For over 25 years, Kalibrate has advised fuel and convenience retailers worldwide on how to be best-in-class operators in the fast-changing marketplace. Kalibrate provides strategic expertise and technology solutions in fuel pricing, location planning, market data and traffic count data. These solutions have been deployed in over 70 countries with hundreds of clients of all sizes, including oil companies, convenience stores and supermarkets. Kalibrate is headquartered in Manchester, United Kingdom with support operations worldwide.
Their Challenge
While transitioning into 2015, Kalibrate's marketing team was challenged on multiple fronts. Despite being an incredibly lean team, team members were working in different locations around the world. On top of the limited number of team members and interactions in multiple time zones, marketing leadership was looking to adopt a completely new approach for their marketing and sales strategies: the inbound methodology.
At the same time, Kalibrate was operating in a complex market and needed to define their niche's decision makers. There were several target accounts they wanted to work with in the areas of fuel pricing, retail network planning and data analysis, but this created a challenge in identifying the ideal contact. A huge opportunity existed for Kalibrate to assist these corporations with their unique solution, but first they had to overcome their identity crisis.
Therefore, Kalibrate was dealing with the challenges of solidifying their marketing team, adopting the inbound methodology and reaching their decision makers across various company departments — but when they decided it was time to enlist the help of an agency with additional expertise in 2016, they had a tough time finding a partner who was up for the task of working within a complex industry. Finally, they came to New Breed Marketing, HubSpot's Diamond-tier agency partner, who helped them tackle these issues head on and set them up to properly leverage their tech stack for continued success.
Our Process in Motion
Our initial engagement with Kalibrate was designed to solidify their inbound marketing foundation, get them ramped up into the methodology and, finally, increase their lead velocity.
1. Solidify Inbound Marketing Foundation
Growth Acceleration Workshop
In our Growth Acceleration Workshop we worked with Kalibrate to establish buyer personas — or semi-fictional representations of their ideal customers. With their knowledge of the market and our knowledge of buyer personas, champions and advocates in the inbound methodology, we came together to define the intricacies of their organization's buyer personas. Kalibrate has advised over 300 brands in the fuel and convenience retail market. They work with these companies in areas spanning from fuel pricing to retail network planning, which creates the opportunity for multiple decision makers as each solution works with a different department. Our team worked with Kalibrate to identify the target positions at each type of organization and define the pain points that an individual in each one could experience.
During this workshop, we also worked with Kalibrate to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of their industry and combined that with the goals and challenges of the developed buyer personas, so that we could attract them with Kalibrate's website. By bringing these pieces of knowledge together, we could create the best messaging and change language appropriately based on location role to best support their website.
Inbound Readiness
Next, we brought Kalibrate through our Inbound Readiness workshop, which is designed to configure marketing and sales platforms for better team alignment, provide clear documentation of internal processes and create a full-funnel reporting structure. In this workshop, our team mapped Kalibrate's funnel to their new buyer personas, standardized their form strategy and established lead qualification and handoff processes to move leads efficiently through their marketing and sales funnel.
2. Ramp Up the Inbound Methodology
Inbound Marketing Services
When Kalibrate first started working with us, we got right to work creating blogs and content offers that targeted their newly created buyer personas. It's also been interesting to reflect on the fact that when Kalibrate first became a client, we offered entirely different versions of our current solutions. However, as Kalibrate's relationship with us continued to grow and evolve, we expanded and altered our own offerings, so that we could be better equipped to support their growth.
Now, with our inbound premier services, we help strategize and create email marketing campaigns, and we assist with technical implementation and execution of their other efforts within HubSpot.
3. Increase Lead Velocity
Over time, we've introduced additional services to increase Kalibrate's lead velocity now that they are fully ramped up and successful with their inbound marketing efforts. These efforts have included:
- Content: We've collaborated to produce even more content, including premium content offers, associated landing pages and email marketing campaigns.
- SEO: We've worked to increase search visibility and eliminate technical errors on their website to increase search engine ranking and authority.
- SEM: We've pushed to increase the reach of their content offers and overall website traffic. These efforts have been huge for Kalibrate and they've seen great results with paid advertising.
- Conversion Optimization: We've improved website functionality and user experience to drive conversions.
Kalibrate is currently working with our full demand generation suite of products, which is another example of how our product offering continues to evolve with their business. Rather than offering several, separate services, we've combined many of our key services into a demand generation package to reflect how each of the included services plays a part in Kalibrate's overall inbound growth and demand generation strategies. It enables our team to work as a cohesive unit rather than siloing our efforts across various services and empowers us to drive even better growth for Kalibrate.
Results
While working with Kalibrate, we've produced:
- 75+ blog posts
- 2 gated content offers
- 75% of the website copy (some of which is in the works)
- 18+ months of social media content across 3 different platforms
- 5+ ongoing email campaigns
- Event-specific promotion on social media
While working with us, Kalibrate has seen:
- 28% increase in inbound-sourced leads this far in 2018 compared to 2017.
- 72% growth in new contacts and 450% growth in MQLs since, on average, 90% of generated leads are qualified.
- 55% growth in website traffic.
- 49% growth in social media following.
- 354% growth in published social posts.
- 152% growth in published blog posts.
Our work to increase lead velocity and create a more refined qualification process has eased some of the manual burden on Kalibrate's marketing team. In the next phase of our relationships, we'll be working to further refine this process and work with their team to improve their Salesforce instance and integration with HubSpot.
Impact
With an increase in website visitors and improved lead velocity, investments can now be placed in other areas to focus on improving the overall experience with Kalibrate's brand. We're currently in the midst of a a big revamp of Kalibrate's website. This website project has been a huge undertaking for our partnership in 2018 and 2019, so that we could optimize the overall experience to:
- Further increase lead generation efforts
- Improve end-user experience as well as back-end experience
- Optimize for search, and
- Reflect internal changes at Kalibrate.
This project will deliver a fresh homepage, updated templates, new copy and improved SEO. Ultimately, we want to make Kalibrate more relatable to the market because no one is more relatable than Kalibrate. They are industry experts and the individuals on their team have been in the same shoes as many of their buyer personas, or they've advised these types of people for tens of years. We want their website to reflect this intense market expertise and lend itself as a trust mark to their potential clients.
However, the most significant impact for us as an agency has been Kalibrate's satisfaction in all of our efforts and associated results. Just see what Tamera Ross, Kalibrate's Global Marketing Director, has to say for these engagements:
Before we began working with New Breed, our marketing team had been tasked with huge objectives to support both our global sales team and global client base. We needed to find not only an accomplished marketing agency, but a HubSpot partner that was capable of effectively supporting such aggressive objectives. New Breed added a skilled set of talented members to our lean marketing team to help us not only meet our objectives, but exceed them. They helped ramp up our inbound marketing tactics and through the methodology they instilled, we saw (and still do see) phenomenal growth across key areas of our marketing strategy. In the years we’ve been working together there’s been a 55% growth in website traffic, 72% growth in new contacts and a 450% growth in MQLs. All of these results combined have brought about higher marketing influenced opportunities in our global sales pipeline and in FY2018 contributed to 38% of our contract wins. Our partnership has been an incredible addition to our marketing initiatives and we’re excited to keep going with New Breed’s support and guidance."
-Tamera Ross, Kalibrate Global Marketing Director
Interested in accelerating your growth with the help of a Diamond-tier HubSpot partner? We'd love to discuss your unique growth goals and help you formulate a plan for achieving them in 2019. All you've got to do is reach out.
