How an eCommerce Company Saw Immediate Success With Hubspot and Inbound

I started working with Western Spirit, a national cycling trip company, in May of 2015 and they were a perfect fit for DMD, Hubspot, and inbound for these reasons among others:

• They're athletes. So they're all incredibly goal oriented and always looking to improve. Enough said.
• They're also fun, so I always looked forward to talking them, which really does make a difference.
• They weren't using a CRM. They had what they called their "post it note" system. Basically all customer information was in their heads or random notes and conversations remained unknown to anyone who was not involved unless someone verbally told them about it or forwarded an email...or actually passed them a note.
• They had hired a full time marketer with the goal of having her focus on lead generation before and while she was nice and did a good job at database work, she didn't really crack the code on generating leads from the website. They weren't going to make the same mistake again.
• Their business had been hit by the recession. They averaged about 1,300 trips a year pre-recession and then after were only averaging around 800. Their goal was a 20% increase in annual trip sales.
• They have an incredibly specialized and innovative company. (Have you ever heard of a mountain bike vacation before now?). This is my bread and butter because these types of owners are naturally out of the box thinkers and have a good chance in increasing their leads from search with longtail keyword targeted blogs.
• They have a fairly high average revenue per transaction at about around $1,200. It's not like manufacturing or high end remodeling numbers on a per transaction basis, but they can also sell quite a bit at a time so the volume is there. So the math makes sense to cover the costs of inbound marketing and the software.
• The purchase decision for the service their business provides is still complex enough that it usually requires some researching and really mulling over on the prospects' side, which is where content marketing can really help. You wouldn't book a cycling trip online going to the Grand Canyon for your family within five minutes of hearing about cycling trips for the first time, in other words. That would be weird. But you might do that with a new gadget or another low cost, low risk product or service.
• They have at least one dedicated full time sales rep. And she's really good at what she does.
• Last but absolutely not least, the owners are a husband and wife team, which is not a requirement but is a favorite for me as I can definitely relate!

The Value in Taking the Time to Really Flesh out Solid Personas

We started in May of 2015 and hit the ground running. DMD interviewed a handful of past guests about how and why they decided to go on Western Spirit trips with the Buyer Persona Institute's methodology and worked together to really flesh out our first two priority personas. Along with the different reasons about how and why different people decided to book, we also incorporated some basic persona information to get a feel for who these people were, like demographics. We then pulled in one of our writers out of Boulder, Colorado who knew a little bit about cycling and fit with the culture of Western Spirt to ghost write one blog per month as Ashley Korenblat, our "Get Together Cairy" persona, and one per month as Mark Sevenoff, our "Gnarly Cycler Jen/John" persona.

• Why You Have to do Telluride to Moab this Fall if You Love Epic Rides (Written as Mark Sevenoff, Published July 16, 2015)
• Top 10 Singletrack Rides This Fall (Written as Mark Sevenoff, Published August 18, 2015)
• Top Five Fall Rides for Groups in the U.S. (Written as Ashley Korenblat, Published August 27, 2015)

Keyword Researched Blog Topics Can Go a Long Way

While that might not sound like a huge year over year difference of 3.38%, the real value lies in the quality. Because of the highly targeted content we were writing, we were able to see a conversion rate for visit to lead of almost 1.8% with only a simple website popup on each site, which usually gets around a .4% from what I've seen. And the conversion rate of the leads to customers was double industry average of 6 percent, at 12 percent for Western Spirit. In other words, these were really quality leads who were coming to the websites from search and either buying a trip on the site or giving the Western Spirit team their information so their sales rep could reach out to answer questions and help them find a trip that's right for them and their schedule. As of the beginning of June 2016, they're already at 745 trips booked for the year, so close to their 2014 totals and we're only half way through 2016.