Pop Quiz: How Does a Small Company Generate Leads Like a Big Company?

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That's what I asked Holly Allison a few weeks ago.

Holly is the vice president of marketing at Vico Software, a successful Boston-area startup that provides construction software to engineers and contractors.

Holly's answer?

Inbound marketing.

With the economy tightening, Holly says, Vico can't be spending money on trade shows or direct mail. Instead, they produce webinars and create content that prospects download and link to. In other words, they do things that help them get found.

And it's working. Over the past six months, their website traffic is up 89%, their free download program is up over 200% and they've generated over 1,500 leads.

In the video below, Holly explains the process.

Although Holly is a HubSpot customer, this video focuses on Vico's approach to marketing, not its use of HubSpot software (we try avoid talking too much about HubSpot in the Inbound Marketing Blog). We have a separate page for HubSpot case studies.

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Posted by Rick Burnes on Wed, Jan 14, 2009 @ 07:22 AM

COMMENTS

I may be paraphrasing a bit, but there was some awesome sound bites. I wish more marketing VPs were clued in like Holly.

"It's marketing's job to support sales in every way we can."

"We do that by providing a sales pipeline of educated leads 40% more of the volume of sales that we need. It's that simple. It's that mathematical."

"I can go to the board and say, 'We can support this revenue plan with this small of a marketing budget.'."

Love it!

posted on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 7:52 AM by peter caputa

It's great to know that other small businesses are able to keep their marketing costs at a minimum while staying current with marketing trends. Just goes to show how valuable inbound marketing can be, no matter what size of the company.

posted on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 8:50 AM by Kelly Fagan

Holly discusses how in the past, marketing would spend their money on print ads, trade shows, and blast faxing (wow! what a blast from the past!) She makes a great point about how if your website traffic increases, the benefits are plentiful. More people will download your content, watch your webinars, etc. This generates educated leads for the sales force. It's impressive that Vico markets with less than 1% of their annual revenue! In today's economy, why wouldn't companies use inbound marketing instead of wasting all of their resources on methods that have a 1-2% return rate?? Oftentimes, I would guess that its probably because they don't want to put forth the time and effort. Inbound marketing is effective, but it involves work. I would imagine that it's much easier to blindly sent out mailers to random addresses than it is to write a constructive blog. But with the rewards of inbound marketing being so high, the extra sweat is worth it!

posted on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 10:20 AM by Bianca Buco

Once mastered:
inbound marketing = business success
inbound marketing = consumers that already know that they want what you sell

Need more convincing? Local Search for SMBs: Sign of the Times

posted on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 2:44 PM by Beth

Inbound marketing is truly powerful and it makes sense for the small businesses to start using it asap because it is really effective.

Greg

posted on Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 2:29 PM by Strategic Internet Marketing

Comments have been closed for this article.

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