Mark Gibson: My name is Mark Gibson and I’m the principal of Advanced Marketing Concepts. We’re a sales and marketing, consulting and training firm and we’re based in the U.K. We started the business five years ago working specifically on sales training. It was really important for us to be able to find people that needed our stuff and that could – that basically could opt in to contact us. And so, HubSpot really gave us that capability to clearly articulate how we help buyers.
We’ve just developed a brand new website. In fact, spent a significant sum with a web designer in the U.K. to actually build our new website and quite quickly into the process, we discovered that, you know, we weren’t making any headway with his proposed Google AdWords campaign to identify our keywords and we really didn’t have any opportunity to blog within this platform And the other thing was that they were really – they didn’t have any idea about the integration of social network and the importance of social networking.
Since we’ve been on HubSpot, we’ve had about 500 percent more leads in the past six months than we had in the previous five years. So – and it’s trailing [Phonetic] [0:01:19] up so we’re very happy about the inbound traffic we’re getting. We only work with – you know, with a handful of clients a year and, you know, they can be anything from, you know, $50,000 to $150,000 so, you know, an inbound lead is extremely valuable to us. And we have leads from Israel which is great because that’s where we wanted to get leads. We’ve also had leads from the U.K. and from the US.
Traffic is going on this actually and what we’ve seen with traffic is that once we generate a blog that’s of interest, the traffic basically spikes up on that day and for a few days afterwards. So, blogging is really key to us getting inbound visitors and it has also been very useful getting social media to spread the word.
It’s immediately compelling for us because it was – what HubSpot offered us was a missing piece of that methodology so our methodology starts with messaging and identifying the bio persona and how the products are used. The second piece used to be outbound marketing but that wasn’t very effective anymore and companies weren’t being effective with their outbound marketing and cold calling. You know what I mean? That’s basically, you know, 90s stuff. It’s over. The next piece is personal development because – and communication because what we want sales people to do is to become master communicators. Then finally, leveraging the sale and as soon as we saw HubSpot, it was like an “ah-ha” moment for us.
We took on the HubSpot owner product and we migrated our website and it was pretty quick. It was only about, you know, a week or so to migrate the website and we are now using the HubSpot CMS. I mean, the HubSpot CMS basically has given us the opportunity to go back and optimize every page.
I’m not a computer geek. I’m just a business guy trying to run a small business and it gives me productivity that I wouldn’t have had and tools that allow me to do stuff that normally I couldn’t do, so I’m really thrilled. I’m really interested in seeing who’s interested in what when they come to my website. So, just clicking on Lead Tracking, I can see exactly what pages they have been on, how long they have been on each specific page and to be able to follow the line of thinking in actually their inquiries. And then we started blogging basically from – almost from day one. In fact, now we’re doing all of the things that HubSpot allows us to do. So, we’re blogging, we’re doing news releases. We’re using social media.
The thing I really like about HubSpot is that it’s keyed on to my favorite keywords and it searches Twitter and Digg and LinkedIn and Delicious and it brings back any stories that might be relevant for me to comment on.
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