MRC Partners with Lynton for HubSpot Marketing Hub Success

The Customer

Marturano Recreation Company (MRC) is a leader in the park and playground equipment industry, with over 40 years of experience. They are a creative team of experts that help communities design parks and playgrounds from start to finish. 

These playgrounds and parks feature state-of-the-art, durable outdoor equipment, including GameTime (a partner of MRC) playgrounds, splash pads, safety surfacing options, outdoor fitness equipment, site amenities, bleachers, and custom metal furnishings. They work tirelessly to make playground and park visions a reality and, by working closely with their related brands, ensure people of all ages and abilities can enjoy them. 

Why They Sought Help

Before we began working with MRC, their team used a combination of MailChimp, GameTime’s quoting and sales tool, and a HubSpot marketing account that they shared with Playground Experts, a sub-brand of MRC that targets smaller audiences. Unfortunately, this resulted in disparate systems, disconnected communication, and siloed data.  For example, they had difficulty showing ROI for almost anything and ultimately couldn’t determine what marketing efforts led to sales -- something they were extremely interested in knowing. 

The lack of visibility caused anxiety for a team of intelligent, motivated playground and park design experts. On top of that, they had trouble making updates to their processes and getting internal users to adopt an outside portal and CRM. At this point, it was clear to them that they needed a HubSpot portal that would work for them. 

Knowing that HubSpot would allow them to create and monitor their efforts afforded the team a change of pace to truly stop and think about their marketing and sales strategy as a whole -- a vital component of any Lynton onboarding. With this in mind, we met regularly with the MRC crew to create a timeline and establish actionable goals to lead them to their desired outcomes: A team fully trained on a merged HubSpot portal (MRC + Playground Experts), ready to execute their sales and marketing initiatives!

The Solutions

While MRC plans to onboard both the CRM and Marketing Hub, our team started with the marketing platform first. After building out our onboarding roadmap and conducting our routine technical setups, such as gathering IP addresses, connecting domains and subdomains, user settings, and more, we worked on more significant onboarding initiatives. They included:

A Thorough Lead Management Strategy 

Kevin Page, the strategist who led the project for Lynton, is deeply experienced in lead generation and management. During various discussions, he and the MRC team realized MRC spent much of their time focused solely on generation. That means that when a lead came through their system, it thrilled MRC, but they didn’t quite know what to do with it afterward. 

Fortunately, Kevin took the time to completely map out how MRC (and GameTime) should handle every lead. These detailed instructions:

• Provided definitions and requirements for every type of lead and HubSpot lifecycle stage, including subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), opportunity, customer, evangelist, and “other”
• Detailed requirements for different kinds of lead status, such as pre-qualification, qualified, active deal, closed-won deal, inactive, re-engaged, and unqualified 
• Offered easy-to-implement and follow lead scoring positive and negative attributes, or the activities with number values that help determine when a lead becomes an MQL or SQL 
• Diagramed every possible scenario for what happens next regarding different leads, including whether or not they are sent certain information if they’re passed to a sales rep, if they hop on a Zoom call with a representative, and more 
• Determined who in the MRC team gets the leads and what role each person plays in moving them down the pipeline, including who needs to email someone when or who is best to handle talking with someone 

On top of this, our team also created the related content to supplement some of these lead processes. We worked on one-off emails, lead nurtures, and the design of relevant templates. 

A Detailed Chatbot

To help generate leads and help nurture them, our team worked on an in-depth chatbot strategy. After working through the rules and coming up with an on-brand script for every possible interaction, we built the chatbot to MRC’s specifications. It starts with an initial welcome message that branches into five main categories: 

• Upcoming project
• Current customers
• Interested prospects
• Visitors
• Just browsing

From there, the chatbot presents users with appropriate follow-up questions until they reach their ultimate result, which can include everything from subscribing to the MRC blog, learning more about specific equipment, or speaking directly to a team member. 

PPC Advertising and Other Marketing Training 

Learning the advertising tool in HubSpot is a crucial part of understanding Marketing Hub. Because we know MRC engaged in advertising before, we taught them how to track various ads, specifically PPC. As part of this subproject, we had our designers create custom landing pages for every ad group. Then we worked out the strategy and wrote the copy, showing the MRC team where to find the reporting within HubSpot. 

In a similar vein, we trained the MRC team on other similar tools such as:

• The workflows tool, including how to build, personalize, and automate various email campaigns 
• Campaigns tools, emphasizing how to create them and build goals, audiences, and budgets and associate the appropriate content 
• Custom reporting, showcasing how to build dashboards that will help them optimize processes over time and reflect the unique nature of their work

Various Content Marketing Efforts

As an agile agency, our team can adjust projects as needed. During our onboarding process with MRC, both groups decided that working on some content marketing pieces in place of more training would be beneficial. This included copy and design and efforts such as:

• A fleshed-out content marketing strategy that highlighted different pieces of designed and written material for various personas, stages of the buyer’s journey, and keywords 
• A complete redesign of their catalog page, with development included (this was an essential task for the MRC team as the catalogs are crucial pieces of their sales and marketing processes)
• A lengthy pillar page centered around the topic of “inclusive playground design,” a topic near and dear to the MRC team’s heart 

The most crucial piece to every implemented tactic, strategy, or content piece is built with intention. Everything exists in HubSpot properly, with the correct automation and related notes, tagging, and more. We did this to ensure that as we onboarded new components, we set the MRC team up for success. They can go in and recreate things with ease, and best of all have an accurate way of connecting everything that they do back to their contacts. 

The Results

When it comes to the Lynton and MRC onboarding process, the most apparent and substantial result is the partnership we’ve developed. A real trust exists between us, allowing us to knock out one onboarding piece after another, with a bit of content marketing sprinkled in. During this project, the impression we left on them also convinced MRC to continue working with us on additional marketing strategy and training for another year. We’ll also be helping them learn Sales Hub in the upcoming months as outlined in the initial discovery process and continue to work toward and refine goals over time. 

And we think it’s going to go swimmingly. Just take a look at what MRC has to say: