Inbound marketing relies on gaining and retaining the interest of potential clients or customers through various digital marketing tactics. At its core, it is the process of providing valuable information that attracts visitors to your website and guides them through the journey of becoming a lead for your business.

Why Do I Need Inbound Marketing?

The digital age has changed the way consumers seek out information. Today, consumers are actively searching online for products or services that solve their problems.

Inbound marketing focuses on providing resources for those individuals seeking information. As a business, you have the opportunity to provide information that meets their needs and answers their questions through your website. Inbound marketing is essential to keep your brand relevant and top of mind.

Can I Implement Inbound Marketing on My Own?

Absolutely. An individual company can certainly implement an inbound marketing strategy on their own. However, a true, results-driven inbound marketing strategy is not something you can set and forget; it is a long-term strategy that requires constant, focused effort to make it work.

There are many resources out there like this one that can help you navigate the complex world of inbound marketing. But depending on your individual resources and availability, you may consider seeking out an agency that specializes in inbound marketing. Either way, it’s important to have a solid grasp on the basics before getting started.

CHAPTER 1

How Inbound Marketing Works

When it comes to marketing, there are numerous opportunities for business to grow. However, because every business is different, marketing in general is never a one-size-fits-all approach. While traditional marketing methods still have a place for many businesses, the ever-increasing shift to digital means that those traditional methods are becoming more and more obsolete and can cost more money. Businesses are being forced to adapt to new tactics in order to reach their customers in the digital world.

Inbound marketing involves getting your message about your products or your services to the people that are seeking them out. It’s all about showing up in search engine results for searches related to your business, rather than the traditional approach of forcing your message on people that aren’t interested.

There are many inbound marketing tactics that can help support the shift to digital. Building a message to reach an audience may seem simple, and in many ways, it is. The whole purpose and goal of inbound marketing is to get your business top of mind for those prospects searching for something related to your business. But navigating inbound marketing terminology can be slightly overwhelming if you’re just getting started.

Glossary of Terms

Inbound Marketing:

Inbound Marketing is the process of creating and generating qualified leads. While traditional marketing is all about blasting customers with direct mail, TV, radio, and magazine ads, inbound marketing uses content that is meant to appeal to your ideal customer, attract them to your business, and keep them coming back for more.

Marketing Automation Software:

Digital marketing comes with many tasks that allow marketers to reach and cultivate leads. These methods include:

Creating and publishing blog posts
Sharing social content
Maintaining an online presence
Sending emails.

These tasks can take up all of a marketer’s time quickly, leaving no room for anything else. Having a software that automates many of these things frees up valuable time.

Here are a few examples:

CMS (Content Management System):

A Content Management System allows a user to manipulate the content of a website (pages, blogs, etc.). WordPress is the most popular and secure option available.

COS (Content Optimization System):

Many marketing automation softwares, such as HubSpot, take CMS one step further with a Content Optimization System. This allows users to manipulate content in the same way as a CMS, but also integrates the entire marketing platform.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management):

CRM is the set of strategies and technologies that sales teams use to analyze and manage customer interactions. The goal is to use this data to provide a more nurturing relationship that takes visitors through the process of becoming a customer.

Lead:

A lead is a person who has expressed interest in your product or service by downloading an offer, filling out a form, or requesting more information. The goal of digital marketing is to attract visitors and turn them into leads.

Lead Gen (Lead Generation) Campaign:

A Lead Generation Campaign uses your website, content, and social platforms to create new leads for your business. The campaign involves creating a valuable, relevant offer for your audience, sharing it through blogs and social, and capturing emails through landing pages and forms.

Keywords:

Keywords are the words your audience uses when they search for your product or service. Keywords can be divided into two main groups:

Head terms: short, specific words about a subject (for example, “dog grooming”)
Long-tail keywords: a group of words about a subject (“dog grooming lubbock tx)

Using keywords on your website and in your blog is an art, and should be handled with care.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

SEO involves developing content around the words your audience would likely use when searching for your product or service and integrating them on your website in ways that are relevant and valuable. It’s important to conduct keyword research when building your SEO plan to ensure you are using words that your audience is truly searching for.

The key with SEO is to think like your potential customers. The more you can put yourself in their shoes, the more likely you are to be able to create content that is appealing to them.

SEO is abused often. Cramming a blog post full of keywords for the sake of having those keywords doesn’t result in genuine leads, and often turns away potential customers. But, when you think like your customers and use the words they are using in the way they are using them, while providing valuable information, you will attract leads to your business.

Blog:

A blog is a section of your website that allows you to house pieces of content written about topics related to your business (called blog posts). Blogs can cover a range of educational topics such as pain points, solutions, and other relevant industry news to help your customers solve a problem. The key to success with a blog is to consistently provide relevant, helpful information that uses keywords in a natural, effective way. Misusing your blog by stuffing it full of keywords in an irrelevant way will only go badly for your business.

Content Offer:

While significantly more time-consuming for your team, content offers such as eBooks, white papers, case studies and infographics can help you not only increase your position in the search engine results page, but also supports lead generation for your business. Because content offers are typically more robust than a blog, they provide businesses with the opportunity to ask for information in exchange for providing the content offer to the prospect.

CTA (Call-to-Action):

A button, link, or image that encourages your audience to take an action (i.e. “click here for your free download”, “chat with us today”, “contact us for your free evaluation”). This action usually involves how the user claims your content offer.

Landing Page:

A landing page is a page on your website that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a form. Visitors come to the landing page with the purpose of downloading or claiming a free offer, such as ebook, guide, checklist, case study, etc.

Webinar:

Like other written content offers, webinars provide businesses with an opportunity to generate leads, educate their audience about the products or services, and position themselves as thought leads in their industry. Webinars can be pre-recorded or in a live video format.

Workflow:

Workflows are a series of systems that are setup to automatically occur after a specific trigger. For example, any users who download a pool guide on your pool maintenance website could receive a series of three follow up emails comparing and contrasting different pool options.

CHAPTER 2

Inbound Marketing Myths

Myth #1:

Inbound Marketing is a Fad

At its core, inbound marketing is the process of providing value and useful information to prospects, make the business visible, earn trust, and nurture the prospect until you earn the sale. In reality, inbound marketing is the digital version of the same marketing that has stood the test of time. It’s simply a more scalable, efficient, and modern way to approach marketing.

Myth #2:

A Marketing Agency with a Single Person Is Just as Capable as a Team

Many businesses make the mistake of thinking one individual is capable of doing every facet of inbound marketing as efficiently as a team could. This is simply not the case. It’s true, an individual person is likely very capable of performing all the individual marketing tasks that make up inbound marketing, but thinking one person can do all of them in one job role, and do them well, is simply not true. Inbound marketing takes time and a lot of planning, management, and execution. It takes significant effort to pull it off successfully.

Myth #3:

Inbound is The New Term for SEO

Terminology in the marketing world is constantly changing as times change. So it’s very common for businesses to get confused about what inbound marketing and search engine optimization are. Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually a segment of inbound.

While inbound marketing is the practice of providing valuable resources to prospects, SEO is just a facet of what is needed to effectively build those resources for search engines.

Myth #4:

SEO is a Scam

Sure, SEO has gotten a bad rep due to its association with black hat techniques. Tactics like buying inbound links, keyword stuffing and shady link-exchange programs are all bad practices that smart marketers avoid. But, with Google leading the change, modern SEO has left black hat techniques behind and has shifted its focus from search engines to the person doing the search. The act of tricking robots into pushing a business into higher rankings is long gone, being replaced by much more intelligent bots that are able to index pages with qualities that a human would find valuable.

Myth #5:

Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Content Marketing are Competing Ideologies

This myth is a complete misunderstanding of the inbound methodology. To clarify, we’ll break down the definitions of each. Content marketing is the creation and distribution of quality content to a clearly defined target market. Content marketing is integral to every stage of inbound marketing: attract, convert, close, delight. Like content marketing, and as explained above, SEO is just a facet of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing encompasses multiple tactics to reach target audiences.

Myth #6:

Inbound Marketing Shows Results Immediately

No form of marketing can guarantee overnight success and inbound marketing is no exception. It takes time to develop valuable content alone, and even more time for search engines to index all those pages to increase your position in search results. And never forget, it also takes time to lead people through the sales funnel from strangers to sales. Therefore, this myth is very easily debunked.

Myth #7:

Inbound Marketing Has One Secret Formula for Everyone

CHAPTER 3

The 4 Phases Of Inbound Marketing

As we said in Chapter 1, inbound marketing is the process of creating and generating qualified leads. To clarify, when we use the word “lead,” we mean a person who has expressed an interest in your product or service. This interest is shown by downloading an offer, filling out a form, or requesting more information about your product or service. Generating leads with inbound marketing is simply the process of attracting visitors to your business and turning them into known leads.

Hubspot breaks down the process of inbound marketing into 4 phases: Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.

The 4 Phases of Inbound Marketing

Attract

Throughout all of these stages, it’s important to ensure that you’re attracting the right type of visitors and leads to your company by building out your buyer personas. But we’ll cover more on that in Chapter 5. The value of thinking of your inbound marketing strategy in these stages is that it allows you to tailor your messaging based on where a contact falls in the buyer’s journey. There are many benefits to building an effective inbound marketing strategy. We’ll cover those in the next chapter!

Convert

The process of a visitor coming to your site and discovering their desire for more information about your business is where a visitor becomes a lead. Visitors to your site have a choice: either build a relationship with you, or leave and never come back. This is the phase that helps prompt a visitor to provide information through contact forms or content offers.

Close

In this phase of inbound marketing, your team is nurturing the relationship with the new lead through whatever communication means necessary to seal the deal and close the customer.

Delight

Once a lead becomes a customer, the relationship doesn’t end there. You have the opportunity to take them from a customer to a promoter of your business: someone who will gladly share about you to friends and family. The way to create people who are passionate about your business is by continuing to provide them great value. Create special offers and discounts for them, continue to offer valuable information, and commit to the best customer service possible.

CHAPTER 4

The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Throughout this guide, we’ve touched on several pieces of inbound, but we haven’t nailed down the actual benefits you can expect to see from a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Here are a few benefits to a building a successful inbound marketing strategy:

Build Authority

Inbound marketing is an excellent solution for building your brand authority and awareness. By creating quality content and having a strong social media presence, you’re able to showcase your brand as a thought leader by educating your audience through your website. For example, think about a specific brand you follow online. What are they doing that makes you so adamant to return regularly and read what they write? Chances are, they are providing you with valuable content that interests you and makes them appear trustworthy and reliable. Your goal as a business should be to position yourselves in the same way to your prospects and customers. You want to be the expert in your industry and you want to be able to build that trust. You accomplish this through inbound marketing.

Another way to build authority is by developing relationships with brands that have a high domain authority. This approach can take significantly longer, however it can help you tremendously in the long run.

Some of the best methods to receive high quality backlinks are:

Have a Strong Social Presence Convert: The process of a visitor coming to your site and discovering their desire for more information about your business is where a visitor becomes a lead. Visitors to your site have a choice: either build a relationship with you, or leave and never come back. This is the phase that helps prompt a visitor to provide information through contact forms or content offers.
Ask to Guest Post: As we noted, getting high quality backlinks from well-known brands typically isn’t an easy process. Often times it will take a member of your team reaching out to these websites to see if you can create a guest post on their site. When you do your outreach, be very specific about who your company is and how your guest post can be of value to them and their audience.
Ask for a Link: Similar to asking for a guest post, sometimes you may need to do outreach to see if a high quality domain will link to a piece of content that you created. It is imperative that the piece of content you created is extremely valuable to their audience, otherwise asking for a link is a lost cause.

When you do your outreach for high quality backlinks, it is vital that you don’t sound spammy. There’s no better way to turn people off to your brand than to sound like a spammer.

Just keep in mind: building authority takes hard work. It’s not something that will happen easily or overnight without your team putting in the necessary time to generate these backlinks.

Reach New Audiences

Since inbound marketing is a digital strategy, it allows you to reach new markets and audiences with your campaigns that you may not have been able to reach through traditional methods, such as direct mail, radio, billboards and TV ads. When companies use direct mail, radio, or tv ads, they’re casting a wide net and hoping that the right people get the message.

With inbound marketing, you can create content that targets the exact audience that you want to turn into customers. You could target 35-year-old males that are homeowners, drive a truck, and have an income over $100,000. While the audience you’re targeting does become smaller the more narrow you segment, you are able to be more detailed in your marketing message because you know exactly who you’re marketing to.

Maintain a Digital Presence

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that inbound marketing isn’t about quick wins, it’s about building a smart strategy that will work well for you consistently and over time. A major benefit to building inbound the right way is that it helps you maintain a digital presence that works for you 24/7. Your digital presence is always living and breathing online. When you create a valuable piece of content, like a blog, an eBook, or a webinar that ranks well on search engines, that piece of content will continue to bring quality traffic to your website - even after your team has moved on to the next big thing.

Additionally, repurposing that valuable content is a smart approach to your inbound efforts. Turning a robust eBook into several smaller, easily digestible blogs is a great way to create valuable content - either with limited or unlimited resources. The fact is, people consume information differently, so providing similar content in different formats is one way to create content for multiple audiences.

In order for your company to truly reap the benefits of inbound marketing, there are things your company needs to be well-versed in.

CHAPTER 5

The Value Of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20.

How Can You Use Buyer Personas?

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas. If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity). When combined with lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along someone is in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content.

What Are Negative Personas?

Whereas a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a negative – or “exclusionary” – persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer. This could include, for example, professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who are only engaging with your content for research/knowledge, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire (because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company.)

How Do You Create Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. (For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms. You could also gather information on what forms of social media your leads use by asking a question about social media accounts.)
Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. (What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?)

CHAPTER 6

Why Keyword Research Matters

Keyword research is the process of finding words or phrases that your audience is searching for on the internet. After identifying your target keywords, you can use them and integrate them into your content marketing strategy to attract visitors to your website.

Keyword Research Tips

When you start researching keywords, begin by jotting down topics that are relevant to your business. Initially, keep the topics fairly broad, and remember to always keep your buyer personas in mind. After you come up with topics that are relevant to your business, consider relevant keywords within each topic. For example, if you were a realtor, one of your topics may be ‘selling a home.’ Some keyword phrases that fall under that topic could be:

How to sell your house
Hiring a realtor
Sell your home with a realtor
How to choose a realtor when selling

Obviously there are several keywords that you could note. The key here is to think of as many relevant phrases for each topic. This isn’t your final list of keywords yet, so feel free to write down whatever comes to mind.

Keyword Research Tools

If you are struggling to come up with keywords that are relevant to your business, fortunately there are several tools that can help you.

Google’s Related Searches

This is a great tool to find keywords that are relevant to your business. Type a phrase into Google, and at the bottom it shows you related searches that other users are looking for.

Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner allows you to type a keyword that is relevant to your business and it will populate keyword ideas for you. It will also provide historical data on each individual keyword, including competitive rankings for each.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz allows you to search two separate queries per day and provides 1,000 keywords related to each search. It also lets you export the keyword list to a .CSV file, along with showing you monthly search data, ranking difficulty, and the relevancy to the query you originally searched for.

Finalize Your Keywords

After you’ve established your topics, identified your keywords, and used the tools we listed above, it’s time to finalize your keyword list. You should decide which keywords and phrases that your business wants to integrate into your content marketing strategy.

A good rule of thumb is to try to rank for keywords that have high monthly searches, but low difficulty scores. This is the quickest way to start gaining traction from your keywords.

While keyword research is very important, you must execute and create content around the keywords you researched for it to be valuable for your business.

CHAPTER 7

Building An Effective Inbound
Marketing Strategy

We live in a world where people crave information as much as they crave their favorite foods. This quest for information presents a unique opportunity for you to connect with your audience by both engaging them with information they care about, and by providing them with valuable knowledge through content. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, businesses must create and execute an effective inbound marketing strategy.

We’re talking about a marketing approach that is focused upon the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant content with the purpose of generating leads. Here are 6 steps you can take to create an effective inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Determine Your Goals

Before you can begin planning and executing any sort of strategy, you need to nail down what you are trying to accomplish. Your goals must be specific, or SMART. It’s not helpful to say, “I want more customers for my heating and cooling company.” Instead, you need to decide your target. Do you want to increase your revenue for Q4 from the services side of your business? Are you wanting to see an increase in customers who call you for new installations in a specific location? Is your goal to be more proactive with customers, and encourage them to service their units before the winter season? Each of these goals would require different content, so you have to know what you want to accomplish before you start publishing.

Know Your Ideal Customer

Once you you know your goals, you need to do everything you can to determine your ideal customer. By taking the time to know who your ideal customer is, as well as the problems they want solved, you will be able to create content that they find valuable. The best way to identify your ideal customer is to build out buyer personas. Remember those from Chapter 3?

Conduct a Content Audit

Take the time to evaluate the content you may already have. Even if it was created before a strategy was put into place, could it be reworked to suit your goals? A content audit should also explore how any existing content was received by your audience. If you wrote a blog previously, how did it perform? Could it be expanded on to develop a larger eBook? Once you have a good idea of the current state of your content, what you can rework, and what types of content have performed the best, you can begin to take steps to build out your content marketing plan.

Build a Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is one of the largest pieces of the inbound marketing pie and it takes a lot of time, especially if it is going to be done well. Before you jump right into writing and creating content, you need a way to manage your content. Who will be responsible for managing your content and what systems or software will you use to manage it? If your team is limited, will you need to hire for this role or should you consider outsourcing? Once you’ve decided how you plan to manage the plan, you’ll need to build it. Because this content strategy exists as part of a greater marketing strategy, you need to know what kind of content you’re going to create in order to attract visitors that will become leads. In order to accomplish this, you will need some of the following types of content: blogs, offers (such as eBooks, guides, checklists), and social media posts to attract people to the blogs and offers. You’ll also be able to decide what photos and videos you will need within your content marketing. Our team prefers to plan out our content at least a month in advance. This doesn’t mean that all of our content has been created a month ahead, but that we know the plan a month in advance. You might want to start with a week or two weeks at a time, and then work up to a monthly strategy.

This can be as simple as an excel sheet, but here are some of the things you will want to include:

Which topics will you cover?
Who is the target audience for this topic?
What is this person’s stage in the inbound marketing process?
What is the best format for this content?
What is the next step? (If this is a blog, what CTA and offer will you include?)
When (and how) will you publish this content?

Because you’ve taken the time to establish your goals, audience, and lead generation strategy, and to do your research, you are well prepared to begin creating your content. Make sure that you allow time within your plan to edit this content, so that everything you share is high-quality.

Distribute Content

Once this content is created, you need to share it with the world. Post it on your social media pages, share it in an email to your contacts, or create a digital ad for it. The purpose of this content is to generate leads for your business. As you’re planning the best way to distribute the content you have created, lead generation needs to be at the front of your mind. If you just publish your content online without it being part of any sort of plan, you will lose out on effectiveness.

Analyze Your Data

When it comes to inbound marketing, you can never stop analyzing your performance. Which blogs drive the greatest number of visitors? How can you change your landing pages or forms to see maximum conversions? Which email subject lines have the best open rates? The process of analyzing, testing, improving, and analyzing some more will help you to get the greatest return possible for the content you create.

CHAPTER 8

Measuring Your Inbound Marketing Success

You could spend all day and night developing your buyer personas, researching your keywords, and building out your content marketing plan, but all your efforts will be for nothing if you aren’t analyzing and tracking the success of your strategy. Here are the most important metrics you should be tracking to fully understand the true success of your inbound marketing efforts.

Website Traffic

This is a simple metric but a very important one. How many people are coming to your website? Knowing the answer to this question will help you understand the success of your brand awareness strategy. This is also a metric you want to measure over time. Make note of where you started, where you’re headed, and the results you’d like to see that will make the most impact. Your website traffic is the first step towards building lead generation.

Website Traffic by Source

Understanding where your website traffic is actually coming from is a great metric to measure because it helps you focus your efforts. The major website traffic sources are:

Direct Traffic: Visitors that type your exact business web address in their address bar.
Organic Search: Visitors that get to your website from search engines.
Referral: Visitors that come to your website from another referring site.
Social: Visitors who got to your website from a social media link.
Paid Search: Visitors from a paid advertisement, such as Google or Bing ads.

If you see these numbers continuously grow over time, it typically means that your content is considered valuable by both visitors and search engines.

Leads

Leads are those individuals that provide their information through contact forms or in exchange for a piece of content or valuable tool. Tracking your lead metrics, such as how many leads you get per month, what pages or offers are driving the most leads, as well as the actual persona data helps you better understand the value of your content as well as the stages of the buyer’s journey for your business.

Site-Wide Conversion Rate

Your site-wide conversion rate is the rate at which your website is converting unknown visitors into known leads. This metric helps you identify which pages are resulting in the highest number of conversions throughout your entire site. A typical site-wide conversion rate is around 1-3%.

Social Reach

Understanding the number of followers you have on social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn is the best way to measure your social reach. The higher this number is, the more people you are likely to reach with your content promotion on social sites.

Email Click Rates

Once a lead opens an email, it’s important to measure the performance of the content within the email. Email click rates provide you with engagement data. This metric helps you understand whether or not your email was engaging enough to drive action from your prospects and leads. If your email click rates are low, you may need to position your content differently to drive the engagement you’re looking for. It’s also important to note the relationship between open and click rates. For example, if you send an email with a high open rate but a low click rate, there could be a connection. Perhaps your subject line was misleading and the prospect or lead was expecting different content within the email copy. Whatever the reason, these are important metrics to consider as part of analyzing your data.

Customers

At the end of the day, we all want more customers from our marketing efforts. And while all the above metrics are incredibly important, tracking a metric that shows actual measurable ROI is by far the most valuable. Not only will tracking customer data show a direct return on your investment from your inbound marketing strategy, you can also gain valuable insight into the customer lifecycle, such as how many touch points were needed or how many days it took for a lead to close into a customer.

While these are not the only inbound marketing metrics you could and should track, these are some of the most important that can be a direct reflection on how well your inbound marketing is performing.

CHAPTER 9

The Value Of Inbound Marketing
With HubSpot

It’s no secret that we’re passionate about inbound marketing. We believe it’s a proven, effective way to generate leads. But, it’s also no secret that executing an inbound marketing strategy involves a lot of time, energy, and resources in order for it to be effective. This is where tools like Hubspot become very valuable. HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform designed to generate more traffic, leads and customers for your business. It provides the support and tools you need to turn visitors into customers. When you combine the use of a proven methodology like inbound with a powerful tool like Hubspot, you are able to increase efficiency, streamline systems and processes, track results, and create a stronger alignment between your sales and marketing teams.

Here are a few valuable reasons why implementing your inbound marketing with Hubspot is something to consider.

Inbound Marketing Experts

We might even say they were the first to create the term. Every single piece of their software is created with the intent of generating leads for your business. Not only has Hubspot created one of the most powerful tools on the market, they also use inbound marketing for themselves.

Single Platform

Hubspot is the only software on the market with its very own CRM. This means that everything you need to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer’s lifecycle is all in one place. This centralized system is also very valuable in maintaining a consistent flow of information from marketing to sales and vice-versa.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation allows you to take certain aspects of your inbound marketing tasks and automates them, allowing you to focus more intentionally on other areas of your marketing strategy. You can automate things like emails, social publishing, and workflows. While it’s very easy to automate specific tasks, it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean set and forget. You’ll want to check back on your marketing automation regularly and make changes when necessary.

Personalization

Along with marketing automation, Hubspot allows you to personalize your inbound marketing for visitors once they have become a lead. For example, if a visitor downloads an eBook on ‘dryscaping’ from your landscaping company, they will begin to see smart CTAs targeted toward drought tolerant landscaping. If a user has already filled out a smart form on one of your landing pages, the next time they visit a landing page with a form, they will have a different set of questions that allow you to gather more information about them.

Analytics

We’ve talked about how important marketing metrics are. It’s impossible to measure the value of your inbound marketing efforts without the ability to prove it is worth the time and money it costs to do it. Hubspot’s analytics allow you to see exactly what is working in your inbound marketing efforts, and what still needs to improve. It also allows you to perform A/B testing on landing pages, emails, and CTAs to convert more visitors into leads.

Resources and Support

Being HubSpot partners, we know the value of their resources and support firsthand. Not only is Hubspot one of the most powerful tools for inbound marketing, their resources library and their support staff are unparalleled. HubSpot shares knowledge regularly through their marketing and sales blogs, and prides themselves on their ability to fix any issues that may arise with their platform quickly. As a HubSpot customer, you are provided with a dedicated customer support team and HubSpot rep. Response times are quick and painless.

These benefits barely touch the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Hubspot is an intricate marketing automation software that both streamlines and empowers your inbound marketing efforts.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Contents

Why Do I Need Inbound Marketing?

Can I Implement Inbound Marketing on My Own?