
Integrated Strategy
Inbound
Off page SEO
•Social Media Profiles
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Social Media Monitoring
• Facebook
• LinkedIn Groups
• Twitter Hashtags
• Local blogs
12. 12
Integrated Strategy
Inbound
• Social Media Engagement
• Series of Lead Nurturing emails
• Additional Offers
• Daily Interaction
Funny Plumbing Facts: Sir John Harington is credited
with inventing the flushable toilet in 1596, hence
the American nickname for it, “the john.”
Water Heater – How to You Tube video
Tax Credit Trivia: (Q) How long do I have to take
advantage of the tax credit for energy-efficient
home improvements? (A) The tax credit for..
Grand prize tickets to the Cav’s vs. Miami game)
15. 15
Case Study 2
Outbound Marketing
• Tradeshows
• Distributors
• Product Endorsements
• Marketing Literature
• Product Labels
Challenges
• Perceptions That It Is Not Easy to Care
for Orchids
• Cost to Reach a National Audience
• Learning About Consumer Preferences
• Spreading Consistent Brand Message
Through Multiple Channels
16. 16
Inbound Marketing
Update Strategy
Build the Brand
“Caring for Orchids is Easy”
Build Loyal Brand Advocates
Become Online Resource for Orchid Care
Goals
• Increase Website Traffic
• Expand Reach in Social Media
• Create Great Content for Consumers
• Collect Consumer Data
• Increase Demand for Distributors
• Attract Additional Distributors
17. 17
Update Website Design
For the Consumer
• Design & Content Centered
Around Consumer
• Watering Reminder Emails
20. 20
Get Found Online
Get Found & Interact
• Improve Organic Search
• Interact in Social Media
• Collect Consumer Data
• Surveys/Polls
• Offers/Landing Pages
31. Social Media Campaign Summary
• 4,100+ Facebook fans
• Uploaded 225+ customer photos
• 7,000 new leads captured
• 51.8% average conversion rate on 6 landing pages
• 13,304 Lead Nurturing emails sent to leads
• Email subscriptions grew to 17,000
32. Questions & Answers
32
• Conclusion – Chris Knipper
• Questions
• Free Inbound BluePrint available
at www.kunocreative.com
Chris Knipper
President
Kuno Creative
@chrisknipper
LinkedIn.com/in/chrisknipper
Notes de l'éditeur
Good Afternoon. Welcome to the webinar. I’m Chris Knipper with Kuno Creative. We will beginning in just a few moments…. I wanted to check first and see if everyone can hear me, if a few people could comment in the chat box, well be sure.
When ready….>OK, - we’ll go ahead and begin. Today’s session will be recorded.
Again, Welcome to this REAL CASES. REAL RESULTS Inbound Marketing Success webinar. Today I’m going to go over some actual results from Inbound Marketing campaigns for two of our current clients. I’m going to give you an inside look at what we did for strategy and execution and then review the results. At the end of today’s session, I’ll open it up for some questions and answers.
To start off, I’ll give you a brief overview About Kuno Creative.
Kuno Creative has been marketing company since the year 2000, We’ve always been involved with traditional marketing services such as Brand and PR and Marketing Strategy. We’ve used outbound techniques for our clients including media such as print, outdoor, direct mail and just about any other method that would help us ultimately market our clients to get good results.
But over the past few years we noticed that many of these methods kept requiring more and more effort to get a similar response. There are so many channels you can try to use to reach each demographic, but the problem is, people have just gotten better at blocking out unwanted Ads and marketing messages. That is the leading reason, that since the beginning of 2009 we’ve focused on Inbound Marketing methods that bring your audience to you because that’s what people want, rather then being inundated with advertising.
Developing these methods includes Getting Found Online by Creating Content that is optimized for the search engines and shared within social media. To Build your brand you have to join the conversations that are occurring in social media and win the trust and respect from your target audience. After doing this, that audience is much more likely to want to buy from you. And many of these interactions will happen online.
In these two case studies, we’ve integrated a combination of Outbound and Inbound techniques.
The first customer, I’ve known them for a long time. We’ve been their marketing company for over 9 years. Raymond Plumbing Heating and Air Conditioning, is a small business located in my home town of Lorain Ohio. The current service area is a little less than 50 miles and they provide heating and cooling comfort solutions.
And from the beginning we’ve always done the tradition marketing techniques, such as direct mail, newspaper print ads, outdoor billboards, and even various local radio campaigns. And it has worked pretty well, they have always done a little better than the industry average and the other local competitors. But again, as time went on, the costs for everything from phone book ads, to direct mail postage, continued to go up. And this happens at the same time that economy has gotten worse. And when things get tight, the competition get fierce, and profit margins decline.
Overall, the strategy pretty much remained the same, the overall marketing budget tends to be some type of percentage of sales, and something that is a consistent percentage for someone in industry.
Well the best thing about this customer, is that we do go way back a long way, and I believe we have strong repoire and level of trust. So in 2009 when we started telling Keith Raymond about the methodologies behind Inbound Marketing, that we were fortunate that he would give us the benefit of the doubt, and say OK, after much consideration, and even though there really wasn’t a budget for this, he said let’s give it a try.
So in 2010, we embarked on a new direction with Inbound Marketing. The first difference is the strategy. Instead of having a marketing budget based on a percentage of sales, our strategy adjusted to create a budget based on a targeted number of leads. And for the first time in our relationship, we sat down and talked about defining a sales funnel.
So in this example, as you can see, we know we have to target 25 qualified leads to close 8 new customers per month. And to reach 25 leads our website traffic had to average around 1,400 visitors per month. The question then became, what amount of blogging, SEO, and Social media promotion, needed to be performed, to reach the targeted number in traffic? And what was an average new customer worth? In this scenario we will able to determine that we needed to convert 3-4 new customers per month to cover the inbound marketing budget.
So, the integrated strategy that we came up with, was a mixture between outbound and inbound techniques. For outbound, we still wanted to use direct mail and put pieces directly in the hands of our best customers. We had a history and track record of success doing this. The customer base expected to receive direct mail with certain discounts in way of coupons a few times each year. And we also promoted these special discounts with other advertising on local radio stations and web banner ads in the local newspapers. The biggest difference in our outbound techniques is that we updated our messages to include invitations to communicate with us in social media. And we rewarded customers with special offers on sites like FaceBook and Twitter. And no matter where these conversations occurred, we ultimately made sure to drive them back to landing pages on the website to capture the information we needed.
What this resulted in was significant increases in our Reach. By reach, I mean we were now growing our email list, # of fans on FaceBook, followers on Twitter, subscriptions on YouTube and connections in LinkedIn. What is shown here is one of the monthly email blasts. In the past, before integrating with social media, our list was much smaller. It’s a plumbing company, and there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive to give up your email for a free for just a plumbing company newsletter. But that started to change as we began creating great content for the Inbound Techniques.
To create that great content, we started with updating the website with compelling call to action graphics and offers and we began writing and publishing three blog articles per week. One of the great side effects of doing this was, we had to research, read and learn about the latest topics of interest in this industry. It turned out that we really didn’t need to do this for long. You start to identify patterns of the most common areas of interest. And this helped decide what articles and article titles would be interesting to our audience. In a way, we ended up re-branding ourselves on the fly.
Other things we did to integrate the strategy was to perform on and off page seo. We optimized page content and meta information and even special videos we made and uploaded to youTube. In these screen shots you can see..
Once we created the great content and then optmized it, we made sure to promote throughout social media by….
And in additonal to the promotion in social media, we aloso wanted to engage our audience, not just promote ourselves, here we…
Within the first 8 months what resulted was a significat increase in the number of leads. And even more important was the improvement in the traffic to lead conversion rate.
And another side effect of creating great blog articles based around our seo strategy was the we started to rank in the top few positons…
So, after 7 months in 2010, it was very interesting because we were able to reach our estimated traffic goals, we actually surpassed them, and our pre-determined sales funnel turned out to be pretty close. We had 99 leads which resulted in 27 new customers, which is an average of 9 new customers per month.
The best part about it is that, the improvements we made to the site, the content, the increase in social media reach, are all things that are long term assetts. We didn’t pay as much for phone book advertising, and we didn’t buy serach engine ad words.
The 2 second case study is about Just Add Ice Orchids. Just Add Ice Orchids are grown by green circle growers out of Oberlin Ohio and distributed both regionally and nationally through retail stores like grocery store chain and big box stores such as Home Depot and Walmart.
In the past, there marketing was primarily done through trade shows and through their retail distributors, and recently they have product endorsement through gardening and home decorating celebrities like P. Allen Smith.
The biggest challenge they have, is communicating the message that Orchids are easy to take care of. We are trying to overcome the perception that orchids are a specialty item, that the everyday consumer would rarely purchase due to these difficulty of keeping the plant alive and most importantly how to properly water the orchid.
And these solutions for these problems need to be communicated dircectly to the consumer and also through the distribution network.
Although this client had a small website when we first met them at the beginning of 2009, it had very little traffic and there was little to no reach in social media. What was really important to their marketing team was finding out what consumers thought. What consumers concern were with how to care for the orchids, how to water them, what colors they preferred, what type of pots, but most importantly how would these orchids interact with their lifestyle. How can we send the message that these orchids are for everyone, not just the orchid enthusiast.
This type of data is criticial for the retail environment, and distributors like Walmart and Home Depot want analytical data about these consumer preferences and of course they want the overall demand for orhcids in the US to grow.
Some of the first things we did was redesign the website using the HubSpot inbound marketing software. We updated the design to focus on how orchids interacted with everyday life. We didn’t focus on putting up volumes of pretty orchid pictures by themselves, because that wasn’t how the consumer would see the product in their own homes. We included more imagery of orhcids in every facet of their everyday life, an orchids in every room of the house, on the kitchen table, in dining room, in the bedroom, on a sun porch, as mother’s day gift. The other important function of the website was to focus on caring, sharing and learning about orchids.
Consumers had options to sign up for weekly email watering reminders, or participating in interactive orchid care forums, and even sharing their stories, pictures, and feelings about orchids in their lifestyle.
On the website we also wrote and published orchid care blog articles every few days and provided options for orchids care downloads. With these downloads we started significantly increasing our email subscription lists and were able to follow up with them and encourage them to join the conversation with us on other platforms such as FaceBook and Twitter. Using the HubSpot software we were able to capture analytical data from the website users about the preferences and problems, and we knew where they came from and how they found us, and we started interacting with them and answering their questions in the blog and forum comments on a daily basis.
Once we listened to their comments and concerns, we adjusted our content strategy and started creating content that directly addressed their needs. Common questions in the blogs, forums and Facebook pages resulted in us creating website pages and videos we could direct our social media to in order to help them with orchid care. Within a short period of time we noticed that other consumers that were participating in the forums and on their facebook page, we also start trying to help other consumers find the answer they were looking for. They were able to do this by, because they had seen the company answer these questions in the past.
Now that we had these tools in place we focused on expending our reach online.
To get found online and expand our reach, we performed both on page and off page seo – search engine optimization. Using the Hubspot data we were able to determine what phrases people were using to try to find the answers they were looking for. On the website we optimized page content, meta information, images, videos and links to target this organic traffic. Off of the website, we focused our conversations on these phrases, and created great content in our blogs that encourage outside websites to link to our site. We saw organic search result improve 700% in an 8 month period and with this increase in traffic we were able to capture critical data through interactive polls and surveys.
We monitored daily, any comments both on the website and also throughout social media, we then engaged customers to help them solve their problems and thanked our loyal brand advocates. On Facebook, especially, we were able to see comments and pictures of our most likely buyers. Using these buyer personas are now able to segement are most likely consumer groups and cater future content and offers based on their demographics.
In this this comments you see examples of these interactions.
What we found out is, that these brand advocates, who truly do want to be your fan on sites like Facebook and twitter, don’t mind getting regulary updates from the company. They liked sharing their opinions and even having fun taking about how orchids had become part of their lives.
For example, on the left are posts in response to a social media engagement question that was, “how many of you actually name your orchid?, the first response says morning glory, sweet innocence, and another user name their orchid “my pretties” from the wizard of oz.
On the right you can see an example of reponses to a question about who likes poetry and a list of words the user is using to spell out the acronym for ICE or ICE orchids. The style and the vocabulary used provides insight to their personalities, age, interest, favorite movies, pet owners, etc.
As we collect this data we write additonal blogs articles and pieces of content that will make these loyal customers feel appreciated.
In additon to discovering what current brand advocates are like, another part of the strategy is to create additional markets. If our current users are woman who have an average age of 45-65 and are more likely to be non-business type people. What can we do to create demand from young professional men and woman who are more likely to be in Linkedin on a regular basis?
Some of the strategies included creating an orchid care group in LinkedIn. And starting to listen to what conversations are occuring and offering helpful answers and suggestion. We monitor these interactions and start creating content that would commnicate to these professionals about the ways orchids can be part of their life. Mayb as a great gift for someone’s office, decorations for a lobby, or a special thank you for an important customer.
We try to develop relationships with the thought leaders in different groups without being overly promotional.
Another strategy to increase our reach create demand is to come up with special social media promotins. In this example we used the website and our social media sites to reach out to current and potential customers a chance to win a free orchid. While this has a very lost cost to the client, meaning giving away a few free orchids each, the audience found it fun and engaging. You could win by being a fan on Facebook, or answering trivia questions about orchid care in the blogs or on Twitter. You could even win by uploading a photo to their website that shows how your orchid fit in with you lifestyle.
We were able to engage the audience at the same time we were promoting our most important brand features and meanwhile collecting invaluable consumer data.
And as we continued to build loyal fans, we made sure to always come back them first and reward them with special free perks, like this customized computer wall paper that includes graphics that reminds them of when to water their orchids.
Another advantage of the HubSpot sofware was that once we got someone to convert on any of our forms or offers, they were entered into a lead-nurturing campaign. These lead nuruting emails futher encourage them to interact with us on our webiste and in social media.. And we offered additional tools to help them take care of their orchids.
But again, one of the most important things we wanted to do was to capture converion rate data, so we could measure effects of our marketing and understand which offers and landing page were the most effective. In this screenshot you can see various landing pages, the views, the leads, and the conversion rates. We could compare the costs for each type of marketing effort to the actual results and adjust our future strategies based on data instead of instinct.
We also used the HubSpots software to capture B2B leads from additonal potential distributors. This helps the inside sales department and started creating a separate b2b marketing list and these leads can also be included in future lead-nurturing efforts to further communicate the value and power of our brand and why you would want to become a distributor.
So, here were the results after just over one year. Year over year traffic to the webiste incrased by over 500%. The blue line is 2009 traffic and the red line in traffic from 2010.
In just 90 days of beginning our social media campaign our blog subscriber grew from zero to over 674.