Camping agency AdriaCamps was established in 2015 by a team of four enthusiasts with considerable experience in the tourism industry. They believed that the marketplace was ripe for a new entrant — there were plenty of competitors, but they weren’t using the inbound methodology for their marketing. CEO Alen Salamun wanted to fill that gap.
“Three years ago, I came across the HubSpot website — in fact, I was an inbound lead myself! I read the blog, downloaded whitepapers and generally educated myself about the method. When the time came to set up AdriaCamps, I knew that this was what would help us stand out from the bigger players.”
AdriaCamps needed a way to not only generate visitors to its website, but also to gain insights that it could then use for its lead nurturing campaigns.
“I used to work in a hotel and camping business as marketing manager, but when we used email marketing, we just sent the same offer to the whole database. There was no way to segment, and that was key for us when choosing the HubSpot Marketing Hub. It had everything we needed — it was easy to use, but it was powerful enough to allow us to target our marketing tightly.”
The decision was made, and AdriaCamps signed on with HubSpot in 2015.
AdriaCamps wanted to dig deep into the wants and needs of its various types of customers, so defining personas was one of the first things it did with the HubSpot software. After a good deal of research, it came up with three: a retired couple, a married couple with two children, and a young couple looking for a fun sun holiday.
It also used HubSpot's SEO tools to research the kind of keywords that would help it rank highly with search engines and used that knowledge to create content for its blog, ,emails and landing pages.
“We added calls to action (CTAs) and forms on almost every page, which allow us to gather much information on our visitors. We segment leads into where they are in their thought process: the awareness phase, the consideration phase, and, finally, the decision phase.
"Once we know that, we can enter them into workflows and give them content and offers based not only on their persona, but also their position in the marketing funnel,” explains Alen.
The AdriaCamps CEO says that one of the best aspects of the HubSpot platform is how it facilitates a closer relationship between the sales and marketing departments.
“Our salespeople are having more tailored discussions with potential clients. They’re not just answering call and emails, they have full insight into whom they are talking to. For instance, if a guest is interested in a particular campsite and it is booked out, we can offer them something different that we know will fit their requirements. Without that knowledge, there would be at least a 50% chance that we would lose that booking.”
In fact, the sales team is so invested in the HubSpot platform that they now create 70% of AdriaCamps landing pages. Rather than send a lead an offer in the form of a PDF file, they create a personalized page just for them.
“When they do that, we can then use the dashboards in Marketing Hub to get even more data about how the lead interacted with the offer. In fact, the dashboard is something I use at least 20 times a day. It allows us to keep on track, find out what we should do more of and what we should tweak,” says Alen.
Since teaming up with HubSpot, AdriaCamps has seen remarkable results – during just the single month of July 2016, for example, it gained more than 50K website visitors, as well as a respectable number of leads and customers.
“HubSpot helped us surpass all our budgeted numbers. In the first six months, we had 60% more leads than expected and 66% more bookings. It has allowed us to dive deeper into what our customers want and target them in a much more granular way – I recently sent an email campaign to just eight contacts! We can see that it’s working. Our email open rates are at 45% and our click-through rates are at 20%.”
Looking ahead, Alen plans to nurture his growing contact database with even more targeted content and workflows, based on the data collected during the company’s inaugural year.
”I would recommend the HubSpot platform to any other business that wants to get serious about inbound marketing. I already do! When people ask me how we have achieved so much in such a short space of time, I direct them to the HubSpot website.”