The LeadG2 Podcast
The LeadG2 Podcast is dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week host Dani Buckley (VP/GM at LeadG2) discusses proven sales enablement strategies and real-life examples with experts and thought leaders from across industries.
The LeadG2 Podcast
How a Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy Expanded a Company’s Reach with Hilary Dillard
In this episode, we’re diving into the many benefits that come with implementing a solid inbound marketing strategy. Chief among them? How your company is better able to reach and educate your ideal prospects.
Here we ask questions like: What kind of problems and needs does an inbound marketing strategy help solve? Why is it important to be creating new educational content? And what inbound marketing tactics yield the most significant results?
Helping Dani answer those questions and more is the amazing Hilary Dillard, Marketing Director at Questco.
Hilary has so many awesome insights, such as:
- How inbound marketing helps nurture leads through the sales process
- Why an inbound marketing is perfect for industries where a lot of education is typically needed
- And lastly, how inbound marketing helps establish you and your company as “that thought leader” who people feel comfortable turning to when they have concerns or questions.
Welcome to the LeadG2 podcast, the show dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week, host Dani Buckley discusses proven B2B marketing and sales strategies and real-life examples for experts and thought leaders from across industries. In this episode, we're diving into the many benefits that come with implementing a solid inbound marketing strategy, chief among them, how your company is better able to reach and educate your ideal prospects. Here we ask questions like what kind of problems and needs does an inbound marketing strategy help solve, why is it important to be creating new educational content, and what inbound marketing tactics yield the most significant results? Helping Dani answer those questions and more is the amazing Hilary Dillard, Marketing Director at Questco. Hilary has so many awesome insights, such as how inbound marketing helps nurture leads through the sales process, why inbound marketing is perfect for industries where a lot of education is typically needed and, lastly, how inbound marketing helps establish you and your company as that thought leader who people hold comfortable turning to when they have concerns or questions.
Dani Buckley:Welcome, Hilary. I'm so excited to have you here. You've been a client for many years and, yeah, thanks for taking the time to join us today. Of course, thanks so much for having me excited to be here. Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about. We've done a lot together over the years and I think Quesco is a great example of an organization doing these things really well and seeing results. And so just to kind of get us all on the same page, tell us a little bit just about your specific role, kind of what do you do? What do you oversee? What is your involvement in the inbound marketing execution?
Hilary Dillard:For sure. So, I'm Hilary Dillard, the marketing director here at Questco, handled pretty much anything on the marketing basis, anything that our clients see, anything that our prospects see, and we work really closely with LeadG 2 on our inbound marketing efforts to make sure those are productive and passing off the leads to sales, making sure those are of quality. So we partner with a lot and we work hand in hand on all those efforts.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, I love that and I think you guys are a great example of having just really strong sales and marketing alignment. We all think it asks who oversees this stuff, and so in this case, you oversee all the marketing pieces, obviously as the marketing director, but also there's a lot of involvement with sales and sales enablement, and so we're going to talk about some of that today. So you've been a partner since 2019. And can you tell us a little bit about the kinds of needs and problems that inbound marketing has helped solve for Questco? Why does this continue to be an important part of your marketing plan every year?
Hilary Dillard:Yeah, absolutely so. Even before I was at Questco, before I was in the marketing department at Questco we are, our biggest way of people hearing about us was through word of mouth. So I think LeadG 2 has really helped us expand our reach, made us searchable, it really helped increase our traffic to our website and has been a huge piece in the education component as well, helping us produce materials for our sales team and all the tools that we need to help nurture the leads through the process.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, so I'm hearing. Yeah, just a way to really build an additional funnel of new prospects? Absolutely Before, like you said, it was word of mouth or salespeople going out and finding them. Now that continues, of course, but you're also now getting to drive marketing leads in addition to that.
Hilary Dillard:Yeah, absolutely, it's a whole new ball game Tons more opportunities, so we love that.
Dani Buckley:Yes, that's the goal. You touched on this. You talked about being educational, and so that leads me to my next question as a PEO company, for those that are also in that space or in a similar space, that requires a decent amount of education to the businesses you're talking to. They may not fully understand the benefits of the services you provide or how it works. There is a lot of education needed. So why does this matter to you as a company, being educational and providing helpful content? What matters to you about this? For sure.
Hilary Dillard:So I think the biggest piece is we've been able to help so many clients navigate the challenges that they face as business owners, and we have an amazing staff, amazing team, some with over 20 plus years of experience in their field. So we want to share that education. We want to see if we can potentially help those businesses in the same way we've helped our current clients, but also just being that thought leader, that person they think of when they have questions or concerns. They can come to us for information or even just to see if they want to explore a partnership. They have problems. We want them to turn to Quesco.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, I love that. Yeah, being the thought leader, being like that valued resource, I think you guys have done a really good job of that. So let's get into some tactics. With inbound marketing, some specifics what have you seen yield the most significant results for your organization?
Hilary Dillard:The most significant results have come from our webinars timely webinars that people want to join. I love you know. It's a great interactive aspect and, in addition to that, nurturing those leads, nurturing them through the funnel. In addition, our blog has been a huge piece. We've been consistently posting on our blog for five plus years now and it's been amazing with our searchability. So it's been that's been huge component as well.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, so okay, so let's go through those. So blog we know that that consistency and patience, which is what we tell all of our clients you guys are really a great example of that that like, yeah, we got results in your one, but like now you've got content I know we see from three, four or five years ago that it's driving, you know, thousands of views still. Which is one of the things I love about blogging is that it's really evergreen and kind of like you're continuing to build this machine of things.
Hilary Dillard:Absolutely, and to your earlier point, it helps us present ourselves as a thought leader. You know, just answering those questions and talking about relevant topics and it's been a really helpful tool, yeah, great.
Dani Buckley:And then you also mentioned the nerd lead sorry, lead nurturing, which I think is really important, because that's where, like, automation comes in right. That's where, like, we're really thinking about the buyer's journey. And, okay, someone watched the webinar. Like you said now what? What do we send them? How do we communicate? How do we not just go right to like trying to sell them something, because that's not how that's gonna work.
Hilary Dillard:So I love that you're doing it. What additional tools and resources can we pass on to them that are along the same vein of why they joined the webinar to start with? Yeah, absolutely.
Dani Buckley:Yes, yes, love it, Okay, great. Are there any specific campaigns that stand out, and this could be even like just specific titles or topics that you've covered.
Hilary Dillard:Absolutely. One of the campaigns has been very successful for us is our multi-state employer campaign. You know, with COVID and the world that we live in today, we've had a lot of businesses shift to fully remote work environments, which has opened up a whole new door for candidates in several states.
Hilary Dillard:But with that comes a lot of challenges as far as compliance goes with the hiring process with several employees in several different states so we've had great success with that one, we could think, because it's a very relevant topic that a lot of business owners are dealing with today and it's the current climate that we're in.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, great, that's a great example. Love that. We're talking about things that work and that are successful, which is great, but I don't want us to ignore that it's not always easy. There's work that goes into this and we learn a lot along the way. Are there any challenges that stand out that you think might be helpful for our listeners to know that you encountered with implementing in-bell marketing and how you overcame them?
Hilary Dillard:The biggest challenge for us, or what we've focused on quite a bit, is making sure we're passing off only quality leads to our salespeople. We want them to have been through the process, have been nurtured, engaged with our content, and then we don't want to waste our salespeople time, so we want to make sure we're passing off the warmest lead possible. We have been really strict about what leads we pass along and just making sure they're a quality, it's good stuff to pass on to our sales team.
Dani Buckley:I love that you said that, because that is probably one of the biggest challenges we see with so many of our clients of making sure that we're properly qualifying and in timely handing them off in a timely, efficient manner. That makes total sense and you guys have really worked hard at getting that down really well, thank you.
Hilary Dillard:Absolutely, it's an important part.
Dani Buckley:We keep talking about automation and things like that. Let's jump right into that. Automation, marketing automation is a really big piece to end on marketing and doing it well. You guys have been using HubSpot for as long as you've worked with us. I think your HubSpot software is a pretty well-oiled machine. At this point, Tell us just a little bit what are some of your favorite tools or features within the platform that really elevate what you do as a marketing director?
Hilary Dillard:Absolutely. I would say the biggest thing is the reporting aspect. It lets us see where our leads are coming from, where they're at in the process. We've had great success with the pop-up form that we have on our website. We'll be able to track that. Do some A-B testing, try out different forms, see different versions if you will see which one works best. But I think it really just gives us a snapshot of where we are, what's working, what's not, and helps us to guide where we should go in the future.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, reporting is huge. I think with a platform like HubSpot that's so robust, there's so much reporting and I think people can get overwhelmed. I know being able to hone in on here's the things that matter to us, here's the stuff we're going to focus on here's the KPIs is really an important piece to that. Yeah, absolutely. That takes us into our next question, talking about ROI and performance. That is the name of the game. You would not have been doing this since what? 2018, I think I said if you weren't getting results. Tell us a little bit about how do you know if inbound marketing is working? We know there's the direct revenue impact, of course, but what are the other stuff that you're looking at? What are those key performance indicators that matter to you?
Hilary Dillard:When we evaluate at the end of the year, we're looking at the whole picture, right. Like you mentioned, of course it's ROI and of course it's closed sale. That's a huge piece of it. But where did our tools fit in the process? How are they improving? We've seen a constant increase in website visits, traffic through social, organic. I think that just shows that all of the pieces to the puzzle are working and as long as we just want to see that constant increase and that constant growth year over year, yeah, yeah, great makes sense.
Dani Buckley:So do you have any memorable success stories or case studies that kind of speak to when you've seen inbound marketing really working?
Hilary Dillard:Yeah, absolutely so. When I mentioned our webinars earlier, we actually had a lead that attended a webinar back in December of 2021. We kept that lead and nurtured it. We continued the communication. They interacted with our content by downloading an e-book and we just recently converted that lead to a sale about a couple of days ago. So it's a true testament to how that continued communication nurturing about lead will come out.
Dani Buckley:Yes, I am so glad I did not know for those listening I don't know the answers people are coming to. This is not canned or planned by any means, and so I love that that's the story you're highlighting because, well, certainly, many leads and prospects move quicker than that. Often, especially in a space like the EO where it's a longer sales cycle, yes, there's a lot of time and there's timing matters a lot in making those types of decisions. So I love that you highlighted one that's almost two years of nurturing but pays off and that stuff matters. We want to like. That's why kind of that persistence and consistency can really matter over time. So I love that you shared that one. Yes, absolutely so. As just we, a lot of folks listening often are in the position of either they're doing it in-bound marketing to some extent but want to do it better, or they're not really doing it at all and they're curious. So is there anything that you would pass along to them, that kind of unexpected lessons or insights that you've learned along the way?
Hilary Dillard:So I don't know if it's per se, unexpected, but one thing that we continue to focus on and continue to revisit is what I mentioned earlier making sure the quality of lead that we pass on is the best. We're passing off enormously possible and then, even more so, extending into that sales cycle. There's so much that goes into sales, there's so many components that go into that piece. So constantly trying to figure out if there's any tools or material or any education, anything that we can do to help usher that lead through the process and ultimately results in a closed sale. So we want to just see how else can we fit pieces in the puzzle to help our sales team and being the most successful they can be.
Dani Buckley:Yes, I love that. So what you're really speaking to is kind of that integration of like okay, we've got these marketing efforts to like attract new people and new eyeballs, new visitors, new leads, but also everything we're doing with marketing is enabling sales as well with their existing prospects and their existing sales process. And, like you said, how can that content or tools be used to close more business that they're already working on? Absolutely, yeah, great, I love that, and that is what we call true marketing and sales alignment, which we all do really well, thank you. So, to kind of wrap us up, you know you guys, cuesco is a leader in the PEO space and in your leader in marketing for PEOs, and so for those that are in this space or in a similar industry, what advice might you give that maybe we haven't touched on? If there's anything else, for those that are thinking about taking on an inbound initiative or just like wanting to elevate what they're already doing, what advice would I give?
Hilary Dillard:I would say figure out what makes you stand out from your competition, and grain that to your brand. Integrate it in every marketing material that you release. Any messaging you have out there, position yourself as a thought leader and make sure you're putting out relevant, timely information. And lastly I want to reemphasize this the relationship between sales and marketing is crucial. You know, I think your sales team holds one of the keys to your success, so making sure you're constantly getting feedback from them. Working hand in hand with your sales team is going to help you tremendously.
Dani Buckley:Awesome. Thank you, hillary. I think I know our listeners. I don't think I know, because I hear it. Love hearing from actual folks that are in the trenches doing this stuff day in and day out. And that's you. So one thank you for your partnership. But, yeah, thank you for your time today and for joining us.
Hilary Dillard:Yeah, thank you so much. Y'all have been an integral part in our success and we're just happy to have this partnership. So thanks so much for having me yeah, us too.
Dani Buckley:And for those listening, if you want to connect with Hillary, we'll include some of her contact information in the show notes. You can learn more about Questco or connect with her on LinkedIn, and we look forward to seeing you all on the next episode. Until then, happy selling.
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