How to Reach Your Market Niche [Customer Story]

How does a company reach customers who don't even know their product exists? HubSpot customer OPAS found success -- and their niche -- by executing on the basics of inbound marketing.

OPAS offers a service that most of our customers didn’t even know existed before they found us, so reaching these customers in the first place has historically been difficult. We tried to use more traditional marketing channels, but it was hard to really identify who, exactly, we needed to reach. We started looking for more creative or alternative ways of reaching customers, and actually ended up on a HubSpot landing page through a Google search. We thought hey, if it worked on us, maybe it’ll work on our customers, too.

The result: In one year, our website traffic increased by 700% and we collected more than 13,000 leads.

Here’s how we used HubSpot to reach our market niche:

Step 1: Start a Blog

Our service is an unusual one and most customers only find it after searching for a series of long, clumsy keyword phrases. It’s pretty hard to include these search strings in our main website copy because they’re so long and awkward, and because there are a lot of variations that might be used by our target base.

But with a blog, we could just design a new indexable post around every weird search variation we could come up with.

Step 2: Answer Questions

We realized that most of our customers were searching online because they had a problem, but in many cases they don’t yet know what the solution is. Our blog allowed us to provide a lot of different answers to the same basic problem so that whatever approach a customer was using, they found us. The Keywords tool in HubSpot really helped us generate lots of potential search strings -- once we seeded it with a basic question and answer.

Step 3: Rinse and Repeat

One of the more clever things about the HubSpot analytics toolset is that it tells you exactly what keywords customers were searching for when they found your content. A lot of these keywords were ones we hadn’t expected to come up. HubSpot analytics taught us a lot about our customers, and we were able to use that knowledge to create even more tailored content -- and this in turn brought our website even more traffic.

The Tools
The HubSpot tools we used to reach our market niche and increase our website traffic 700% were the Blog Tool, the Keywords Tool, and the Sources Tool.

Bio
OPAS is a package forwarding company that helps shoppers outside the US buy from US stores. We were the first company in the world to offer such a service, and have lead the industry for more than twenty years. We’ve been a HubSpot customer since February 2011.

“We HubSpot because it helps us connect with more customers in new ways.”