Steeped in South African heritage, Hazendal is one of South Africa’s oldest and most interesting wine estates, with a history dating back to 1699.
Hazendal underwent extensive renovations in 2018 and offers guests a wide range of experiences. The estate now includes a wedding and conference venue, kids edutainment, luxury accommodation, driving range and executive golf course, and of course wine tasting and a fine dining restaurant.
It truly is a gem to behold - If you haven’t visited yet, you should!!
The Challenge?
Hazendal needed to develop a marketing strategy that would help them increase organic visibility, brand awareness, and centralise marketing and sales data.
Specifically, Hazendal wanted to:
- Increase organic traffic and online visibility to effectively compete against competitor brands.
- Reduce overall lead acquisition costs across campaigns.
- To effectively remove data silos by consolidating marketing and sales data into one centralised system.
The Solution?
To help Hazendal achieve its goals, we created a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy, that looked like this:
- A buyer persona workshop helped uncover some key insights into Hazendal’s current customers.
- A deep dive into industry trends and data on Hazendal’s competitors.
- A full audit of Hazendal’s existing marketing materials.
- A 12-month blogging calendar that included 4 quarterly content campaigns.
- A technical onboarding onto each of the HubSpot Marketing Pro, Sales Pro and Service Pro tools to centralise each of the team's data into a fully customised HubSpot portal.
Time to Execute:
Content Production Started. With the blogging and campaign calendar confirmed, we moved into the production of the agreed-upon content assets.
Content Campaigns Launched. We launched several content campaigns that were tailored to Hazendal’s buyer persona’s. These campaigns were supported by our blog content and targeted paid social media to generate leads and drive awareness.
Custom Landing Pages. We launched targeted landing pages across the website to increase visitor to lead conversion rates across the site.
Paid Social Media. Through Facebook and Instagram advertising we wanted to expand Hazendal’s audience reach and effectively bring down their overall lead acquisition costs.
The Results?
Hazendal has seen a 237% increase in organic traffic in 12 months.
Organic growth remained minimal while onboarding, content production and SEO audits were being worked on. In October 2020, a month into Hazendal’s HubSpot journey they amassed only 5604 organic sessions.
With the release of the first round of content at the start of 2021, we began to see a noticeable increase in organic traffic and engagement.
So much so, Hazendal’s organic traffic in October of 2021 reached 18,888 sessions.
That’s more than 3X the amount of organic traffic since the launch of the content strategy.
How did the custom landing pages perform?
The organic growth had a direct impact on the overall campaign performance too. The custom HubSpot landing pages saw a significant improvement in the contact conversion rates across the site.
Hazendal’s landing pages on average converted new visitors to contacts at 19.89% since their launch in March of 2021. Performing well above the expected industry average of just 3%.
The performance of content, and the associated landing pages was especially encouraging considering the various levels of lockdown laws, implemented as a result of COVID-19, which directly affected the estate's ability to operate.
How did the paid social media campaigns fare?
Paid social media was used to drive brand awareness and as a way to retarget and nurture leads.
In fact, the average cost per lead for the campaigns was R11.90. Well under the projected outcomes for the campaigns.
The Impact?
The content campaigns addressing each stage of the buyer’s journey influenced a significant amount of weddings revenue throughout the year too.
In fact weddings at Hazendal enjoyed a 100% increase in quarterly influenced revenue from the quarter preceding the launch of the first campaign to the following quarter, and has enjoyed a significant upward trend in revenue since.
Our partnership with the team at Uku Inbound has been an great success. The extensive research and comprehensive inbound marketing strategy the team put together, laid the foundations for some exceptional results. As a highly professional, collaborative and friendly team, the Uku’s have been integral in the improvements we’ve seen across our digital campaigns thus far.
If you would like to learn more about how inbound marketing and HubSpot can help drive growth for your business, then click 👉 here to get in touch, we’d love to see how we can help you.