Transworld Minnesota: Started At The Bottom, Now We're Here.

In May 2016, Transworld Business Advisors of Minnesota approached Leighton Interactive as a new business franchise with some substantial goals. They wanted to fill a need in the market - a need for business advisors who were passionate about working for their clients; marketing the properties to sell to the right people, and connecting the buyers to the right properties and resources for them to be successful. In order to do this, they needed to create awareness in the market, as well as build trust with their prospects by acting as an industry thought leader.

Branching out as a franchise of Transworld Business Advisors, the company specializes in consulting services for a wide expanse of businesses, industries, and business owners and entrepreneurs with varying levels of experience. As a franchise, they set out to do things a little differently, especially within the local market.

The world of buying and selling businesses is very fast-paced and evolving. Transworld Minnesota knew they had to find a way to get in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time. If the wrong information is presented to the right people - you still lose the right people and the opportunity. Leighton Interactive understood this and took it to heart when we got started.

The Start (Challenge)

Transworld Minnesota was brand new without a database of customers and leads … there wasn’t even a dedicated website. With big goals, Transworld Minnesota required a presence in the market. As a new business, they needed to create awareness, leads, and obviously, customers. As a franchise, they have the backing of the corporation; which happens to be the world leader in the marketing and sales of businesses, franchises, and commercial real estate. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a strong reputation tied to your name; however, they had to push this information out to their own audience and create a separate brand.

Enter Leighton Interactive - It’s not very often we have the opportunity to work with a client from the ground up. It’s a fresh start - beginning from the beginning. This was new territory for our team, too.  So, how and where do we start?

With the inbound marketing methodology, of course.

The Business Plan (Solution)

Working with a brand new business gave Leighton Interactive the opportunity to utilize the inbound marketing methodology and HubSpot’s expansive tools right from the start; we jumped in head first with Transworld Minnesota.

We started by taking a deep dive into developing Transworld Minnesota’s buyer personas. These personas drove decisions on the website, content creation, and social media interaction. As business advisors, Transworld Minnesota works with both buyers and sellers. The business is dependent on both as well as the ability to make connections. Transworld Minnesota has two distinct personas:  Entrepreneur Eric and Business Owner Ben.

From there, we started developing a website within the HubSpot COS, giving us the ability to track every prospect and analyze every engagement. Key term research and search engine optimization (SEO) was at the forefront of our inbound marketing strategy. We utilized the Keywords tool in HubSpot - along with Google tools - to create an impactful plan for Transworld Minnesota. We not only optimized site and blog content but strategically used paid ads and AdWords as part of our inbound campaigns. Our SEO and key term research were key to the success in driving website traffic, especially for organic traffic and our paid search ad campaign.

Leighton Interactive implemented more inbound tactics including awareness stage blogs that showcased Transworld Minnesota as a thought leader in the industry and enabled us to generate more visits. This was seen as an opportunity to rank for SEO, and also to provide educational information the persona would find helpful - thereby strengthening the persona's perception of Transworld Minnesota as a thought leader and developing a foundation for trust. Concurrently, we jumped onto social media platforms to push the new content and drive organic traffic. To assist with the conversions, Leighton Interactive added CTAs, landing pages, and forms to bring visitors to leads. Our number one priority was to create awareness and drive traffic to the website. We had the content, we just needed the people to serve it to.

Along with industry blogs, we started incorporating individual business listings that were first published by a third-party site. After the launch of the new site, the listings were available on the Available Listings page and were shared through social media. After analyzing the data coming in over the first few months and through our Growth Driven Design process, we realized the listings needed to be front and center on the site. We introduced a homepage blog-style rotator featuring current listings in the hero section of the homepage. In addition, we added the listings rotator to the bottom of each blog as a CTA.

As we saw more interactions with different content, landing pages, and forms, Leighton Interactive worked closely with Transworld Minnesota to create segmented lists in order to send targeted weekly emails specific to business listings that would interest them. Lists were segmented by past engagement with business listings and related content.

The Results

So how did inbound marketing work for Transworld Minnesota? Let’s look at the numbers:

Website Notables

We saw substantial and consistent growth in Transworld Minnesota’s website traffic. Our focus on search engine optimization and key term research was done intentionally to drive the right traffic to our site. While website traffic is website traffic, our goal was to bring the right people to the site. A majority of our traffic came from organic search, paid advertising, and direct traffic.

Landing Page Learnings

Landing pages performed very well; converting above industry standards at 15.75%. Landing pages were critical for bringing in new contacts. Starting in April 2017, we gated information on business listings which increased our landing page conversions and gave us more insights into what our audience was looking for.

Email Marketing Excellence

Throughout this campaign, Leighton Interactive tried many different avenues to deliver business listings. In June 2017, we started sending targeted emails to a segmented list with the different business listings. The list was pulled from Transworld Minnesota’s SalesForce CRM based on certain criteria that included contact location, past inquiries, advisor knowledge of what they want, and liquid assets. The list was then imported to HubSpot to send the targeted emails and track response rates. We had found a hotspot - right away we saw the open rates rise, as well as the click rates - rates well above the industry standards for business.

Targeted Emails

The Contacts

Each quarter, our inbound marketing efforts have nearly doubled the number of contacts collected.

• July 2016 - September 2016: 17 contacts
• October 2016 - December 2016: 26 contacts
• January 2017 - March 2017: 50 contacts
• April 2017 - June 2017: 109 contacts

The Impact - We're Here

There’s the proof, the background, the game plan, and the results. So what was the impact?

In one year, Transworld Business Advisors of Minnesota’s visits went from zero to 10,365 since implementing inbound marketing. They gained 246 contacts, and most importantly ...