Digital 22 started life in 2011 as an agency that helped its clients improve their search engine rankings. However, by 2014, Rikki Lear, the owner and director of the company, began to consider how it could help clients achieve success more holistically.
“I thought about expanding into social media and blogging because I knew that would be useful from an SEO standpoint. However, I also wanted us to impact every stage of the buyers’ journey. Then HubSpot got in touch. The representative explained the inbound methodology to us, and I was taken with how it joined the dots between every marketing action that you take.”
The conversation, Rikki says, gave him the impetus to broaden Digital 22’s services and change direction into online and content marketing. However, he didn’t want to use disparate, unconnected tools. He realised that partnering with a marketing software provider would allow the company to offer the full range of inbound marketing services through a single piece of software.
“When I looked at HubSpot’s competitors, like Marketo and Act-On, they didn’t feel as polished or right for us. We knew the HubSpot software plus the inbound marketing methodology would be a winning combination for our agency.
Digital 22 signed up to the HubSpot Partner Program in 2014, and since then, it has gone all-in with the inbound methodology, both for itself and its clients.
Following the advice of his HubSpot account manager, Rikki immediately began turning Digital 22’s website into the ultimate example of the inbound marketing in action.
“When we got set up with the HubSpot Marketing Platform, we said we want to be our own best case study, we want to live and breathe it. Today, our website is something that we show our clients when we are persuading them to come on board with us. It’s great to be able to see the whole funnel – the visitor’s journey from reading a Blog post to following a CTA, to downloading a piece of content from a Landing Page and being entered into a Workflow.”
Within a month, Digital 22 had signed two clients onto the HubSpot Marketing Platform and had achieved HubSpot Gold Tier Partner status. According to Rikki, one of the most significant advantages of the software is that it allows him to prove ROI to his new customers.
“The ROI side of it has always been important to us; we were trying to make SEO tangible. However, unless sales went up, our customers didn’t know much about how our work was affecting them. Now, with the HubSpot Marketing Platform, we can show them exactly how what we’re doing is making a difference. We produce reports for each of our clients every month, and at the top, we put how much they’ve spent and how much they’ve made. It makes them very happy!”
Rikki says, “When clients see what they can achieve with us, we get their full trust, and they are eager to try the approach we recommend. As an agency, that’s something that you strive for.”
