By 2013, Unum’s digital marketing team realised that the outbound methods that it was using were not delivering the desired results, says Soeren Diel, the company’s digital marketing manager. A member of the team suggested inbound marketing as a possible way forward, but the handful of unconnected tools available made it difficult to do this effectively. The team needed a better way to start a conversation and nurture their target audience.
“We had our blog on WordPress, our website on a custom CMS and we used Silverpop to send out occasional product updates. However, they didn’t work well together – we needed to find a way to get smarter about our online activities,” explains Soeren.
It’s while the team was looking for a solution that they found HubSpot, or instead, it found them:
- It came up in problem-based searches and references to it were ubiquitous on Twitter
- It offered up ebooks relevant to their buyer stage
- It educated them on integrated inbound marketing
Hubspot’s marketing not only proved to the team that Hubspot knew their stuff but also confirmed that inbound marketing works.
“With all this useful content that Hubspot was putting out there, it became clear that the HubSpot software itself was something we’d like to try. It was easy-to-use and came with all the analytics that our other tools lacked. That was three years ago, and we’ve been delighted with the results!”
Soeren describes Unum as a B2B2B insurance provider, as it sells its products through brokers to other businesses. That means that one of its primary goals is to build awareness for its brand and its products amongst employers so that when they approach a broker, they have Unum in mind.
“We wanted to build up their trust and show them that we were thought leaders in our field, so we produced ebooks, guides, online workshops and whitepapers that spoke to their concerns and answered their questions. We put that content on Landing Pages, added Calls-to-Action and Forms and then used the Email App for follow-up communications.”
Of course, Unum wanted to target the brokers themselves. To this end, it created content targeted explicitly at the broker persona and put up a detailed Form for them to fill in to get a quote.
Although Unum initially used the HubSpot software for simple data capture and emailing, it started using more and more features as it explored all of the platform’s capabilities.
“Once we saw how powerful the software could be for us, we started adding more automation into the mix. Workflows were introduced, and we began to use the Keywords tool and SEO features to optimise our Blog and content offerings. Last year, we moved our entire website to the HubSpot COS – you could say that we’re quite convinced.”
Soeren says that one of the most significant changes for him was the ability to prove the ROI of their marketing activities, something that had been impossible to measure accurately before.
“I really like the Marketing Analytics Dashboard. We’ve used it since day one, and it’s given us incredible insight into how effective our campaigns are. Once we know that, we can make smarter decisions, and that’s really valuable to us.”
