PatSnap is a leading provider of innovation intelligence. It was founded in 2007 in Singapore, and it has since expanded into the UK and China and has over 3,000 clients throughout the world. However, inbound marketing had not been an area that it had traditionally focussed on, according to PatSnap’s marketing director, Ade Risidore.
“Up until recently, PatSnap got its sales through relationship building, word of mouth and events. We didn’t do anything in the way of strategic marketing. We had a WordPress website that was a contact capture form and used Outlook mail merge rather than an email point solution.”
Something needed to change. PatSnap wanted to find a way to drive leads to its website and nurture them through the buyer’s funnel. But, as it was starting the inbound process from scratch, it needed a powerful, all-in-one solution to help it succeed.
After evaluating a range of software, it decided that the HubSpot Marketing Platform was its best choice. It had all the features it needed in terms of content, social media and email, and it was strong on analytics and reporting.
PatSnap signed on the dotted line with HubSpot in 2016. Ade was already an expert on the HubSpot Marketing Platform, having used it in three of his previous roles.
“When I worked at Automic, we originally used Marketo. However, it didn’t have the features we needed to implement a complete inbound marketing model, and we switched to the HubSpot Marketing Platform. I had also evaluated Pardot, but I felt that it did not match our needs. With the HubSpot software in place, I knew that I could completely reinvigorate PatSnap’s marketing.”
PatSnap went all-in with the inbound methodology and put its entire website on the HubSpot COS. It placed new content, including webinars, whitepapers and innovation reports, on Landing Pages, and added Calls-to-Action and Forms to encourage user engagement.
As PatSnap operates in a very competitive marketplace, he used the software to identify new customer types that weren’t being targeted by its competitors. He then refined the company’s personas and made sure that there were Blog and social media posts to appeal to them.
“I come from a sales background myself, and I wanted to show our sales team that marketing isn’t arts and crafts. They had this impression that marketing influenced revenue, but didn’t source it. My goal was to demonstrate how we could track every step from captured lead to closed deal supporting sales teams along the way to build trust.”
Ade set up attribution reporting so that the marketing team got credit for every touchpoint that they created on the customer’s journey. He also used the Ads add-on to create Google AdWords campaigns from within the HubSpot software.
“That gave us a better understanding of which of our ads were converting, and that made a huge difference. Using the Ads Add-On, we closed a six-figure deal in four days from a £60 AdWords spend. It was a clear example of the right message, to the right person, at the right time in their buyer journey. The knowledge we have gained has enabled us to get a lot smarter with our marketing budget. Now, for every pound we spend, we know how much we will get back.”
“We’ve been working very closely with some of our key salespeople. Once they saw the tangible benefits that inbound brings, they became champions of the model and helped sell it to the wider sales team.”