How Creating Cohesion Captured $3M & Successful Acquisition of Corporate Clients Like Walmart & Target for a Security Tech Company

Overview

The successful acquisitions of Target and Walmart as corporate clients by a security technology company were a direct result of a collaborative inbound strategy overhaul intended to better align its teams and improve search volume.

Increase in organic sessions

200%

Increase in SQLs from organic search

20%

In digitally sourced pipeline

+$3M

Background

Any business needs more than just a great product. Successful businesses not only clearly show the value of their offering, but they must also initiate efficient marketing and sales workflows that encourage a seamless customer journey. The ability to move effortlessly through this journey is a key differentiator that leadership teams must prioritize when developing their business model.

A leading security technology company that specializes in electronic asset protection offers smart solutions for managing critical assets and keys with advanced access control systems. The company envisioned targeted campaigns for its two main product offerings: a sophisticated RFID key control system (“Key Finder”) and controlled-access smart lockers (“Value Vault”).

Marketing automation and sales lead status management were especially difficult for the company’s employees because the three affected departments (marketing, sales, and customer service) were all on different pages operationally. Finding a creative way to align these teams using HubSpot would allow the members to work cohesively when capturing and converting leads, adding invaluable functionality to their processes.

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The Problem

Poor Online Presence Results in Lack of Conversions & Subpar Lead Quality

Before recruiting SmartBug to take a closer look at its inbound marketing opportunities, the company faced the following major challenges:

The brand lacked significant search presence: It had the potential to rank for high-volume, low-competition keywords but wasn’t taking advantage of the proper channels.
Marketing automation and reporting processes were misaligned: Teams needed a better system for managing, storing, and sharing data between departments for more streamlined workflows.
Organic sales leads were minimal and low-quality: The company had very few high-quality leads coming through the sales pipeline organically, especially compared to other companies in the same space.
The business wasn’t leveraging its subject-matter experts: Employees had a lot of valuable information to offer that could help directly engage the buyer with the proper content strategy.

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Close up image of two hands holding a tablet

Our Solution

Identifying & Leveraging Untapped Inbound Marketing Potential

After evaluating the company’s marketing potential, SmartBug was tasked with determining the best approach for boosting search presence, maximizing reporting, and categorizing leads. The SmartBug team leveraged advanced HubSpot features to collaborate on the following strategies and execute a detailed inbound marketing strategy:

Lead qualification dashboard
Customer success interviews
Persona-driven blog content
Paid media strategy
Search engine optimization
Attribution reporting
Custom HubSpot properties
Data visualization and marketing automation

SmartBug got to work on the back end by implementing detailed dashboards and custom HubSpot properties that helped sales reps better organize, track, and manage sales qualified leads (SQLs). By appropriately marking leads and using the dashboards to monitor progress, reps could understand and trace the customer lifecycle much earlier on in their journey. Automated reporting features also allowed them to clearly visualize and categorize lead qualifications in real time.

On the customer-facing side, the company began an aggressive new content strategy, publishing four or more blog articles per month (and at least two associated content campaigns) to generate keyword rankings and traffic for the two product offerings. Additionally, SmartBug optimized the website’s pillar pages, which included topic clustering and internal linking. These various efforts were intended to encourage marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and to nurture SQLs and Opportunities.

The Results

Cohesive Teams Close on Enterprise Accounts

Following a transitional content pause that started during the second quarter of the year and lasted through Q3 of that same year, the implementation of the above solutions resulted in:

$3M in enterprise pipeline opportunity
179% increase in organic sessions YoY
256% increase in Opportunities generated for Value Vault QoQ
17% increase in Opportunities generated for Key Finder QoQ
19% increase in net new qualified inbound product line SQLs QoQ
274% return on marketing and sales enablement investment

All of these performance metrics contributed to a total of more than $3 million in opportunity and led to closed revenue of approximately $1.5 million. It’s important to note that these efforts also allowed the company to close on two large-scale, well-known corporate accounts: Target and Walmart.