SmartBug Media® is a globally recognized Intelligent Inbound® marketing agency that helps businesses grow revenue. From increasing lead generation and building brand awareness to cultivating customer loyalty through content marketing, sales enablement, website design, marketing automation, and public relations, SmartBug provides the roadmap for many companies’ success.
The SmartBug marketing team had only one week until HubSpot’s 2020 INBOUND conference to book virtual meetings for their sales team there. The clock was ticking, the pressure was on, and the marketing team needed to move fast. Their reps were depending on these sales meetings to meet their quotas. The SmartBug marketing team needed creative ideas to create a polished and professional campaign without having to dedicate countless resources and endless time.
The result was a polished lead-generation coffee campaign titled “Our strategies are very ROBUSTA, Meet SmartBug at INBOUND 2020.” The campaign offered a digital gift card for coffee to prospects who booked a meeting with SmartBug. But the marketing team had a concern. How could they address the issue of no-shows? They didn’t want to spend money on prospects who would book an appointment and receive a gift card, but then wouldn’t show up for their scheduled meeting.
Hannah Shain, Director of Marketing at SmartBug, needed to find an option that would reward only those who pre-booked and completed the meeting. She researched multiple vendors using well-defined criteria, looking for a system that was simple to set up and use, wasn’t an administrative burden, integrated with HubSpot, and was priced so that SmartBug could quickly show a positive return on investment. Hannah found BHN Rewards in the HubSpot app marketplace. After that, the choice was easy.
“We chose BHN Rewards because it aligned with our need to quickly (30 minutes) set up the campaign,” Hannah said. “BHN Rewards was so seamless; it took us longer to create the puns for the ads!”
Although campaigns of this nature typically follow the 5 weeks – 3 weeks – 1 week (5-3-1) promotion plan, Hannah and her team didn’t have the luxury of time. Within just one week, BHN Rewards was making a difference. By looping in multi-channel promotions such as LinkedIn and HubSpot to automatically pre-book meetings and deliver digital gift cards via a BHN Rewards workflow integration, SmartBug significantly moved the needle on the number of meetings booked.
“The campaign ran for just one week prior to the event,” Hannah said. “Our success can be largely attributed to the fact that BHN Rewards automated everything up until deal creation.”
The offer of a $10 digital coffee gift card helped SmartBug pre-book 19 meetings in just a single week. During the three-day event, SmartBug reps met with 74% of those prospects who had scheduled meetings. And the success didn’t end there, with 68% of the meetings converting into opportunities and 30% of those opportunities moving to the deal stage. “We had zero meetings from organic traffic to our virtual booth,” Hannah said. “If it weren’t for BHN Rewards and our campaign push, ROI from this event would have been dismal.”
Instead of ending the show with a negative ROI, SmartBug received 30% more than invested — positive ROI from a marketing campaign launched just days before the event. The goal now is to increase this percentage event-over-event (and to start marketing campaigns weeks ahead of time). “We’ll be using BHN Rewards extensively for our campaigns,” explained Hannah. “With BHN Rewards, you can basically ‘rinse and repeat’ across events. Our team members can leverage this campaign without needing to go through quality assurance or get management approval — saving us time and money.”
It’s no secret event sponsorships can be expensive, and realizing a positive ROI is crucial. Using BHN Rewards to incorporate digital rewards into a campaign helped SmartBug do just that, and do it quickly and easily. BHN Rewards’ simple HubSpot integration made the setup straightforward, and its breadth of digital offers allowed prospects to choose what they want. Even more importantly, BHN Rewards gave SmartBug a repeatable lead-generation tool that can be scaled for as many events as the company wants. If the team can ensure success by using digital rewards, there’s no limit to their potential event ROI.
“BHN Rewards provided everything we needed to realize a positive ROI,” said Hannah. “From the automation that let us set it up and forget about it, through providing us with the ability to forecast accurately and predict campaign ROI, to providing us with a baseline of success that allows us to virtually future-proof our campaigns, BHN Rewards not only met but exceeded our expectations.”
SmartBug is raising the bar with an innovative digital rewards events model that sets its sales team up for success. Not only do they plan to use BHN Rewards incentives internally, but they trust that it’s a great partnership opportunity for their clients. “We believe this model will give our clients the edge they need for repeatable campaign success,” Hannah said.
Would you like to build successful campaigns like this for your company? What SmartBug did for themselves, they can do for you.
Kristy is a digital marketing professional who specializes in innovative marketing solutions for the technology space
Kristy is a digital marketing professional who specializes in innovative marketing solutions for the technology space
