As the lead of the growth marketing team, Casper Leijen is responsible for Studytube’s paid lead generation. Paid lead generation can quickly get expensive for a B2B learning platform like Studytube: their company is competing for rankings on popular audiences that are relevant to much bigger B2C learning companies, too.
“We're very much competing on audience attributes that are relevant to us and other eLearning platforms, but are also very relevant for the business-to-consumer markets,” Casper explains. “Attributes like eLearning, eLearning platform, learning on a job, things like that. A vast majority of our competition on those audiences are universities or bigger business-to-consumer learning platforms.”
To optimize spend, target the right people, and reach their audience, one place stands far above the rest when it comes to strategically deploying B2B paid advertising: LinkedIn. “I spend more of my time on LinkedIn than I do on Google,” Casper says. “We have a niche product with a very specific target audience. LinkedIn is the only platform where we’ve been able to target leads precisely based on their exact job titles and company size. That’s incredibly helpful.”
On LinkedIn, Studytube’s lead to MQL conversion rate skyrockets compared to other platforms. LinkedIn's data comes from member-generated demographic data that includes job title, company, industry, and more, which helps marketers reach the right audience and drive high-qualifying leads. “You don’t get clutter on LinkedIn. Our leads there are much higher quality, and our costs per MQL are lower.”
But generating leads is only one part of the equation: to track and manage them, Casper uses HubSpot.
Casper Leijen
With HubSpot and LinkedIn’s native integration, Studytube’s main lead generation tool and CRM communicate seamlessly. Together, both tools combine to give Studytube the ability to drive high-quality leads and track their progress all the way through the customer journey from start to finish. All of their forms are connected one-to-one on both platforms.
As Studytube’s Head of Demand Generation Hakar Sidik explains:
“The LinkedIn-HubSpot integration is very valuable for us,” he says. “Thanks to this integration, we can see which lead came through which campaign, which asset they downloaded, and how much our different campaigns cost. It allows us to be sure we are spending our budget in the most efficient way possible.”
For Casper, the HubSpot-LinkedIn integration works so seamlessly that he has trouble imagining what his job would look like without it. “I don’t need to do anything by hand,” he muses. “It’s such a nice, easy one-to-one integration. Everything is set up correctly from the get-go. I didn’t need to connect the forms to each other or make a workflow in order for LinkedIn leads to appear in HubSpot, it’s all automatic. It’s very well integrated.”
The integration between HubSpot and LinkedIn is especially valuable for Studytube because their entire business has been built on HubSpot from the very beginning.
“Our entire website has been built on the HubSpot platform,” Hakar explains. “It allows the marketing team to adjust almost everything ourselves. And whenever we need help, we have our dedicated customer success manager. There’s a help desk team that always responds within a couple of minutes. It’s really helpful.”
Both Hakar and Casper spend the majority of their day working in HubSpot, working with workflows, lists, templates, and dashboards to generate and track pipelines for the company. “My day typically starts with opening up HubSpot,” Hakar says. “I look at the dashboards that I’ve created: the marketing dashboard, sales dashboard, SDR dashboard, account executive dashboard, content marketing dashboard, and performance marketing dashboard. We have all the insights that we need.”
Thanks to HubSpot and LinkedIn’s seamless integration, leads automatically flow through Studytube’s pipeline. Sales and marketing are aligned, and the data is accurate and error-free. “Without the integration, we would have to do this manually, which would open us up to errors and could skew the data,” Hakar says. “It removes a lot of friction and saves us time, but also, the margin for error is much smaller because the process is automatic and seamless. I honestly couldn’t see it being any other way.”
But HubSpot and LinkedIn’s value for Studytube goes far beyond a single integration: Casper’s biweekly calls with LinkedIn account managers have helped him identify the right audiences and refine their targeting, which has added to their success on the platform. “Those calls have been extremely helpful for us,” Casper says.
HubSpot’s partnership and strategic support have also helped Studytube grow as a company. “HubSpot is a true partner, and I feel like we’ve grown together,” Hakar says. “HubSpot is continuously launching new features and functionalities, and the HubSpot team is always ready to show us new and better ways to use their tools, or show us workarounds that other companies use that fit our specific use case as well.”
HubSpot’s insights have also been invaluable for Studytube as the company has expanded into new markets in the DACH region. “HubSpot showed us a couple of blueprints on how to tackle some issues, and we’ve used those,” he says. “It’s really helpful for an organization that’s changing and needs to adapt. HubSpot is the ideal partner for us in that process.”
With the help of HubSpot, LinkedIn, and the integration that allows for the seamless flow of data between them, Studytube has seen continued improvements in their lead generation and overall sales and marketing alignment.
“The insights are very valuable to us,” Hakar says. “We can create business cases and present them to our director. It has offered us a lot of validation in knowing what we should do and what we should focus on. Plus, the integration also helps a lot with efficiency. That’s a great bonus as well.”
They’ve been able to use those insights to target new verticals and further refine their sales and marketing efforts, which has paid off. They’ve had a 36% increase in overall form completions and a 4.4% increase in form completions from senior management audiences from Q2 to Q4, 2021.
In the same time period, all of their conversion rates have improved:
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