Spitfire Inbound was founded as part of Penquin, a full-service advertising agency based in South Africa. The management team wanted to be able to clearly show the ROI of the marketing activities it was carrying out for its clients. After discovering HubSpot and inbound marketing they realised the opportunity was significant and needed to have its own focus, and so Spitfire Inbound was born.
“We evaluated several competitors, including Marketo, Pardot and the HubSpot software. But we kept returning to HubSpot – and when we did we felt like we were returning home. It was easier to use, and it would allow us to get rid of several solutions and replace them with one complete package.
“Once we started working with HubSpot it became easier than ever before to prove the ROI of our work. We had the data at our fingertips which help align strategies based on facts, not assumptions,” says Darren Leishman, managing director of Spitfire Inbound.
“We created Spitfire as a standalone agency, dedicated solely to the inbound methodology. We saw this as the future of marketing, and we wanted to get in on the act. Of course, HubSpot was critical to that plan, and we signed up to the HubSpot Partner Program in June 2016.”
Spitfire Inbound immediately began to use the HubSpot growth stack, a combination of the Marketing, CRM and Sales software, on its own website. The first task was to create its personas.
“We came up with three main personas. Each person was based on detailed research so that we knew who were talking to and what their marketing challenges were.
“More recently, we’ve developed an additional persona who is much more sales focused. Our ability to deliver results by aligning the marketing and sales efforts meant that we needed to be providing useful and helpful information to both departments.
The agency started using Landing Pages for its content, created a Blog and added Calls-to-Action (CTAs) and Smart Forms to capture user details. Social media has been formed a significant part of our plans and continues to deliver results.
“We keep track of our leads using the CRM and then use Workflows to send our contacts personalised messages that correspond to their stage in the buyer’s journey.”
Darren is a big fan of the HubSpot software’s analytic capabilities, which allow him to optimise the agency’s content and get the best possible results.
“If you aren’t tracking your conversions, you are missing out on opportunities to nurture a potential customer into a paying one. The Marketing Analytics Dashboard gives us a bird’s eye view on our performance. Now, we can see exactly which content, CTAs and other factors are influencing our visitors, and we make decisions based on that knowledge.”
Spitfire quickly began to gain new customers, who were impressed by the agency’s results-driven philosophy.
“Once our clients see what we can do, they sign up for longer and more lucrative contracts. We have 70% of them on the growth stack, and we find that they do particularly well. Their marketing and sales departments are much more aligned, because they have a clearer understanding of their leads’ journeys.”