How Inbound Marketing Helped a Niche Chinese Business to Increase Sales by 200%

Our first obstacle to overcome was to create a professional image for PEL that made them stand out over the competition who were all using stock image pictures. Using our photography services to capture images of the laboratory and the PEL employees at work was instrumental in helping to create a professional and trustworthy image for a niche Chinese company that has a long consultative sales process.

We modernised the company logo, fonts and colours, which immediately elevated the brand and gave us a strong design base to work from. With the new creatives, we set out to build an industry-leading company site for PEL, given the importance of possessing a high performing B2B site in the Asian market. To learn more about the design work we did for PEL and the success of the new website constructed with our web development services, please see this case study.

Overseeing buyer persona research and development for PEL via our inbound marketing services was crucial to be able to create relevant and educational content for C-level leads who are decision makers at their companies. It was easy to find ‘shallow’ content on eyewear inspection online but nothing in-depth, especially about manufacturing specifically in China. Through interviewing PEL management and existing clients we were able to divide buyer personas into three main groups: eyewear startup, eyewear production manager and eyewear OEM salesman.

To start, we immediately expanded the descriptions of all of PEL’s services and ‘fleshed out’ content wherever we could on the website after translating PEL’s internal Chinese documentation with our specialised Chinese content audit services. After doing significant keyword research with AHREF’s we were able to identify key areas in which we could start building content around. Through the strict use of the HubSpot inbound methodology, we were able to create content at the awareness, consideration and decision stages on topics that our buyer personas were actively searching for. We had to think outside the box, by diving into areas that were slightly un-related to PEL’s core service offering that had a lot of traffic, such as “eyewear sourcing in China”, which we successfully created high-traffic blogs on to boost the website’s domain rating.

Recognising the importance of content marketing in China, we wrote many successful blogs and generated numerous leads through ebook offers. From there, we began to start the lead nurturing process. Our monthly blog emails, new offers and our automated system outreach caused leads to interact with more and more content until eventually converting into MQL/SQL’s.

Starting from scratch meant that waiting for keywords to trend organically and running some ancillary ads would not be enough to get leads flowing in the first year. In order to get our content and offers in front of the people who matter we utilised our sales enablement services to develop and embark on an aggressive ABM strategy with our client’s assistance on LinkedIn. By sourcing industry related contacts and relevant groups for our client, they were then able to add these contacts and participate in these groups. By promoting blogs and offers on LinkedIn and taking a very active approach to replying to comments on forums and Reddit, we were able to spike our engagement and collect quality leads via the HubSpot forms on the website. The HubSpot social tool played an important part here in allowing us to easily collect questions and comments from leads and followers to pass onto management at PEL when the questions were too technical for our team to handle.