Lansing Trade Group increased subscribers for their Market Minute video series by 266% over the first 4 months.
Since 1922 Lansing Trade Group has been growing and building relationships focused on trading commodities such as whole grains, feed ingredients, and energy products via all modes of transportation in North America and internationally.
In order to grow and remain top of mind, they wanted to establish themselves as thought leaders, provide helpful industry information to their users, and continually add to their subscriber base.
To accomplish these goals, they decided to create a market-specific commentary video series that consisted of one YouTube video a day. Their Market Minute featured industry experts that shared daily insights on micro and macro factors that impact regional and global grain prices.
While YouTube was a great platform for them initially, it wasn’t giving them the metrics they desired. To better understand how their video series was performing and to gain more traction, they began looking for a way to house the videos on their site so that they could have more flexibility and the capability to glean more in-depth analytics.
That’s when they reached out to us — the marketing team at TANK New Media — for a solution.
Our Recommendation
Understanding their goals and what they were trying to accomplish, we recommended Wistia and HubSpot because together these two platforms could meet Lansing's needs and provide marketing ROI.
This powerful duo can generate leads through high-quality videos and pass detailed viewing data from one platform to the other. Once leads were in HubSpot's CRM, they could be scored, segmented, and assigned based on video triggers, ensuring each click of the play button moves the needle on critical business metrics. With Wistia and HubSpot’s marketing and analytics tools, Lansing’s investment in video was able to go a lot further and make a greater impact. Learn more about HubSpot’s Wistia integration.
Strategy and Implementation
After implementing HubSpot and setting up the Wista integration, we created landing pages for Lansing’s current user base to subscribe to the Market Minute which benefited them because they received daily emails promoting new videos in real time. These landing pages had one video on them and utilized the in-video Wistia turnstile form for data collection after the video completed.
To start growing the audience, we set up a workflow. The workflow consisted of a succession of three emails explaining the value of the Market Minute and prompting readers to go to the landing page, watch the video, and subscribe. So simple, yet so effective! Over the first six months, approximately 42% of users in the workflow subscribed to Market Minute.
Not long after the first video series launched and began gaining attention, Lansing added an afternoon recap video to the mix so all users would get both a morning and afternoon video.
Because the Lansing leadership team was ready to be more aggressive in their pursuit of subscribers outside of their customer base, we added a HubSpot Lead Flow Form to their site. We added it to pages where the videos would be relevant to website visitors. Guess what? The subscriber base gradually grew week over week.
To be sure we were maximizing the site traffic and generating as many leads as possible, we also added remarketing campaigns for people that visited key pages of the site. Over a 2-month period, these changes increased the subscriber list by 79%.
Knowing we needed to reach beyond just the traffic Lansing was getting on their site, we added in Facebook Lead Ad, targeting the ideal subscriber for the Market Minute. We created an ad form on Facebook that allowed visitors and followers to subscribe natively within the Facebook interface. Once they did that, their email addresses were automatically fed into HubSpot’s CRM. Over the first month, we saw another 70% increase in list growth.
Many users, we discovered, were now not only subscribing to the Market Minute, but also engaging with the Lansing’s website, email, and social media content. Additionally, playtime and engagement rates for the videos continued to climb with an average 61% play rate and with 81% completion rate.
The Results
So, what’s the skinny? How did our recommendation and strategy play out? Did we help Lansing meet their original goals to establish themselves as industry thought leaders, provide helpful information and reports to their users and beyond, and continually grow their potential user base? Yes!
We are pleased to say that they consistently provided helpful videos that established them as trusted thought leaders and their great video content paired with great tools like Wistia and HubSpot coupled with effective lead generation strategies such as targeted emails, landing pages, and social ads, their subscriber base grew substantially with 1,436% of total subscriber growth in the first year and a half of implementation!
Nailed it.
