Bell Performance is a manufacturer of fuel additives and treatments for consumers as well as for businesses. Bell formulates and sells fuel treatments for most fuels including gasoline, diesel fuel, bio-diesel, and LPG. They solve fuel and fuel storage related problems in many industries including power generation, commercial fleets, marine, agriculture, railroad, and just about anyone else that uses something that uses liquid fuel. Bell sells B2B and aftermarket B2C here is the US and exports to 15+ countries around the world. Bell Performance is over 100 years old and is the inventor of the first fuel additive in history in 1909.
Bell had a number of marketing challenges relating to their website and inbound marketing that are common to many older companies. They had outsourced the management of the website and had no direct control over content management or optimization. Making changes was a costly and time-consuming process. Bell was uncertain of how to develop an online marketing strategy though they were keenly aware of the opportunities. Bell also understood the opportunity to both generate leads from a variety of industries as well as to generate sales using their website.
In short, Bell needed traffic, conversions to leads, and ultimately to customers and needed a partner to help them do it.
“When Todd Hockenberry, our HubSpot certified gold level partner, recommended that we use HubSpot it seemed a perfect fit to help us achieve goals”, states Erik Bjornstad. Bell Performance Technical Sales. “Our goals were to create a significant online presence that generated sales revenue and to educate consumers and businesses and convince them to convert to leads allowing us to help them with their fuel-related issues. We wanted to expand our influence and increase the number of people that knew about Bell. HubSpot and Todd's tea, have certainly helped achieve those goals and to build a marketing platform that will continue to help us expand”
“HubSpot has addressed or significantly assisted in addressing all of our concerns. Their web content management system solved our problem of having a plug-and-play system that allows us to build all of our pages in-house (without having to pay a developer) in real-time, and have them optimized properly. We do collaborate with Todd's team to assist in the content optimization and they have done an excellent job of directing us on what content to create as well. HubSpot's tools for identifying keyword & search trends have been extremely valuable in identifying what consumers are looking for and thus enabling us to be proactive in creating content that causes these consumers to find us. HubSpot was also the first system we have ever used that gathers comprehensive information on web prospects/leads and enables us to develop follow-up campaigns for visitors that have proven to be very effective.
In summary, HubSpot has shown itself to be a very valuable solution that addresses many of the essential needs we had (and many we didn't even know we had at the time) in this arena.
The HubSpot inbound marketing system itself, with all the things it addresses, has broadened our view as to what the best practices are in this arena. Before we were introduced to HubSpot, we had no conceptual idea of what the best people in different industries were doing to develop effective web strategies and presence. Having used HubSpot for 2 years or more, we are much more familiar with what works in this arena, and HubSpot gives us the tools to effectively do what works. Just as importantly, the system has allowed us to differentiate ourselves from our much larger and more-resourced competitors by getting ahead of them in these areas. Our competitors do not develop as much content as we do, they do not appear to have focused strategies centered on the topics that consumers are looking for on the internet and we do and the results have been significant and tangible”, says Mr. Bjornstad.
Our first step in the development of an inbound marketing strategy was to develop target customer personas and attributes. Bell’s products address a wide variety of fuel-related issues for both consumers and businesses so we had to determine the best target market segments we should approach first.
How did Bell get your employees on board with the inbound movement?:
“Todd assisted us greatly in this respect. He is an excellent communicator and collaborated with me in crafting the messages needed to convey the value and importance of what we were doing and going to be doing” states Mr. Bjornstad.
Some of the tactics Bell Performance employed include:
- Online new customers increase from -0- to 600 in 2011 and 1,100 in 2012 and we expect over 1,500 in 2013
- Increase in site visits from under 2,000 per month to over 16,000 per month in 2012 and expected to be over 20,000 per month by the end of 2013
- Increase in leads generated online from less than 10 per month in 2010 to over 150 per month in 2012 and over 200 per month in 2013
“We have worked with Todd's team throughout our time implementing inbound marketing. Apart from the actual Hubspot system, Todd's team has been the single biggest contributor to the ongoing success of our web efforts. They spearhead and fine-tune the optimization and the development of the follow-up campaigns.
With Hubspot's recent system additions, Todd's team is expanding their efforts into really making our follow-up campaigns dynamic instead of linear. This will increase our conversion rates, which should really increase our customers even over the large increases we've already seen (50% increase from 11/11 to 11/12). Just as importantly, they have been the guiding force in educating us from the beginning of the process. What the process should be (best practices), what steps go into the process and why the steps are important. Many providers would not do that because they want to protect their business. Everything Todd and his team do is with the customer's best interests in mind. Our knowledge of what to do in 2013 dwarfs what we knew in 2010, and it is mostly because of Todd”, states Mr. Bjornstad.
"So for us, one Todd plus one HubSpot equals at least three in terms of results."