Written By: TMSA Staff | Apr 26, 2017 12:00:00 AM
By: Heather Sweet – Content Marketing Manager at 
Kenco and TMSA Member
The first time I heard about marketing automation was at TMSA’s annual conference in 2014. There was a panel of transportation and warehousing marketers sharing their experiences with finding and choosing a marketing automation tool. They spoke about:
The biggest piece of advice I walked away with is to do your homework. There were (and are!) a lot of tools out there, and in 2014, the complexity of many of them required your entire IT team to implement. I am on a two-person marketing team, and something of that magnitude would not work for Kenco.
I had worked with Constant Contact and HubSpot when they were just email tools, but the whole concept of automated emails when a lead or potential customer clicked on something on our website was a mind blowing thought to me. I came back from TMSA and told my boss about it. He had heard of marketing automation, but we had already established our marketing strategy for that year, and we were not ready to do an 180 midyear.
My boss’s wife had a baby in May and was unable to attend TMSA with me, but he still wanted to go to a marketing conference that year. He chose to go to Inbound (HubSpot’s annual conference). During that experience, he was introduced to the concept of inbound marketing and what an automation tool could do for Kenco beyond tracking email blasts.
I think attending Inbound was a turning point for Kenco. After my boss had told me about the sessions he attended, the HubSpot tool, and the potential leads we were ignoring, we were bound and determined to make inbound marketing a focus for our 2015 strategy.
We did our homework.
The first thing we did was read everything we could on the concept of inbound marketing. Of course, the companies who sell the products have the most content out there, so be careful who the source is for your information. It might sound just “perfect,” but in truth, it might be biased.
The next thing we did is look at our current marketing strategy. How much of it did we want to keep? How much did we want to change? We felt the blog was where we wanted initially to share our content, so we wanted to keep it and improve upon it. We felt content should be published on our blog and shared via social media. We also felt creating high-value content was also going to be a major component.
Finally, we were in the middle of a website revamp and wanted to stay with our web developer and keep the website outside of the marketing automation tool.
Who did we vet and what did we think?
Pardot – we wanted to see what Pardot had to offer since we were already using SalesForce. We thought it would be a no-brainer, and it would be a seamless transition for us. At that time, the tool didn’t support blogging or the inbound marketing methodology as much as we would have liked. The reporting and interface didn’t seem to click with our team either.
Marketo – since they are one of the “big guys” we wanted to see how they measured up to Pardot and the others. In the very first meeting, it seemed complicated to us. Not that it is too complicated for everyone, it just didn’t seem like a good fit for Kenco.
HubSpot – we wanted to stay objective even though my boss had a positive experience at the Inbound conference. It was hard not to want to pick them right away. Their sales team was very blog-centric and kept reassuring us the implementation phase was a breeze. The demo seemed very intuitive and answered many of our questions.
Who won our business?
HubSpot.
For our goals and objectives, we felt the 90-day implementation program, cost, continuing education, and culture matched very well with Kenco. We have been with HubSpot for two years and are very pleased. Our results with HubSpot are staggering.
To sum it up
Our HubSpot implementation and the adoption of the Inbound approach caused us to focus on our personas, the buyer’s journey, and high-value content. The tool also provided us the metrics and analytics we needed to have justified our marketing budget, channels, and resources.
Note: Marketing automation and its impact on the Buyer’s Journey will be a topic of discussion at the upcoming TMSA Logistics Marketing & Sales Conference June 11-13, 2017, at the Omni Amelia Island Plantation Resort near Jacksonville, Fla. > Click here for more info (Jake then link to the conference microsite page).
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