In this case study, find out how we helped Lakeland – a producer of high-quality, high-performance protective garments – to launch marketing campaigns in Europe and better manage its HubSpot platform.
Lakeland – the background
Lakeland Industries Inc. is a multi-divisional, publicly held producer of quality and high-performance protective garments for industries worldwide.
Founded in 1982 and based in Ronkonkoma, New York, Lakeland has served companies in over 40 countries and is also a vendor to federal, state and local governments.
As well as chemical protective clothing, it also supplies reusable flame and heat protective woven garments, high visibility clothing, gloves and sleeves.
The challenge
Lakeland was looking to expand into Europe to further market its products and services internationally.
Whilst the company had grown consistently since opening its UK-based European division in 2002, it felt that a HubSpot-savvy UK partner would help take the company to the next level in terms of its marketing.
Lakeland wanted a partner that could help it to achieve recognition as one of the key global suppliers of protective clothing throughout European markets, particularly in the UK and Germany. This would allow Lakeland to launch quickly and with confidence that its new marketing campaigns would generate interest and leads.
“We’d had several years of working with HubSpot and implementing campaigns in North America and were looking for an agency that could assist us in replicating that for the European market.”
- Michael Schoonover, Vice President, Lakeland Industries
Developing buyer personas and content
Lakeland engaged The Huble Digital for advice, consultancy and support building its European marketing campaign. This started with the Huble Digital team running a buyer persona workshop to map out Lakeland’s European personas, focusing on key pain points and challenges for those individuals and teams.
Next, the Huble Digital team devised a content strategy and helped Lakeland to build a bank of blog and gated content to get up and running. The content programme consisted of blogging and an eBook every three months. All assets were optimised for long-tail keywords and pain points extremely relevant to Lakeland’s European personas. By blogging regularly and gating content, Lakeland would be able to quickly build its presence in Europe, attract the right people to the website and convert more leads.
Social media management and content amplification
As well as creating high-quality, search engine optimised content, Lakeland also needed to promote its products and services on social media to build brand awareness and attract potential clients.
To start, the Huble Digital team created a social media plan, helped Lakeland to set up its social media channels from scratch and created collateral for promotion on those channels.
From there, the Huble Digital team helped key spokespeople at Lakeland to join industry-specific groups on LinkedIn, audited and optimised their social profiles, and carried out hashtag research to find out what people were already searching for.
The Huble Digital team also created industry news tweets to ensure their new audience was being provided with industry-wide information and content, not just product focused. These tweets would help Lakeland demonstrate its PPE expertise and acquire followers interested in keeping up to date with the latest developments.
General HubSpot support
In addition to helping Lakeland with its content marketing and social media management, the Huble Digital team assisted with general HubSpot support.
This included building landing pages, publishing search engine optimised blog posts, using the social tool to drive awareness, and building lead nurture workflows to send content to contacts, keeping them engaged.
To ensure any marketing activity that was taking place outside of HubSpot could be accounted for and reported on effectively, the Huble Digital team also created tracking links for assets where necessary.
Finally, the Huble Digital team ran a training session for Lakeland’s international marketing director to explain the Inbound methodology and how to use HubSpot’s blogging, landing page and email tools to launch Inbound Marketing campaigns.
"The Huble Digital team has provided us with around-the-clock HubSpot support, acting as a valuable extension of our marketing team. With their support, we have been able to scale our marketing efforts considerably and focus on other business initiatives.
Also, thanks to their detailed training sessions, we now have a very thorough understanding of the different tools in HubSpot and how they can be used.”
- Martin Lill, International Marketing Director, Lakeland Industries
What happened next?
Because the campaigns worked well for English-speaking Europe in the first year, Lakeland wanted to do the same for Germany in the second year. The second campaign involved translating eBooks, blogs and some website copy for German-speaking audiences, while social media activity expanded to Xing to target German speaking channels.
Having seen the success of the content marketing programme, the Huble Digital team started producing pillar page content for Lakeland. These pillar pages were repurposed from existing eBooks and allowed Lakeland to further highlight its expertise in specific subject areas.
The results
As a result of the campaign, Lakeland’s activity in Europe has been excellent. Website traffic has improved significantly, eBook downloads are on the rise, and form submissions, conversion rates and blog traffic have increased.
1) Blog views:
81 views in September 2017, 325 views in May 2019 – an increase of 301% since the start of the engagement.
2) Twitter:
459 posts published, 345 followers since September 2017, and top-performing posts average 13 clicks.
3) LinkedIn:
209 posts published across LI company page and Martin’s profile, 88 followers since Sept 2017 and top-performing posts average 16 clicks.
4) Landing pages:
2,412 views, 511 submissions, 21% submission rate (all time totals).
As well as getting more people onto the website, Huble Digital’s social media activity has helped to establish Lakeland’s spokespeople as experts on LinkedIn and Lakeland’s following on Twitter has increased significantly.
All of this comes as a result of multiple marketing projects coming together to deliver a consistent, prospect-orientated experience. Social promotion, targeted email marketing, content creation, calls-to-action (CTAs) and pop-up forms on the website, all of these have helped drive activity for Lakeland.
Lakeland is now in a position where its website is generating organic traffic without promotional activity – and promotional activity is resonating well with its newly built audience.
As time goes on, Lakeland will most likely look to build out its content programmes further and target other areas of Europe, as well as promote quality material via its subject matter experts on social media.
“Thanks to The Huble Digital team, we’ve been able to develop a comprehensive marketing campaign that targets our key audiences in Europe. Our content is driving website traffic and engagement and our gated content assets are converting leads for our sales team to evaluate and distribute across the European team.”
- Martin Lill, International Marketing Director, Lakeland Industries
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