How to Dramatically Increase your Qualified Leads in a Month [Customer Story]

Last summer, the marketing team at Appcore decided that it was time to redesign the corporate website so that it focused more on driving leads and visitors than on being just another product catalog. Our old website and outbound marketing tactics (cold calling and tradeshows) were bringing in very few qualified leads each month. And the only thing our "contact us" form was doing for us was generating a lot of spam. So we set out to create a whole new website, along with the right inbound marketing strategies to support it.

The result: One month after launching the new website and inbound methods, we saw our monthly traffic increase 73% and our leads were up 1,400% YOY.

Step 1: Create Remarkable Content

Following the Smarketing methodology requires tight communication between marketing and sales teams, especially when it comes to content creation. Every week we try to determine what content would resonate best with our prospects by talking with our front line sales team. What questions our prospects have been asking lately? What products did they want to know most about? In our first month of doing inbound, our sales team gave us answers that led us to write a white paper on our white-label cloud product, then follow it up with a case study on a current customer who has had success with the product. Using HubSpot’s social media tool, we shared this material to our network and directed qualified leads to a landing page.

Step 2: Create CTAs, Landing Pages & Thank You Pages

When redesigning our website we knew that we would be using CTAs in the near future, so we “reserved” a section throughout the site on each page where we could later add them. After creating our content, we built custom image CTAs and placed them on our most heavily visited pages, which we determined by using the Page Performance tool from HubSpot. These CTAs were then linked to a related landing page. Following HubSpot’s recommended best practices, we continue to evaluate and make necessary adjustments to increase their effectiveness.

We created a landing page following best practices for both our white paper and case study and have a current submission rate of around 40%.

 

We then redirected each lead that submitted their information on the landing page to a thank you page. The thank you page provided the download they were looking for, as well as ways to follow us and share our content via social media, and links to reelevant blog content.

Step 3: Find long tail keywords

We also decided to finally implement blogging into our new inbound strategy to help compliment our new remarkable content. Using HubSpot’s Keyword tool and the information we gathered from our sales team, we were able to identify keywords that were driving leads to our website as well as keywords we would have a difficult time ranking for. After picking the long-tail keywords that we would have the best chance of success, we started writing optimized blog posts. We also reviewed the content on our website to ensure each page was optimized for these long-tail keywords. In just a week’s time we saw some of our keyword rankings move us from 100+ to 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th on search results, in turn driving even more traffic to our site.

The HubSpot tools that we used to increase our website visits and leads were: The HubSpot Page Performance tool, Blog and Social Media publishing tools, the CTA Button tool, the Landing Page wizard, and Keywords.

Appcore^® automates the business of cloud computing^®. Appcore delivers local cloud infrastructure for Enterprise Private Clouds and Service Provider Public Clouds. Appcore Onsite™ is a converged platform of architecture, automation, administration and appstore designed to be roll-in ready, accelerating the deployment and automating the operations of cloud environments.