Before HubSpot, Rentokil Initial South Africa relied on basic marketing and social media tools, which held them back when it came to achieving their mission of protecting people and enhancing lives. The marketing team needed a holistic solution that would grow their traffic, leads, and sales in a streamlined way.
Since implementing HubSpot in a phased approach, Rentokil Initial has used marketing automation to grow explosively. They keep increasing their traffic, nurturing their leads, and empowering their sales team to hit and exceed every sales goal.
Before HubSpot, Rentokil Initial South Africa’s marketing team used a mix of online and offline strategies to promote its offering. Relying on basic scheduling functionalities of social media and email marketing platforms was quite limiting.
Lémay Rogers, Marketing Manager for Rentokil Initial’s Sub-Saharan Africa region, explains the challenges they faced. “Rentokil, the pest control side of our business, always had a strong lead generation setup, but we were struggling to get the same success in Initial, our hygiene and disinfection division.” Lémay wanted to increase leads and sales for Initial and knew the company needed a platform to increase lead generation through digital channels.
Lémay approached a range of providers to find a solution that matched Initial’s goals. “I remember feeling overwhelmed by the range of options, all of them pulling in different directions. We didn’t need just one area of the marketing mix, but a holistic approach that would drive results across the board.” That’s what led Lemay to Spitfire Inbound, a HubSpot Diamond Partner that puts inbound marketing first and uses HubSpot to help clients achieve their goals.
HubSpot ticked all the boxes, and Initial went ahead with Marketing Hub Professional, which we later upgraded to Enterprise in order to be able to include our Rentokil division. “HubSpot won against other options because it’s intuitive and user-friendly. This meant we wouldn’t need a full-time developer to be able to use marketing automation, and that made a huge difference,” adds Lémay.
Lémay wanted to implement both Hubspot and the inbound methodology at pace, and thus relied on Spitfire Inbound’s implementation roadmap to make this happen. Lémay explains, “We kicked the process off with a series of workshops to define our buyer personas, buyer journey, and content strategy. Along with our business processes, this work informed our setup in HubSpot and helped us set ourselves up for success.”
At first, only the Initial South African team used HubSpot. However, the CRM platform is now also used by teams in Europe, North America, Canada, South America, and Australia. The user permissions and partitioning features in HubSpot to facilitate use across geographies, while each region has had the autonomy to work on individual implementation plans.
"We have used the HubSpot permissions, partitioning, and multi-language tools to improve usability for each regional team. We also settled on naming conventions early on to ease search across the various assets, which has helped."
Since Initial South Africa implemented HubSpot, it hasn’t looked back. In the first eight months of implementing inbound methodology through HubSpot, Initial saw a 57% increase in website visits, a 76% increase in both leads and sales, and a 310% ROI on inbound marketing.
In the following year, Initial further increased its marketing ROI by 671%, improved its organic traffic by 44% year-on-year with a successful blogging strategy, and kept nurturing its existing customers.
Finally, as the COVID-19 crisis hit, Rentokil Initial used HubSpot to adjust its landing pages, emails, blogging cadence, and overall messaging. Its landing page views jumped by 280%, new contacts increased by 253%, and the number of customers grew by 43%.
Inbound marketing became a cornerstone in Rentokil Initial’s marketing strategy. Going forward, the team wants to continue to hit sales goals by giving its customers exactly what they need. Lémay finishes by adding, “HubSpot allows us to focus on our strategy and campaigns, rather than worrying about how we’ll implement our ideas. That’s how we can keep on delivering excellence to our customers.”