Motivated by backgrounds in public policy, advocacy, government, community engagement and communications consulting, Eyal Halamish and Matthew Gordon, the founders of OurSay, saw an opportunity to revitalise the way governments and organisations engage with the public. Founded in 2010, the OurSay platform is designed to build trust and authenticity in public communication and government decision-making. The platform provides the ability for two way communication between community and local government and local government and other forms of government to aid improved decision making.
In order to ramp up their marketing the OurSay team had purchased the inbound marketing solution HubSpot, under the special start up program licence. They went through the HubSpot on-boarding and built out a simple funnel, but it wasn’t working and the team felt that there was something missing, but didn’t know what that was.
They had the outline of a plan and goals of generating a demo a day. However their website was only attracting 500 visitors a month and the book a demonstration page had only generated 4 bookings in the previous 6 months. So a demo a day was an aggressive goal.
They needed to ramp up their lead generation efforts but wanted to do it in a way that was data driven, measurable and ultimately would deliver a repeatable return on investment. This was important so that they could be confident, going into their next round of funding, that they had a model for attracting and closing customers.
Plus, they did not have a big budget to pay for traffic, it had to be done organically and done quickly.
OurSay engaged experienced HubSpot partner, Bright Inbound to create an inbound action plan. This action plan laid out the exact steps that OurSay needed to take to build a repeatable framework for lead generation. This action plan could then be used if OurSay wanted to undertake the work themselves internally or they could outsource the work.
The first step in the inbound action plan was to conduct deep customer research. OurSay had previously done some buyer persona work when working with HubSpot during the on-boarding process, however it was not validated with actual customer interviews and did not go deep enough to uncover any real customer insight into the problems they had, that the OurSay solution could help solve.
The action plan uncovered 5 different personas, however one was chosen as the focus of the first cycle of building and execution. This persona was the key person that would both use the software and had the ability to make a purchasing decision quickly.
The action plan also mapped out the competitor research, proposed target keywords as well as a three month content marketing program to organically increase traffic and engagement.
OurSay then decided to continue with the engagement with Bright to create all the content assets and configure HubSpot to execute the plan. This intense period of content creation led to an eBook, 42 blog articles, two email nurturing sequences and two webinars being created in a month.
It was then onto the execution phase. Webinars were proposed as an integral part of OurSay’s funnel due to OurSay’s existing work with live seminars. Their live seminars are very popular, however it meant the team were travelling extensively. Adding a webinar format into the marketing funnel, meant that the team did not need to travel and the reach could be broader. The webinars were also recorded, so that they could continue to be used as an evergreen part of the sales funnel. The first webinar was launched in April and quickly sold out with 100 people registering to attend. The webinar had a 58% attendance rate, which is nearly double the industry standard of 30% attendance rate and eventuated in one immediate sales conversation that same afternoon.
After 6 months working together these are the results
This was accomplished with zero spend on paid advertising.
As well as these excellent results, OurSay’s small marketing team of one received a crash course in inbound marketing best practices to enable them to take the reins and continue to refine, pivot and execute on the program of work.
In July 2017, OurSay was accepted into Startmate, one of Australia’s leading start-up accelerator programs and they continue to run successful webinars as part of their ongoing lead generation efforts.
