Christian Neff founded marketing agency Markentive in late 2012 with a clear plan in mind – use the inbound methodology to help clients win visitors, leads and sales. However, the French market proved to be a tough nut to crack; many of his potential customers were unfamiliar with the concept of inbound marketing.
“For our first year and a half in business, we used a collection of different tools to try and achieve success, including MailChimp, WordPress and some SEO and landing page software. It wasn’t an integrated solution; we had too many tools, and they were too complicated. We wanted something more robust, something that would allow us to prove the ROI of our efforts to our customers.”
Christian says that he and his team had been learning about inbound with help from HubSpot’s online library of content. This meant that HubSpot was at the forefront of his mind when he began evaluating marketing automation platforms.
“HubSpot started the whole inbound movement; it is at the centre of everything in terms of knowledge and authority. We also looked into Marketo, but the HubSpot software was more suited to our clients. It had the right tools for every stage of the marketing funnel, as well as a better price point.”
In June 2014, Markentive decided to join the HubSpot Partner Program, which would allow it to sell HubSpot licences to its customers. According to Christian, “I felt it was the perfect fit in terms of technology, training and support.”
Markentive began using the HubSpot software to optimise its website straight away. The software’s built-in SEO features helped the website to attract more visitors, who discovered Markentive’s ebooks, whitepapers and checklists, which were set up on Landing Pages. The company also used the Email App to communicate with these new leads and optimise its open and click through rates.
Within months, Markentive had sold its first HubSpot contract. However, Christian says that they knew that there was still more that they could do with the HubSpot Marketing Platform.
“To be a good partner, you have to be a good user. Our website generated lots of traffic, but we had no calls-to-action on it, so we added CTAs. We refreshed our website content and moved to the HubSpot CRM to better align our marketing and sales departments.”
This new approach paid dividends. Markentive began to attract a lot more leads and nurtured them with targeted Workflows. The sales department began using the CRM to have more informed conversations with prospects – they could see at a glance what kind of information the lead was interested in and how Markentive could help. Soon, the agency was signing up clients every month.
