Enonic’s inbound journey

Enonic is a cloud and software company offering the open source digital experience platform Enonic XP. With Enonic XP developers can get started fast and build solutions without friction, and web editors get a user friendly and flexible content management system.

But how does one market such a complex product? How do we reach out to the world when we’re dealing with advanced conceptual issues like JavaScript, cloud hosting, security architecture, and headless CMS?

We are selective and use smart and modern marketing principles—namely inbound marketing. Read on and see how we have made our inbound journey up until present day.

Why inbound?

As you can imagine, Enonic’s product is directed toward other businesses, making us essentially a B2B company. And unlike B2C, the sales cycle in B2B is long. Researching, testing, considering, and buying a new digital platform for an organisation is not like buying a drink or a car. Multiple stakeholders are involved, sizeable budgets are required, and one is expected to deal with the new solution for several years to come.

Inbound marketing is a superior method to nurture leads when the buyer’s cycle is lengthy, the sales process is complex, and many stakeholders are involved. In addition, Enonic wanted international expansion and a structure to all our marketing efforts.

Old marketing methods like cold calling and advertising just don’t work anymore. And luckily, we discovered inbound marketing and the marketing automation suite HubSpot.

Editorial process

While marketing automation is helpful, it’s worthless without quality content at the core. Together with our inbound agency Avidly, we decided to create a thorough editorial process. The following describes a cyclical process that’s repeated when we’re out of new content or will start marketing toward a new target group.

As a preparation, we first build a persona—a semi fictional representation of our ideal customer in a given segment. Then we arrange a content workshop, where we brainstorm ideas for blog posts and premium content. After this we plot all the proposed blog titles into a publishing calendar, complete with author, funnel stage, and associated premium content.

See also: WordPress vs. Enonic XP »

After having set the general course, the time is ripe for fleshing out the individual blog posts with order forms. An order form is like a recipe, a blueprint for the future real life blog post. In an order form we outline the structure and essential information we want to include, and then it’s time for the actual copywriting, the making of the blog posts.

After a process of reviewing from internal experts and our external inbound agency, the blog post is ready. Following the publishing calendar, one finished blog post after the other is published through Enonic XP. In conjecture with the publishing, we also use HubSpot to create pop-up forms, social media distribution, and general analysis.

Enonic and HubSpot

As you might know, HubSpot features a CMS in addition to its marketing automation and sales process capabilities. But in Enonic we take our own medicine and consequently publishes all content on our own platform. So what function goes where? Here’s an essential overview:

Sales process

HubSpot replaced our old CRM Salesforce, and we use the platform to support and help our sales department. Sales get handed qualified leads through lead scoring in HubSpot CRM, where points are dealt out based on defined actions like visiting a page, opening an email, and downloading content.

When people reach SQL (sales qualified lead) status, a deal is created automatically in HubSpot. This supports our sales process tremendously, and all SQLs are followed up systematically by sales and in the weekly sales meeting.

Learn more about our CMS: Short introduction to Enonic Content Studio »

Enonic and Avidly

As mentioned, our inbound marketing and HubSpot partner agency is Avidly. But again, who does what? Here is an essential overlook on who has the main responsibility for what:

Delighting customers

One of the central tenets of inbound marketing is that you’re not done with marketing once you have acquired a customer and the ink on the contract has dried. Delighting existing customers and making brand ambassadors is essential, and several efforts are undertaken in Enonic to ensure this.

Every month we send two manually curated newsletters, one for developers and one for web editors. Both open and click rates are way above industry averages, showcasing the engagement of our customers.

In addition, we have a weekly and monthly blog email digest, quarterly meetups with our community, and several workflow and nurture campaigns—aimed at providing our readership with helpful content.

Read more about our awesomeness: What makes Enonic your choice?

Results

The result of inbound marketing, of all these efforts?

• An increase in leads
• An increase in pipeline value and revenue
• An increase in subscribers
• An increase in organic traffic
• An increase in general visibility on the web and on the market
• Helping existing customers
• Supporting sales processes

Overall, things are looking good and we’re quite happy we chose the inbound path to grow faster.