How HCSS Software Used Inbound Marketing to Increase Lead Generation by 400%

Today we interview Dan Briscoe, the VP of Marketing for a software company called HCSS. HCSS started in 1986 and makes software for big construction companies. HCSS brought Dan in about 2.5 years ago when their leads began to stagnate. He has helped them achieve phenomenal results.

In the interview, we unpack the tactics that went into Dan’s results.

How did they get started? How did they get buy-in from the executive team? What did he do to experiment and deliver concrete results to sway the naysayers? How is SEO and video playing a role in their strategy? What lead generating ideas did he bring to HCSS?

We finish the conversation on how he provides concrete ROI data with analytics.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent:

Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome back to episode number 179 of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help marketers to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business. So if you’re a marketer and you are looking for proven tactics as opposed to untested theories and ideas that will help you to increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately to attract more customers well you are in the right place and you don’t want to ever miss an episode of this podcast.

So that is a big promise. How do I make good on that promise? Well I make good on it by bringing on a proven expert in every single episode to share with us exactly what they did to achieve the results that they were able to achieve and this episode is no different. My guest this time around is a fellow by the name of Dan Briscoe. He is the vice president of marketing for a software company that was started in 1986 by the name of HCSS and they make software for big construction companies.

So as Dan described if you are driving down the road and you are in a traffic jam it is probably one of their customers that is doing the construction. The big construction projects on roads, bridges, and so forth that is causing that traffic jam. In this episode we are going to talk about a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. Dan was brought on by the CEO of HCSS about two and a half years ago and since then they have had phenomenal results and I’ll let Dan explain how phenomenal those results were.

Then we spent the rest of the conversation unpacking the tactics that went into achieving those results. How did they get started, what types of experiments – so they had some trouble with buy in; getting buy in from the executive team and some of the folks with the financial purse strings. There was some experiments that Dan did that was very inexpensive, very fast and delivered concrete results so as to help sway the opinion of some of the naysayers.

Once he got budget approved we talked about how they came up with the things they should write about, how SEO is playing a role in the strategy. They are really starting to use a bunch of video. We talk about how video is playing a role. We talked about how they are generating leads, there is a few new things that they have been trying that have been working very, very well.

And then because you end up having to report everything back to the C-Suite we spent we rounded out the conversation by talking about analytics and dashboards and some of the things that Dan is doing in that regard so that he is able to provide concrete ROI data to the other folks in the organization who want it.

So with that said we are going to welcome Dan to the show here in just a minute. I have only one announcement before that and that is if you are with an organization that is looking to achieve success with inbound marketing and demand generation in general I would invite you to visit our agency Groove Digital Marketing which you can get to at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com because that is exactly what we do.

So with that said please join me in welcoming Dan to the show.

Hey Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan:

Hey, thanks for having me Trent.

Trent:

No problem at all. It is a pleasure to have you here. We’ve got some really interesting stuff to talk about today. You’ve achieved some pretty impressive results but before we get into that so the audience knows who you are and what do you do, let’s start with that.

Dan:

Okay, my name is Dan Briscoe. I am the VP of marketing at a company called HCSS. It’s a software company in Houston Texas. It makes software for the heavy civil highway construction industry. Our customers are those guys, if you are stuck in a traffic jam, that’s our customers out there building highways, bridges, dams, things like that. They use our software to estimate when those projects and then run the projects so they can make a profit and take care of their equipment, keep their workers safe, things like that.

Trent:

Okay, they brought you in to spearhead their (for lack of a better word) inbound marketing movement?

Dan:

Yeah, the very successful company was created in 1986, had great products and even better customer service. But their leads had kind of stagnated over the past few years. They were getting 70 – 80 leads a month. Website traffic was stagnant. The CEO and president first wanted to offload some of the marketing he’s been doing his entire career besides running a company so he wanted somebody to take that workload off of him but really wanted to increase the leads and look at new tactics like inbound marketing and things like that.

That is what they brought me in for.

Trent:

Okay, sorry I was writing notes. Did you say how long ago that was?

Dan:

I started in August 2012 so about two and a half years ago.

Trent:

Okay, tell me about the results that you’ve been able to achieve over that two and a half year period.

Dan:

It has been pretty impressive and a big group effort; a good executive team and a good marketing team. We’ve had 400% increase in leads so we’ve grown from about 700 a year till we just wound up with about 2,800 leads. 230% increase in our website traffic. Our organic traffic has almost doubled over those past few years. Revenue is growing at about 30% a year for a 28 year old company so it’s always been a successful company but the last few years have been really good.

We just closed out the year with the second highest profit sharing that we’ve ever had in the history of the company. Things are going well.

Trent:

No kidding. That is impressive. 400% increase in leads. I can imagine the sales team is pretty happy with that?

Dan:

Yeah, [laughing] they are happy and we’ve had to grow the sales team. They actually weren’t able to handle all the leads. We’re growing that very quickly.

Trent:

Wow that is the kind of sales team the sales guys want to be on; the ones where they don’t have to do the digging for their own leads.

Dan:

Yeah exactly.

Trent:

Just so folks know the type of customer that you’re attracting with inbound marketing, when someone signs up to become a customer of your company, how much are they spending?

Dan:

On the small end they are spending $10,000 to $15,000 for one to two licenses. On the large end this could be up to $1 million in sales. These are often very large billion dollar construction companies or joint ventures. An example, the Tappan Zee Bridge, most of the customers that bid on building that very large project where using our software. So it’s a bigger software but there are small companies out there that are small, kind of mom and pop shops, that do construction that use our software as well.

I’d say anywhere from $15,000 – $20,000 on the low end up to $500,000 / $750,000 for a complete software that they use to run their entire business.

Trent:

Yeah so those are nice deals. Obviously the folks who are listening are thinking, awesome, I want results like that so what do I got to do. Let’s walk them through it. Let’s go back to the beginning when you first came on board.

What did you start with? And you can answer these questions in any order you like. But everybody has got to start

somewhere and typically there is some mistakes that are made in the beginning and some realizations that are made and the strategy gets refined a little bit and then the results start to come.

Was it like that for you guys or did you nail it from the get go?

Dan:

A little bit. I came from a previous company where I brought in Hubspot and made the transition to inbound marketing and so I spent a couple of years making more mistakes at the previous company. And so I was able to learn from that and I had a very smart CEO and executive team so we didn’t make that many mistakes. We were able to go off my past experience but it took a little bit of time to get buy in on everything.

And so I wouldn’t say mistakes so much as it took a little longer than I expected to try and get buy in from everybody on what tactics would work. We were almost a victim of our own success. The company had been so successful; there was a little bit of resistance to change and would these tactics work with our customer base. It is not the most tech savvy industry. And so would they read blogs? Would inbound marketing really work?

I would say that it was more of the time than a lot of mistakes that we made.

Trent:

And I think that is a really legitimate concern that you just raised from other people saying, “Well do people in our industry actually read blogs? Because if you’d come to me and you asked me that question about the construction space I would have been, “Ah, I don’t know.” But in your experience the answer is yes, they do?

Dan:

Yeah, they read blogs and more importantly they get on the website. When I got here we invested heavily in tradeshows and magazine advertising for our industry. And it had been very successful so there was a little bit of resistance to change that. We didn’t want to ruin something that had been working very well but all I was asking to do was shift a little bit of money and effort from those efforts into inbound marketing.

And ran some experiments very early on and they would approve the value of it and so we then moved very quickly.

Trent:

What kind of experiments did you run because I bet you there are some other people out there thinking, “I got to convince some of the naysayers around here so I need something that is inexpensive and easy and fast to do. Give me some ammunition.”

Dan:

We did a couple of things that we kind of stumbled upon but I really liked them. The first one was we bought some advertising. One of our industry publications had a daily newsletter that they published. You could sponsor the newsletter and get a couple of things.

One of them you could do a small two inch by three inch ad and this was more like a traditional ad you’d run in a magazine and they would give you that on even days of the week and then on odd days of the week you could get a little article just next to that same ad that was a content story so it had a headline, a sentence or two and then it would point it to the longer story.

So we ran this for an entire month. Every other day we were either running the ad or running the content story. It was really interesting; it never failed that the content story outperformed the ad by ten to one and we would change the ad to be really creative and offer helpful content, trying to drive people there and we would change the story and the story just always outperformed the ad.

And so I was able to take that back to the executive team and show the grasp of, “Here is Monday when we ran the ad and we got X and here’s Tuesday when we ran the story and we got 10X” and then Wednesday would be back to X and Thursday we’d be back to 10X. It ran out the entire month and so we were quickly able to see that if you had good stories that were helpful it would often outperform the ad that we might be putting in a magazine.

Trent:

Briefly what type of story was this that you were using?

Dan:

We changed them up but one of the stories was how a construction company used our software and had a $900,000 turn around in trucking costs in the first year. Obviously that kind of headline does draw attention. Because it is a great company with great software we have those stories all over the place. It is easy for me I just said, “Let’s keep focusing all of our efforts on these ads and tradeshows and get these stories that are out there out in front of our customers and people will read them.”

Trent:

So when you did this first experiment did all the naysayers buy in at that point in time or did you need to run any other experiments to convince other folks?

Dan:

Pretty much but about the same time we did one other experiment. We went back to a magazine ad that we kind of built the company on. It is the top industry magazine in our space and we really put a lot of money and effort into building a really creative ad plan for this magazine. It was the top magazine, it was the top issue of the year.

They published the Top 400 list and everybody want to be on that list. And so everybody not only gets the magazine, they keep this around on their desk space because it is talking about the top 400 in construction.

We purchased four full page ads. We did our best work on the creative and graphic design and headlines. We had compelling calls to action. We really did everything we could do. Set up landing pages for this. And at the end of a very expensive campaign and a lot of work we drove twenty visitors to the website and we had one lead that came out of it.

Trent:

Ouch.

Dan:

When I compared what we were able to do with the one story in a daily newsletter compared to a very expensive campaign that took a lot of work it was pretty easy to sway everybody that this – we won’t ever leave advertising or trade shows but they didn’t have any trouble shifting from the budget and giving me more resources to do more inbound marketing.

Trent:

Yeah no kidding. Holy smokes, I was expecting that was going to turn out with a good ending [laughing].

Dan:

It is tough to tell what people might have called up. You can’t be exact but even if it’s directionally correct it didn’t nearly perform as well as some of our inbound marketing tactics.

Trent:

Yeah, and these story ads were much less expensive I would have imagined too?

Dan:

Yeah [laughing].

Trent:

Alright, so now you are at a point where everyone is bought in. You’ve got some budget allocated to get going. What did you do next? Did you start developing personas? Did you start hiring people? What was the next step?

Dan:

Kind of all that. We did work on customer personas but I had to get the right team in place. We had a very good core team; very successful company. I had to move a couple of people out that didn’t quite have the skill set and bring in some really good talent and kind of coupled that with the team that was already here.

I hired a web marketing person that’s now been promoted to a manager that really understood SEO and things like CRO, PPC. I’ve got him on board, there is a marketing manager in place with an MIS major; really understood marketing automation so we brought in Hubspot, linked it up with Salesforce and she’s been really good at driving those systems.

Hired a web developer because I couldn’t move fast enough creating new things on the website. Went through a couple of different content writers and so I had some interesting lessons learned there. But we have a fantastic one now and that is really working out for us.

There was a video editor that was here and I freed him up from other things that he was doing so he can focus on doing more videos. Because they really are some of our top content consumed on our website. I built a team of nine over the last couple of years and really have a great team now. Did some education when we brought in Hubspot and so everybody gets it.

The executive team picked it up really quickly. So I was able to do that. We were on experiments still and showed them results, “Here is a blog article that we wrote a month ago and now we are ranking number one for something like “safety and construction.” A really broad term; even one blog article can make a huge difference there.

Trent:

Alright, there is a whole bunch more questions that I want to ask. I have done a lot of conversation on buyer personas in interviews just in the weeks prior to this one so I am not going to go really deep onto the tactics on that but in case the folks haven’t listened to those yet, why are buyer personas so incredibly important? Let’s just stay on the surface there for a minute.

Dan:

Sure, without them you are just kind of creating marketing. To me it is kind of like you give a speech and you are just looking over the head of the audience and giving them a general speech versus looking at individuals and tailoring it to them. So I felt like we would look at some piece. And actually we worked closely with the sales guys on this and they would say, “Okay who are we writing this to.”

And inevitably we are kind of staring at each other and saying “I don’t know.” We very quickly figured out we needed to do some work on our buyer personas. I didn’t reinvent the wheel on that. There is a lot of people that have done great work on buyer personas. Hubspot has put out a lot. A lot of other people have to.

So we just went and learned from a lot of people and took all their tactics and some of the templates and worked on buyer personas for our customer base.

Trent:

Okay so advice to other folks would be talk to your customers and talk to your sales team and really make sure you understand who it is that is in your target audience and what their motivation is?

Dan:

That is exactly it. Put it somewhere where you can visualize it and when you are creating new marketing tactics or writing a blog, the first thing is who are you writing this for. And or who are you creating this for and what are they really interested in.

Periodically go back and revisit that and make sure that you’re not just shooting something off and hoping that it works but you are actually tailoring it to somebody that really cares about it.

Trent:

Okay, the next two things I want to ask you about is video and blog topics. Let’s start with blog topics: how did you come up with your list of things to write about? Your topics or your titles or whatever you’d like to call them?

Dan:

That could be an area we’ve made some mistakes in. We just started and I would get a content writer. I would do some myself. The company had been doing newsletters for about 25 years so they were pretty creative in that aspect.

So I kind of carried on this quarterly newsletter that they had been sending out to about 30,000 people. So they had been doing stories for that but I really wanted to shift this from things about the company or things about the software to what could be really helpful to customers in our industry.

Kind of like your podcast. If we did have a success story, exactly what were the results they achieved and the tactics of how they did that? That was what I wanted to do.

We took our six software products and looked for customer success stories. We actually went to the implementation team because once somebody buys our software they don’t just download it and start using it. They usually come into our office and kind of tear apart their business for a couple of days and put it back together with our software.

And then we go and train on site and so these implementers were just a whelp of knowledge about the success stories that the companies had had with our software and so we got them involved and actually made it a company goal. One of our annual goals last year is to get these content stories.

I don’t know that we sat around as a marketing team and came up with up with a great challenge and said, “Here’s what we are going to write about.” We more went to the implementation team and explained what inbound marketing was and blogging and showed them some of the early successes. They jumped on board and give us two to three stories now a week that we can use in our blog.

Trent:

Really, so that is interesting because from and SEO perspective – for example a guy who has been on my show and many other Marcus Sheridan sat down with his pool company and thought I am just going to come up with answers to every question that I’ve ever been asked about fiberglass pools. And so he gets a lot of traffic because people are typing those questions into Google. Nobody that I could think of would be typing in anything into Google that would match a title that you would use to describe a success story.

Dan:

When we get those success stories we do go back and think of them from an SEO perspective and say “Okay what problems did they solve by bringing in our software and then tying that back into a question that they might be asking. We are able to do that and think about it. The implementers don’t do that for us.

They’re not writing the headlines and titles but the problems that they solve – $900,000 decrease in trucking costs. We can go back and turn that into a headline that somebody might be out there Googling.

“How to reduce trucking costs for a construction company?”

Trent:

Okay, so you were crafty? [Laughing]

Dan:

Yeah, [laughing] and then we do write articles. We actually do a lot of videos. We’re publishing about twenty videos a week now on questions that our support department is getting on software and common questions that people are asking. That is exactly what is driving our videos right now, all those questions and the headlines for those videos.

Trent:

Okay well that is a perfect segway because I wanted to ask you about video anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about the high level of video strategies. So twenty a week, you are answering questions, is that pretty much the strategy or is there other elements to it other than that.

Dan:

We have three groups really working on videos right now. We have a support department; they go back and they look at the service software and the top questions that are asked. Some of it is specific to software and some of it is “How would I solve this problem using your software?” They’re looking at those questions and they are creating videos on that with the support department.

We have our product development side that is taking some of the things that they’re hearing from customers and common requests. They’re building videos around that. It is more help for the software and how to overcome common business problems using the software. So we have our whole product development side doing that.

And then we have the marketing team working on videos; working with the sales group and answering common questions that the sales team gets. We went from having one person that was trying to carrel people and doing videos. Now we have three major departments that are all cranking up videos just in the last couple of months.

I haven’t seen the full results of that but we are putting out twenty videos a week out now on YouTube. I have seen the results of videos on our website. That’s really the number one thing that is consumed on the website. I have been able to see the benefit of that.

Trent:

I would imagine your time on site and bounce rate have probably moved in a favorable direction as a result of the use of video on the site?

Dan:

Yeah it really has. Most of the time when we do get a lead the video was an assist in creating that. We went from having three to four minute videos on some of the products, now we are creating explainer videos for every product and how do we even take people down a funnel on videos outside of the webpage. If they watch one can they get an offer of two to three other videos; just staying on the video channel – things like that.

Trent:

And are you using any tools to track engagement like if someone watches a video for a certain amount of time maybe there is a different follow up sequence that might occur versus someone that has only watched ten seconds of the video or have you not gone that ninja yet?

Dan:

Actually lead nurturing automation is on our goals for Q2 of this year. We do use Wistia so we can monitor. We have YouTube for the more public videos and we use Wistia for the videos on our website. We can look at engagement and monitor that and that is all tied into Salesforce so when our sales team gets a lead they can actually go look at the website history for that lead and it shows little clips of videos that they’ve seen and how much engagement.

So they get a good idea of what that person has consumed on the website.

Trent:

Sorry, so you were able to tie the Wistia engagement data into the Salesforce record?

Dan:

Yeah, with Hubspot.

Trent:

How do you do that? Because I use Hubspot and Salesforce and Wistia as well. I didn’t know you could do that.

Dan:

I didn’t do it personally. I’d have to follow up with you and tell you how we did it but I know now when we click on a lead in Salesforce and say View This In Hubspot. There must be a Wistia plugin I think for Hubspot. Now it gives you a little snapshot of the video and engagement score that you can click into and view. It is really handy, the sales guys love that.

Trent:

Yeah, so I think what you are doing there is there is a Wistia integration with Hubspot and I know there is a Hubspot integration with Salesforce. So you pull up the record in Salesforce, you can see the Hubspot score, click on it. It takes you directly to the Hubspot record.

There it is, Wistia.

Dan:

Yeah that is exactly what we have done.

Trent:

And I’ve already got the integration set up so I must not be looking in the right place. We’ll have to off the set revisit that [laughing].

Dan:

Yeah.

Trent:

Alright, and by the way folks if you want to hear another success story about someone using YouTube very successfully I interviewed a fellow by the name of Dan Moyle recently; another Hubspot customer. Dan’s interview was BrightIdeas.co/166. I know that they have been having a great deal of success with video as well and produce quite a lot of them.

Alright, have we covered video? Is there anything else that we should talk about which has been meaningful in terms of your tactics or results?

Dan:

Around video or just in general?

Trent:

Around video.

Dan:

That is kind of it. We are really waiting to see the results from it so I think 2015 is where we really are going to drive a lot of leads and traffic from video so I’m excited to see the results.

Trent:

Okay, so let’s take stock for a minute here. At the beginning we talked about your results; a 400% increase in leads in the last two years and so we’ve talked about how you got buy in. We’ve talked about how you’ve started to create your content for your blog topics. We’ve talked about how videos played a role in that. All that stuff is going to increase traffic. But I don’t think that we have really addressed the tactics that you used yet to get the big boost in leads and let’s make sure that we don’t skip that.

Dan:

Sure, that was one of the problems when I came in with the website; is there was one or two forms that were basically hidden that said contact sales or contact us. But the concept of calls to action or offers for content was kind of a foreign concept. They had pretty good traffic. We’ve doubled it but they had pretty good traffic already on the website. But people weren’t getting what they wanted so once we just started to put some content up and put some basic calls to action up really leads started to take off.

But I was talking to somebody from Conversion Rate Experts. I just linked up with them through LinkedIn and he took a look at our website and said, “You don’t have any free offers for your software.” It hit me. Obviously I have downloaded a lot of free offers from people. I was thinking that our software was too complex. Then I realized we had mobile apps for all of our software; that we could do a free version where people could play around with the mobile app.

And so we put it up on one of our product pages just a free download offer and really doubled leads overnight. It was kind of embarrassing that I hadn’t thought of it myself. We did that and I quickly showed the results to the company and over the next couple of months we got free software downloads for pretty much all of our software.

That really made a permanent change in leads coming out of our website.

Trent:

Is it a fully featured trial that just works for two weeks or something like that?

Dan:

It’s a fully featured mobile app but the app obviously doesn’t tie in to the full system for the company. It is what a field foreman would use. So it is fully featured but it doesn’t work well without sending that software in somewhere. It would kind of be like the mobile app for Salesforce without having a system inside.

But they can see what their field foreman would be using. That is when people get excited when they see how easy it is.

Trent:

Are there any other types of offers that you are using to collect leads? Do you have any ebooks? Do you do any webinars?

Dan:

One of the things we did early on was we had this customer base of 4000 customers that were really loyal to our software and so I was trying to figure out how to leverage that group and worked with the executive team. Came up with the idea of doing an industry survey on the state of estimating and the first time we did this we worked with some customers came up with 25 questions and created the survey very quickly where 450, the top companies in the country wrote back.

So we created this report. It didn’t take that long to do and didn’t put a lot of narrative around it; just published the results and I think the first one we did got picked up by couple of associations. Four or five magazines and got a ton of downloads on our website. It was something where we looked at our customer base and figured we could do this pretty easily and we do that every year now.

That was one that worked really well.

Trent:

What did you call that report?

Dan:

It’s our annual estimating survey.

Trent:

Everyone is pressed for time, we all get the emails, “Hey come fill out my survey.” Usually I hit X. How did you get people to actually want to take the time to fill it out and how long did it take them?

Dan:

It takes them about ten minutes to do it. And we are a little unique because some of our customers have been with us for twenty years and they are genuinely interested in how other companies are estimating. We had some interesting questions in there about salaries for estimators and things like that. We had to advertise a little bit about what would be in it and then they would get a copy of this if they filled it out.

Part of it is just our name and brand recognition and we have a very friendly customer base. It is one that helps us out so with two or three email reminders we were able to get quite a few people to do it.

Trent:

Terrific, okay. Anything else on lead capture that is working very well for you?

Dan:

I would just say try to figure out how to do really interesting blog articles that get people in. Look around your company and see where you can find interesting stories. We wound up with one of our developers that is an avid ultra marathon runner. He was going to run the Badwater Marathon. That is one of the hardest races in the country where you run a 135 miles in Death Valley. We figured out how to put our GPS instruments (we sell those) with our software on his van that would be tracking him through the race.

Just started to publish this thing around and it got picked up by local television stations and a lot of the industry publications and they want to do pre interviews with him and then post race interviews and so it wound up being a simple idea that we weren’t sure would really work and wound up being one of our best ideas that drove a lot of traffic. Our customers were genuinely interested in seeing how he is doing and as they are watching him progress through the race they are seeing how the software works.

Got a lot of traffic and leads of that story.

Trent:

Yeah I’ll bet. Alright let’s make a shift then and we’ll start talking about analytics because one of the great things about digital of course is that you can measure everything. There is so much data. So obviously if I’m the CEO and you’re saying, “Hey I am going to go spend this money and we are going to get these results.” I want very clear visibility on you did one thing and it produced this result.

So how do you close the loop and tie it all together?

Dan:

Right, that was a big project for last year and it is still ongoing. I have a traditional sales and marketing background but I love digital because we can measure everything. I hate doing stuff where I don’t know the results. I am a big fan of Avinash Kaushik. I am sure most of your listeners have heard of him and his blog Occam’s Razor. I was really into analytics and wanted to be able to close the loop and see exactly what ROI we are getting out of our different marketing tactics and the CEO had tasked me with that and that was one of the key things on my role here in the company.

I took the time and took the class from Market Motive on Webanalytics taught by Avinash. I would highly recommend that to anybody that has the time and the money to take that. It was an excellent course. So we really beefed up our Google analytics. We always had Hubspot measurements but beefed up Google analytics and got events and goals in there so we could see exactly what was happening. We had a consultant come in and work on Salesforce.

And then have him to work with the sales team to close the loop. I could tell what tactics would drive traffic to

the website and what channel and then how they behaved on the website, I could measure all the events and things like that but once I sent a qualified lead over to sales they weren’t building opportunities and then they weren’t closing those out in Salesforce and so I couldn’t close that loop.

So we are very quickly changing that. We’ll have that finished by the end of this year where we can get that data. I can already see what leads are driving opportunities now. It has given me more of the picture but by the end of this year we’ll have the actual sales dollars in there.

I am a huge fan of that, the problem is, you talked about this before, we have a ton of data but you really need the analysis to drive decisions and you got to make it simple for executives. Not that they can’t understand it, they just don’t have time. I’m working on building very simple dashboards with simple analysis and then simple recommendations that we can act on every month.

That is kind of where I am right now.

Trent:

Where do all these dashboards live? In Salesforce? Or in Google Analytics?

Dan:

I really have to use all of it so it will probably live in Excel for now. I get a lot of reports out of Salesforce and use the dashboard features in there. Get some out of Hubspot and then quite a bit out of Google Analytics but I am going to stick it in; some of it in Excel and then actually just build the dashboard in PowerPoint; trying to do it on one page per month so that they can see, “Here’s how we are looking at our top six KPIs.”

We have KPIs for how we acquire customers and bring them to the website; a couple of KPIs there and a couple of KPIs for how they behave on the website. How are they converting and what are they looking at and then a couple of KPIs for outcomes. I want to put those six KPIs on a dashboard with analysis and recommendations each month.

Trent:

There is a fellow by the name of Dave Lavinsky at GuidingMetrics.com. I’d suggest you send him an email because any app that you use that has an API, which is every app that you use. They can build all these dashboards for you right in their app. They can do everything completely custom. Like if you get the full on Cadillac you won’t spend more than five grand and then you’ll never have to build a spreadsheet. It will all be real-time all the time.

Dan:

Yeah that is neat. I appreciate the lead. I actually had a company on; their CEO and CPO. There is a new one that is going to come out in the next few months but I am kind of on the early end and they are going to be building one for me as well. That is nice, it is nice to have the knowledge to be able to do this but even myself I get too busy so any tools that you can use that can help you dashboard less where you can spend the time doing the analysis and recommendations I think are well worth it.

Trent:

Yeah, who wants to sit and enter data into spreadsheets and export and do all that manual stuff?

Dan:

Exactly.

Trent:

Where you can just literally have it constantly up to date.

Dan:

Right.

Trent:

Alright, let me go back to my notes here. Let’s see if we can go a little deeper in analytics just yet. For folks who maybe are just right at the very beginning; they have never done anything. You’ve used some terminology events and goals and so forth within Google Analytics. So let’s just go through and quickly define those.

A goal is very simple. I’ll do that one. You want someone to come to your website and download a report or sign up for a trial or take some action that is generally a goal and you can set up goals to track all that stuff in analytics.

How about events, why don’t you talk a little bit about events Dan?

Dan:

So events are any action that they take on the website; interacting with content. We have events that fire off if somebody clicks to download a whitepaper. An event drives your goals. We have more events than we do have goals.

Goals are at a high level what we want them to do. We measure events on every page. Are they clicking on this call to action? Are they watching this video? Are they staying longer than five minutes on the website?

We use Google Tag Manager and we worked with a consultant to get that set up well. We get event tracking set up so we can measure loyalty. How long are they staying on the website? How many pages; so if somebody visits more than five pages that will fire off an event. Say this was an engage visitor that they watched the video, downloaded a whitepaper, viewed pricing, that is another one.

If they click on a button and view our pricing we fire off an event each time. It is nice. Within Google Analytics you can look at reports that show you what people are doing for events and really look at their behavior on the website.

Trent:

That is not something I have actually used yet on our own site. We’ve gone pretty ninja with dashboards and goals and so forth. If you don’t use tag manager it looks like you get absolutely nothing in the event section of Google Analytics because mine are all flat lined.

Dan:

Yeah you have to get the events set up correctly. There is Google Certified Consultants that are out there that will do it for $1500 depending on the size of your site. They’ll come in and set those things up for you. Or you can dig in and watch some videos and set it up yourself. Hubspot has event tracking as well where you can – I can’t remember where it was but where you can actually tell it to fire off an event when people are doing different actions on the page.

Trent:

So let’s talk about an event firing off. So supposedly someone does these actions which you’ve defined as an event. You’ve used the phrase fires off. What actually happens? You can obviouly come to analytics and see the transaction in your analytics report or the event rather.

Dan:

Right.

Trent:

But does anything else happen? Is cell phones going off ? Is automation getting triggered? What else?

Dan:

It can. I can pull up Google Analytics in real-time and see the top event that are happening in the past two minutes and it will say somebody is on your website and they are watching this video. The events really describes your behavior. I can look at it and say, “My organic traffic, their having three to four events per visitor. And my pay per click advertising; this group is down to one event. So they’re not interacting with our content like others. So I would say it is more at a macro level you can see how different channels and different segments are interacting with your web pages.

Who is staying the longest? You can assign dollar figures to those events. You do some backward math and you look at leads that have closed and the value of those leads to you. This lead had three different events and you can do that at a macro level and you can use the math and say, “Everybody that watches this video is worth $25 to my business because of how they go through to becoming a lead and then closing a sale.”

Everybody that views pricing; every time they do that that is worth $15 dollars to me. Everybody that views three pages or more that is worth $17 and so you can look and use that events and the dollars associated with them to really understand how the different channels are working on your website and how different visitors are performing and things like that.

There is some work that needs to be done there but if you don’t have that kind of information you’re shooting in the dark. I’m not completely there and I need to close it off with sales but I have way more information now that I can see how people are performing and I am able to take that back to the executive team; to double the size of the marketing team and the other things that I have been able to accomplish using that data.

Trent:

Absolutely, the one thing about digital that you can always guarantee is you’ll never run out of new things to learn.

Dan:

Exactly [laughing]. That is my problem. We’ve had great successes but I feel like we’ve only done about 25% of what we really are capable of doing. It makes it fun to come to work every day.

Trent:

Absolutely, alright Dan before we close up is there anything we haven’t talked about yet which you think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about it before we wrap up the interview.

Dan:

I have peers and I know that you work with some entrepreneurs but I would say people that are in companies that have established marketing departments; I was talking to a fellow VP of marketing. She was really wanting to get into inbound marketing but just said, “I don’t have the budget.” And I said, “I don’t know how you have the budget to not do it.”

And then kind of dug into her budget and she was spending $2 million on trade shows and magazine advertising. But really was worried about the cost of what Hubspot might cost or $5000 to have a consultant come in.

I would say for any of your audience that is in larger companies with traditional marketing groups; run some experiments and look at shifting some dollars from traditional to inbound marketing. Even in our industry where it is not very tech savvy and people like dirt and equipment. They come to the website, say they want to view software in the middle of the night, they want things mobile optimized, they do read blog articles, it might not be huge on social but if you are not using inbound marketing you are really missing the boat.

Trent:

Actually you just triggered one question I didn’t ask. You said, “may not be huge on social.” We, for our clients and for ourselves use social a lot to promote content to get eyeballs on it.

Dan:

Right.

Trent:

Do you not do that?

Dan:

Not as much, our guys are busy out there running construction projects. They are not huge in Facebook and Twitter. We try all of it and it is growing. Actually LinkedIn is starting to work very well for us. Some of our decision makers; LinkedIn is starting to drive a lot more traffic. We drive a lot of traffic to our website for people looking for jobs with our company with social but not as much on products.

We are going to keep watching it, I am sure that will be growing as the younger generation comes into construction but is hasn’t been as a big channel for us right now as the website.

Trent:

So the way that people are finding the site is that predominately organic for you then.

Dan:

Yes. It is mainly organic and mainly direct. Referrals are picking up for us but social, other than LinkedIn, has not worked as well for us. And email funny enough works really well for us. Our open rates are huge because we are well known in our industry and people trust us so anything we do on email tends to work really well.

Trent:

Have you guys thought of coming out with – or you have an app actually already – are you using push notifications in the app at all?

Dan:

We don’t. That is an interesting concept. I think we’ve just scratched the surface. I don’t have a shortage of ideas to do this next few years.

Trent:

Yeah absolutely, alright. Well Dan I want to thank you very much for coming in and making some time to talk with me.

Dan:

Sure Trent.

Trent:

The interview was very helpful and I look forward to the feedback. Folks if you have questions make sure that you use the comment form down at the bottom of the post and Dan and I will do our very best to give you answers. Dan if people want to get in touch with you what is the one easiest way to do that?

Dan:

Email probably works the best. It is just dan.briscoe@hcss.com.

Trent:

Alright Dan thank you very much for being on the show.

Dan:

Okay Trent. I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

Trent:

Alright, that is it for this episode. To get to the shownotes head on over to BrightIdeas.co/179 and if you enjoyed this episode I would love it if you would take a moment to fire up iTunes and go leave us a five star rating and your comments. If that is too much work just head over to BrightIdeas.co/love where there is a tweet awaiting the click of your mouse.

So that is it for this episode. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. I look forward to having you back for another one soon. If you do need help with inbound marketing or demand generation in general feel free to pay us a visit over at our agency GrooveDigitalMarketing.com.

About Dan Briscoe

Dan leads a great team of marketers at HCSS, a leading provider of innovative software solutions for the heavy civil construction industry.