Transforming Your Business From Zero to Hero With Hubspot

Venturing Out Into the Market Today

Starting any business comes along with a very universal but crucial question – whom will my business cater to?

One could imagine reaching out far and wide to multiple countries with their venture, or one might localize their products to their own country or region.

The one similar train of thought, however, is that the potential market size should be large enough for availing profits.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is like a broad umbrella, which includes the processes of marketing business products and services using the internet and digital technology as a medium.

Companies can use digital marketing to proliferate their business’ popularity to attract a wide customer base.

Believe it or not, digital marketing has become such an integral part of our lives these days that it is impossible to part with it.

Be it on our favorite social media platforms or in the small details of our day to day lives; digital marketing is spread everywhere.

Every time an ad pops up on your screen and compels you to go browsing for that attractive backpack, you can know you are getting engulfed in the phenomenon of digital marketing itself.

Why Go for Digital Marketing?

If the entire hype around you of companies coming up with interesting slogans and graphics aren’t enough to make you realize the significance of Digital Marketing, then you need to do some more research before kickstarting a new business.

Benefits Of Digital Marketing

1. Cost-effective Marketing Technique

If you are looking for a marketing strategy that doesn’t lodge a hole in your pocket, digital marketing is the perfect choice for you.

Often, for small startups and new businesses, maintaining a strict budget is often something you cannot forego. At such times, digital marketing comes forth as a handy asset.

Compared to other media-related marketing and advertising agencies, digital marketing platforms are inexpensive.

With proper planning and a sound campaign, you can reach out to a much wider audience at negligible costs.

Even the fee required for promotions on social media platforms to boost your campaigns is nominal and inexpensive compared to other media platforms.

2. Wider Exposure

The entire world seems to be using the internet these days, especially social media platforms.

Be it school-going teenagers who follow websites for tutorials and academic assistance, or working women who love socializing and extending their circle, everyone is using the internet for some reason or the other.

This is the same reason behind the mandatory presence of your business on the internet. Not just this, you also need to make your presence felt.

Digital marketing allows you to do this and much more, ensuring that you are getting the maximum possible exposure as far as business popularity and the potential of a customer is concerned.

Besides, you have the option of filtering the audience of your advertisement by specifically choosing your target audience.

Unlike print media or mass media platforms like television, where you can not dictate the scope of the target audience, digital marketing offers special tools and techniques to make your promotions available and concentrated to your target audience.

3. Brand Building

Be it a new business venture that has just stepped into the market or an old one that wishes to tread on the path of transformation and expansion, the brand-building plays a vital role in both.

Digital marketing fosters this process by making your products and the brand message reach people by the thousands, creating an impression in their minds. This makes it easy for the brand to connect with the target audience.

Aspects of digital marketing like the advertisement type, a strong video message, an eye-catching graphic, logo, etc are enough to make their mark on the audiences’ minds.

4. Time-Efficient

Ever since the advent of digital marketing, there has been a drastic improvement as far as time efficiency is concerned.

In almost no time, companies can post online advertisements in the format of their choice – graphic visualizations, images, videos, blogs, et al.

In negligible time these advertisements do not just reach out to potential customers worldwide but also have an impact on their lives.

The Need of New Age Marketing (Shift from Funnel to Flywheel Model)

Even the world of advertising today demands personalization and experience. Gone are the days when advertisements were general and product-based.

The modern times demand that people and their needs should go through the processes of marketing, rather than just the promotion of products on particular platforms.

New age marketing, also commonly known as experiential marketing, is the way to achieve all that marketing and advertising demands these days.

The new-age marketing has chiefly helped businesses and startups venture beyond the conventional routes and goals of advertising.

Before we delve, however, into the finer details of new-age marketing, it is important to consider what led to an evolution of this kind in the field of business and commerce.

A deeper study into the patterns of demand, promotion, offer, and supply gives a clearer picture of the present and future of new-age marketing.

The Importance of the Question: What Does the Customer Want?

For any business, the matter that needs to be prioritized is that of the customer’s demands and needs.

A business should not just cater to a product’s demands of the market. But it should also fulfill the needs of its customers, be the value of service, value for money or even the emotional connection.

This leads to a question of paramount importance – What does a customer want? The first step to initiate any business lies in the brand’s attempts of resolving a customer pain point.

Not only do you need to identify the problem and come up with a solution, but the latter must also be unique with something more to offer than just another solution.

This ‘something more’ can come into picture only when you know the answer to – what does the customer want?

Great customer care revolves around the central idea of prioritizing the customer’s wishes. There could be multiple ways of doing it.

Firstly, you could try putting yourself in their shoes. Once you try looking at your business from the customer’s perspective, as a complete outsider, you begin to realize the loopholes and the rooms for improvement. Besides, with this, you also gain a fair idea of how to shape the business further.

Alternatively, you can try to collect data on customer behavior and activity patterns. Analysis of this data can help you in identifying the areas & reasons for the errors occurred.

Yet another way would be to approach the customer directly and ask them about their grievances through offline or online surveys and feedback forms.

What you are most likely to find is that the customer looks out for experiences and a personal touch whenever it comes to any brand.

There can be several products in the market, and yet the customer would fall back only on those that manage to create a space for themselves within his memory. New age marketing is the perfect fix to turn this situation beneficial.

Understanding New Age Marketing

New age marketing, or experiential marketing, as many prefer to call it, is all about building an emotional experience between the brand or business and its customers.

Unlike the traditional form of marketing, which tries to make an impact on viewers and onlookers engaging their attention through graphics and words alone, experiential marketing is about making an impact with the help of such experiences that can immerse as many human senses as possible.

Statistics say that the attention span of any human is only about eight seconds, and this is information plays a vital role while creating a company’s advertisements.

Until and unless you are delivering an impactful message or an attractive offer to the customer within this short time frame, you cannot hope to succeed in any advertising campaign. Experiential marketers should take note of this point.

The simple ideology experiential marketing follows is that if the customer cannot be brought to the brand’s experience, why not channel this the reverse way?

Brands start building & earning their audience’s loyalty by taking a cue from the above-mentioned aspects of new-age marketing.

Instead of simply coming up with campaigns, businesses worldwide are focusing not just on their products but also their advertisements crafted around their customer’s – needs, emotions, and desirable experiences. The key is believed to be the personalization and uniqueness of marketing.

The Benefits of New Age Marketing

The increasingly competitive business world has made innovative marketing a mandatory for success. Believe it or not, organizations are being compelled to fight on social media platforms and popular channels like YouTube to gain attention with respect to their marketing agendas.

No wonder more and more companies are looking up to new-age marketing as a solution, but why? Let’s peek into the fact what appeals to them to do.

1. Paints a Clear Picture of the Market

Besides creating a platform for the selling of your goods and services themselves.

New age marketing can help you derive from social media interactions and analysis market changes, trends, what is not, and what is not in terms of customer preferences, and so on.

All this data helps paint a clearer picture of the market before you.

2. Easier Identification of Potential Customers

What we call identification and catering to the target audience is a product of new-age marketing.

For example, let’s say what you are working on is an e-commerce niche. An e-commerce niche is essentially a separate fragment within the broad umbrella of a market that is made up of several business ideas.

It tends to narrow down on these ideas, pick out a domain that caters to either a particular target audience or a specific idea.

The process must, however, first begin with the identification and then strategizing an approach for the target audience. This can be very easily done with the many tools that come in handy with new-age marketing.

3. More Interactive Customer Support

New age marketing also places a tremendous focus on building an interactive customer support base.

There is no doubting the fact that people have grown more and more inclined towards social media these days.

From daily news to recipes to study materials to maintaining contacts, social media is their answer for everything.

New age marketing ensures that this side of the customer is used to advantage.

In fact, a great part of new-age marketing revolves around the growth of one’s business around the central pillar of social media marketing.

The end result is the making of a better and stronger customer support base.

4. Greater Brand Awareness

It goes without saying that the active usage of social media, the strengthening of the customer base, and the popularity build up among a specific target audience is the reason enough for building better brand awareness.

New age marketing strategies ensure that your business can make the most out of marketing and advertising in today’s competitive world,

How to Use Experiential Marketing for Your Business?

The one thing that must be clear by now is that personalization is the most important tool when it comes to new-age marketing techniques.

Besides, marketing today is no longer about simply creating campaigns or promoting one’s products and services.

All these layers have to be interconnected somewhere deeper to get meritorious outcomes.

Availing Benefits of New-age Marketing

1. Begin With Content Marketing

Content marketing is such an integral tool of experiential marketing for any business that has managed to change the way we look at marketing today completely.

Content marketing is customer-driven – a fact that adds a touch of personalization to the process itself.

Other than that, content marketing involves a lot of creativity and development in itself, which makes it stand out among the entire crowd of possible activities and tools.

It is definitely an economical solution as well, which costs a significant 62% lesser in comparison with other marketing strategies.

2. Marketing Automation Strategies

It is not even like new-age marketing has to be grasped in and conducted step-by-step individually for the best results.

There are lots of marketing automation software available today, and these resources can work wonders when one is looking to save some time, energy, and costs of handling the entire process of marketing themselves.

Marketing automation software is available for multiple organizational structures across multiple platforms and can help you perform everything needed from head to toe.

They take care of everything from the organization that leads to the creation of hubs that take care of promotions and advertisements.

Marketing automation software basically handles everything without the need for you to remember every crucial step. So that you do not miss out onto anything important.

2. Social Media Usage for Channelizing the Process

We have already discussed the roles content marketing and automation software have to play in terms of your business.

What is also important is realizing the role of social media in lending a direction and continuity to what has already been started.

New age marketing tools can actually help you focus better on this aspect and spend more time deriving crucial data such as when and where your potential customers gather online, which is an important clue for marketing purposes.

Besides, you can collect an idea of their likes and dislikes, interests, and complaints.

3. A Touch of the Traditional

New age marketing does not, however, completely erase the need and importance of the traditional forms of marketing.

In fact, one of the key aspects of new-age marketing is that it helps in the transformation and adaptation of older techniques to make them much more efficient and useful.

Today, amongst all the types of technique, tool & strategy available for attaining the customers’ attention towards your company, inbound marketing works the most!

This eBook discusses not just the utility of the inbound marketing platform, but also how businesses can be transformed with the help of it.

Is This E-book for You?

• Do you want to boost the marketing of your existing organization or business venture?
• Do you already have a functioning marketing plan at hand, but wish to improve or change it for desirable results?
• Do you plan to launch your own company and are planning to begin marketing it in the open market?

If your answers to any of the above are ‘Yes,’ then you have chosen the right platform for all your uncertainties about transforming your business with Hubspot – an inbound marketing platform.

No wonder, everyone would want to take a big leap as far as their businesses are concerned.

However, without understanding the depth of the brand’s requirements and working of these marketing strategies, it can become really difficult to succeed.

What is Inbound Marketing?

A very commonly asked question, the glass-half-full perspective, has always led to varied and great answers.

Reducing it to its simplest version, what we have is a glass that can either seem half-empty or half-filled to any particular onlooker.

It is a matter of perspective, yes, but it also has an impact on the mindset of the judge. He may either be a pessimist or an optimist and bears similar outcomes in life.

What if we tell you that marketing strategies can have such simultaneously opposite parallels too?

Well, when it comes to marketing, you could do one of these two things – you could either make sure that your brand reaches the people by outwardly pushing it, say in their daily feeds – Or – You could ensure that the potential customer is drawn in and then made aware of the brand in question and your goods and services. The latter is what we call Inbound Marketing.

When we translate it in the language of digital marketing and the world of social media, it has slightly different yet impactful implications.

A system of interconnected resources are used, the most common ones being Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media engagement, and content writing.

Inbound marketing works towards gathering people’s focus on the brand by drawing them in as discussed earlier.

This happens through the medium of ‘owned’ social media, wherein the business aims at reaching out to the target, drive quality traffic towards him, engage him with the brand through conversations, attractive promotions and then convert them into actual customers.

The term was coined by none other than HubSpot, a specialist in inbound marketing software, back in 2006.

According to the platform, “inbound marketing is the process of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers.”

Through using various types of content at different stages of the buying cycle, the inbound methodology turns out to be the best way of turning strangers into customers and later, as promoters of your business.

How Does Inbound Marketing Differ from Outbound Marketing?

The names of the two types of marketing strategies are enough to let you grasp the difference between the two.

While inbound marketing, as mentioned earlier, rests its focus on drawing customers in and then letting them experience the brand and its services, outbound marketing deals with the outward pushing of a brand’s ideologies, concepts, and products.

With outbound marketing, it is the brand that attempts to reach out to potential customers, while with inbound marketing, the potential customers are initially attracted inwards, and then the brand is made known to them in depth.

In a nutshell, we can say that inbound marketing involves earning customer attention and drawing him in, while outbound marketing involves buying it.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

You must have already been able to decipher a somewhat vague picture of the benefits of inbound marketing and how important it is for your company.

Let us help you further by listing down exactly how you can opt to profit from it.

1. You Are Not Relying Completely on Just One Channel Anymore

The fact that inbound marketing resorts to generating quality traffic from a number of varied resources explain the above fact.

You no longer need to rely on a particular source to be able to market and advertise your company successfully.

There is so much to explore – social media referrals and promotional content, organic searches, and results, topnotch websites that speak about your company, content marketing through blogs put out on a number of platforms or even print media, and so on.

2. You Are Reaching Out to the Appropriate Audience Because They Choose To

As inbound marketing involves drawing in the customer, it already ensures that you have hit the ‘target audience’ right.

As the customer is already the one that is stepping closer towards your brand, you can rest assured that your content has reached the audience it was meant for.

3. Your Brand Is Also Creating a Significant and Trustworthy Image in the Public

Inbound marketing worked with two very different kinds of media platforms – owned ones and earned ones. Inbound marketing worked with two very different kinds of media platforms – owned ones and earned ones.

Owned media is the kind of media platform that the business or organization has direct and complete control over.

This could include the company’s websites, profiles on social media pages and channels, product landing pages, and so on.

Your company has an air of authority over what they publish, where they publish, and how they publish it.

The second kind, known as the earned media, is a product of your company’s inbound marketing campaigns, and the coverage you achieve as a result of it.

In traditional formats, this could include print media like newspapers and business magazines.

In the digital world, this could be news sites, social media sites, and pages about companies and online magazines.

These days campaigns have taken shape in the form of popular hashtags, hotspots on google trends, and even online forums and reviews.

If your company can successfully make it to the good books of these online pages and reviewers, you can say these are your earned media platforms in terms of inbound marketing.

A successful inbound campaign is, therefore, what you require to begin with.

What Is Inbound Marketing Campaign?

It is a yesteryear thing that a marketing campaign meant some kind of creative development for the print or the visual media, investing some money into it, and wait for the audience reaction to unfold and have an impact on the company.

These days, marketing campaigns don’t work that way. According to statistics, 71% of adults with internet access use social media platforms.

According to HubSpot, blogging is 13 times more likely to get a positive ROI. Companies who publish content regularly generate 3.5 times higher traffic per month compared to those who don’t. The lead generation is also 4.5 times higher.

Instead of being discrete from each other, the components of today’s marketing campaigns are much more unified and strategized.

The components have not changed altogether; they have just evolved. The platforms have changed from print, and visual media alone to now encompass social and digital media.

Writing and advertisements have now been taken over by blogging and promotional content in the form of graphics and music videos.

The inbound marketing campaign, as explained earlier, caters to attract a specific target audience towards the product and functions to build a bond with these audiences.

Using the inbound marketing campaign, your company could draw potential customers in with ease and creativity.

The Inbound Marketing Campaign Places the Customer at the Center of the Circle

The chief aim of inbound marketing is to attract. Therefore, the customer must be placed at the center of the circle in all situations.

All the resources and tools of the marketing campaign are, therefore, naturally targeted towards the customer alone, and they are bound to be captured by your compelling content.

The Tools and Components Are Integrated and Not Discrete

Instead of functioning distinctly, the tools and components of an inbound marketing campaign function as one integrated context, weaving together all the requirements to make the campaign a success.

At the end of the day, what matters is that the customer is able to relish a smooth and memorable experience with the brand, which ensures that he remains loyal to it even in the future. This happens only when inbound marketing campaigns work as an integrated whole.

The Inbound Marketing Campaign Works Suitably for All Kinds of Situations and Places

If you have any doubt in your mind about whether the inbound marketing is suitable for your company or not, you need not fret. Inbound marketing campaigns are well suited to all kinds of companies, brands, and organizations. Besides, it doesn’t even matter what the occasion is for you to launch the inbound marketing campaign.

The company could do well with such a campaign even on a product show, a podcast, or even a webinar. The inbound marketing campaign framework can be applied suitably in all kinds of situations serving amazing results. Some great examples of inbound marketing examples are blogs, infographics, whitepapers, and eBooks.

Visit any company’s profile these days, from the one that deals with IT solutions to real estate property; none of them can ignore the power of such inbound marketing campaigns.

More and more companies are hiring freelancers who specialize in SEO marketing. The reason is simple and clear nothing equals the magical results that the inbound marketing campaign serves.

HubSpot, for example, continuously uploads multiple eBooks on their sites by some amazing writers, addressing several issues companies might be facing – a perfect inbound marketing example.

What Is HubSpot COS?

HubSpot COS stands for HubSpot Content Optimization System and is a holistic web marketing platform. HubSpot COS has the most innovative tools and tactics to offer to your company specifically in terms of inbound marketing and campaigns.

When it comes to the traditional systems of marketing that focus more on the brand and less on the customer, the HubSpot COS is eons ahead. As discussed earlier, it lies in the principle of the customer being the king and all the resources and tools being targeted directly towards him for the best outcomes. With the HubSpot COS, companies have the option of building websites, emails, landing pages and blogs on the lines of inbound marketing campaigns.

The key tools and goals that it utilizes are responsive design and great optimization. The most important aspect of it is the element of new-age marketing that it manages to successfully incorporate in its work, lending a personalized edge to all content.

Benefits of HubSpot COS

Having launched about five years ago, HubSpot COS has been able to successfully make a mark for itself in the market at this time. It offers a one-stop solution for all marketing needs as compared with traditional systems like Content Management System or CMS. It brings the best inbound marketing campaign together under a single umbrella and is based completely on the principles of inbound marketing, something which highlights yet another difference between its work and that of the traditional formats.

Responsive Content Design

One of the most noticeable benefits HubSpot COS has over other marketing campaign systems is that it offers a very responsive content design.

This is a growingly important aspect these days with customers because they use multiple gadgets and platforms to review products and services these days.

If your company website or promotional content does not adept at proper display and execution on a wide variety of screens and resolutions, it would be very difficult to have a successful marketing campaign.

According to statistics, 60% of internet users access social media platforms through their mobile phones.

This makes responsiveness to different browsers, platforms, screen sizes, and devices an important factor.

You certainly wouldn’t want to be catering only to the specific small population that uses a personal computer for all their social media needs, would you?

Amazing Speed

According to a test conducted by Yotta, HubSpot was placed first in terms of speed of performance, other competitors including Wordpress, Drupal, and Jumia.

This is a win-win situation for your company because Google searches are directly linked with the speed and responsiveness of a company website, an advertisement campaign, et al.

Therefore, with its amazing speed and faster page loads, your company can aim to feature higher on the results page compared to many of your competitors with the help of HubSpot.

Customization and Personalization

With HubSpot, you also have the option of customizing your product’s landing page or website, successfully and creatively.

This saves you not just from the time spent engaging in a new design or theme all by yourself, but it also saves you the money you could have spent on other professionals to do that work for you.

Even the templates provided by HubSpot COS can be tweaked as you want it to, to create a unique design for your company’s ideas and themes. As we mentioned earlier, HubSpot is a one-stop solution.

When it comes to personalization, we have already stressed enough on the role this factor has to play when it comes to new-age marketing. HubSpot ensures that your company isn’t left behind in this matter.

Smart Content

Content can be good or bad, but it definitely needs to be is smart. Inbound marketing with HubSpot ensures that this is done.

It channels your content and all your resources to a specific target audience, instead of having it afloat uselessly among anyone and everyone. This way content and the brand tend to lose the sizzle.

Content, moreover, is based on certain important aspects of the customer. It could be directed towards the stage of their life, their association with the company, their life cycle, their pain points, their success and so on.

It could either be generic for all kinds of people in the broad domain of your target audience, or it could be tailored to suit each category differently.

The ability to create & execute smarter content effectively can definitely benefit the brand building and reaping the impressive result.

SEO is the King

One thing that comes out unequivocally through HubSpot COS’ marketing campaigns is that SEO is the king. Search Engine Optimization clearly has an important role to play if you wish to succeed in the world of e-commerce, and HubSpot COS ensures this happens. With its multiple tools, recommendations, and an all-in-one-platform, HubSpot helps optimize your content to suit it the best for any search online by potential customers.

Find Out Your Buyer Persona

What Is Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona can be defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. A number of other factors also go into deciphering the buyer persona, like customer demographics, their behavior pattern, et al.

Every business involves a hundred types of different customers. If you are running a large business, the number increases so much so that it becomes really difficult to merely keep the customer at the center. That is a practically impossible thing to do. But it also not healthy to completely ignore such a significant principle of business. And hence, to strike a balance, it becomes imperative to formulate a suitable customer persona image for your business. Your company can also have multiple buyer personas, but you need to try and keep it to as a minimum a number as possible.

Buyer personas are important because they guide you in terms of how you should upgrade your activities and strategies to suit their requirements. A very quick example of the same is how most companies keep talking about what they have to offer instead of paying more attention to the customer himself. Buyer personas can teach you that it is more important for them to stress on what the company has to offer specifically for them and later about the generic positives.

Inbound marketing is about drawing the customer in, and the customer is going to be attracted to your company only when you know what he wants and how. This analysis is made much easier with the formulation of one or more buyer personas. To formulate one, you need to take care of a number of factors – demographics, culture, customs, needs, trends, and social media activity.

All these, when combined together gives you a complete image of the buyer persona and analysis that presents you with what works the best for your company in attracting & converting the customer.

How to Recognize the Buyer Persona?

Recognizing the buyer persona and working on conversing or drawing them in is not a single step process. It involves multiple layers and information, which are wonderfully handled by HubSpot’s features and programs. Let’s share them all in here with you:

Identifying the Target Customer

If you have not already done this so far, this is the final call to finalize who your target customers are. The target customer is one of the most pivotal & prime aspects when it comes to inbound marketing. This is because all the resources and strategies are automatically channelized towards this group of people.

You should start off by seeing a broader picture and studying demographic factors – age, location, gender, interests, education, lifestyle – and so on to understand and segregate them into multiple categories.

Layer by layer, you can try merging categories while maintaining a master database that pertains to the analysis and records of the target customer.

Collecting Suitable Data and Information

As already discussed above, you should try collecting as much data as you can from and about the customer to foster the process of creating and utilizing buyer personas. Besides using the demographical data, you can conduct online surveys or research social media sites to have a brief insight into the needs and wishes of the customers.

You can identify their interests, likes, dislikes, trends, and fads by conducting such an in-depth study on online media. This gives you a lot of useful data that leads your buyer personas to the next step.

Creating Customer Personas Out of Collected Data

After distilling the multiple layers, again and again, you are to finally reach the stage where you can formulate buyer personas out of all the data that you have. Try shrinking the big-picture data you have now to create personal images. All the data can be now overlapped and deciphered to create multiple yet very distinct buyer personas. Here we share a simple questionnaire that can help you in conducting the process of setting up a buyer persona for your company.

• What Is Their Age?
• What Is Their Marital or Relationship Status?
• Do They Have Any Kids?
• How Educated Are They?
• Do They Have a Job?
• Do They Own a House?
• What Is Their Income?
• Where Do They Live?
• What Are Their Goals in Life?
• What Are Their Interests Outside Work?
• What Do They Do in Their Pastime?
• What Are the Obstacles They Face in Day to Day Life?
• Do They Have Any Complaints About Anything?
• What Are Their Pain Points?
• Where Do They Invest or Spend Their Money?
• Do They Look Extravagant or Simple?
• What Have They Specialized in Professionally?

Record the answers, and these will lead you to compile and to overlap multiple data layers in formulating a complete buyer persona. These answers could be derived either from surveys directly, or by tracking their online presence and activities. Your company could also ask for some of this data directly from the customer as a sign-in or checking out process.

The immediate benefits of crafting a buyer persona or a couple more for the company are worth discussing. First of all, you gain customer insights regarding your company’s required performance and other important parameters. Secondly, there are chances of better cross-departmental alignment now that you have enough data on what they like and what they don’t like.

You can work on all those points where you think your company wouldn’t be able to meet the customer’s expectations. As a result of which, all the different departments – marketing, sales, product development, and customer support can work shoulder to shoulder for the overall progress of the company.

Define Your Business Goals

The next important step in the process of establishing a successful inbound marketing campaign for a business would be through defining the business goals clearly. This not just helps the customer identify with the positives your company has over others, it also instills a sense of confidence and identity in everyone who all are working in your company, which lends them a sense of direction and conversation.

Discovery Session

The first step towards defining the business goals can be to conduct a proper discovery session with colleagues and associates.

There are a few important aspects to behold and talk about. You need to grasp exactly what are these important aspects & what your company wishes to offer.

You need to throw some light on what the company has in store for the different kinds of buyer personas and also what new things will it have in store for them in the future.

If there is any particular zone the company wishes to focus more on or if there are specific pain points that need to be considered, all that should be brought up and highlighted in this discovery session.

After all, this is the time you actually sit down and lend a proper structure not just to the workforce but also to the company’s perspectives.

Industry Research

Conducting some thorough industry research can give you a fair idea about your contemporaries and competitors.

Studying their performance, the factors that are responsible for their great or not so great performances, and the ways in which they cope with different situations, helps you in defining your own goals.

This is because unless you learn from the mistakes or the greatness of others, (better if they’re from your own industry) you might fall prey to the same mistakes all over again.

Similarly, without proper background research, you might end up walking the same lines, ending up in heavy competition where you have higher chances of being knocked out.

Therefore, industry research holds high importance when it comes to defining business goals. HubSpot pays a lot of stress on this factor and ensures that you gain access to relevant data step by step.

Defining Rough Objectives

After a rough analysis of the industry and a brief insight into the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, you can now proceed to draft a rough outline of your business’ goals and objectives.

You can make a note of all observations and inferences from your previous discussions and create a draft of your business plan.

Transforming a business venture from an idea to the final product has this very important element to it, and that is deciding on a business plan or strategy.

A business plan essentially outlines everything from the start to the end of proceeding on this venture.

It must entail the tiniest of instructions and the finest of details because an elaborate plan can prove extremely helpful to you while carrying out the same when needed.

The contents of a business plan must, however, be very well-structured and organized enough to reap fruitful results.

At the same time, it has to be an official document, and therefore needs to have a particular format, which majorly includes the following details –

• Introduction/Title
• Executive Summary
• Description
• Competitive Analysis
• Business Goals
• Strategies and Market Data
• Design and Development Strategy
• Operation Plan
• Management Strategy
• Finance Considerations

So far, as you may have noticed, we have already devised the executive summary, the description, the competitive analysis, and also the business goals.

We have had some discussions on the basics of marketing and strategies, and now we shall proceed a little deeper into the topic.

Tricks for Generating a World-class Campaign Idea

A little push and a kick, and your company will already be on its way to generating some world-class campaign ideas. Let’s begin with a few examples that are really working the trick these days.

• Use Twitter handles everywhere to make your point and also to promote your brand.
• The hashtag games are in; get in with the flow and hashtag your brand or product to sweep directly into what is trending.
• You could be using pins to make your point on the popular platform called Pinterest. According to statistics, 250 million people use Pinterest every month. In under two years, there has been a 75% hike in the use of pins on the platform.
• Facebook is not yet out of the scene. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You can use Facebook’s business section to keep a close tab on competitors who are very likely to share whatever they are up with on the platform. Use it wisely to reap great results.

Few More Tricks:

1. Sponsorships and Events

You can choose to be a sponsor at a couple of events from the variety of events happening in the city/country, throughout the year. This allows you to indulge in promotional activity too among larger audiences if the event is a successful one.

2. Online Photo Contests

These days many companies are coming up with interesting contests, such as photo contests, to allow more and more interested people to engage with their profiles. Perhaps you could use one to garner more attention on social media platforms.

Online polls and surveys to make sure that your target customers not just are involved with the brand regularly, but also to be able to extract useful data and information about the customer’s perspective.

3. Redeemable Points for Sharing

You could choose to offer redeemable points to your customers that they can use for an e-commerce site of your choice for availing your products if they share your company’s profile links or offers and referrals with their close friends.

This is a great inbound marketing mechanism where one customer begins a loop to attract others.

4. Blogging

One of the most powerful media in the context of marketing is blogging, which has no limitations that concerns with creativity, genre, and age group. The only thing you need to keep in mind is being specific that the content’s vibe reverberates with the target audience it is written for and promoted to.

5. Infographics and Humour

Two of the most powerful tools these days in the world of social media marketing are infographics and humor, which, when combined together, can lead to some amazing outcomes.

Statistical data can be used effectively to grasp the customer’s attention within seconds. People hardly overlook facts and figures, be it in the email newsletters or Instagram feed.

You could use this tool to impress the customer & increase the engagement they have with your brand.

6. Controversial Content

Controversies earn maximum brownie points when it comes to engaging the social media user.

People continuously scroll down their social media feeds in search of the latest and interesting news. This includes a lot of controversial content.

Easy enough to start a spark, you can also invite potential targets/users to engage & participate in long-lasting debates and twitter rows.

7. Webinars and Podcasts

Another very interesting tools that your company can utilize our webinars and podcasts. They seem to have quite an active participation these days.

According to surveys, 32% of Americans listen to podcasts regularly every month, and 22% every week. This is quite an interesting figure, given the time-duration, these podcasts are offering.

8. eBooks

People these days love to read and research, but hardly have the time to walk up to a bookstore to do that. This is the reason eBooks have taken the market by storm.

This is also the reason why you could choose to generate eBooks as an excellent marketing idea to talk about your company – your business goals, what you can offer, and so on.

Alternatively, other than talking about your own company in the ebook, you could try engaging readers with an ebook on a relevant topic as per their interests and needs.

You could highlight the importance of your company to them in a subtle way, along with highlighting how your services can be of immense value to them.

9. Guest Posts

Whoever said guest posts are out of trend has no idea how the current market is beaming with multiple popular websites and how fond people are of reading the wide variety of articles published on them.

You could use the tool of featuring on a guest post to your advantage, especially the one that resounds with your goals and target audiences.

Writing about your company’s ideas and services to a different audience does have a positive effect and can boost your popularity immediately.

10. Whitepapers

Perhaps one of the best guides these days for any company is the Whitepaper.

With a balance of words and graphics, along with the descriptions and statistics, Whitepaper stands out in comparison to other descriptive text on websites.

Besides, whitepapers are also available in the PDF format, which makes browsing and saving really easy.

You could incorporate ample data on your company’s Whitepaper viz. facts, figures, pros, successes, roadmap, present, past, and future – that it is like a complete autobiography. It is also graphical & hence quite comprehensible.

11. 101 Guides

These days people resort to the internet for all kinds of help. Especially, the ones related to our day-to-day lives.

One hardly does approach their senior/colleague when they do not know how to operate software or the specifications of a process.

The internet is brimming with guides and DIY tutorials that can easily come to their rescue with an equally easy resolution technique.

Use this to your advantage by preparing a 101 guide on how to fix a certain problem, and introduce your brand’s capability in assisting the same.

12. Gamifying the Experience

These days more and more franchises are coming up with mobile and computer games to heighten the experience of the customer’s engagement with the brand. You could opt for something on similar lines to make a mark in the world of marketing.

What Is SMART Approach?

The SMART approach or outline is an acronym for S – Specific, M – Measurable, A – Achievable, R – Realistic, and T – Timely.

The SMART approach in an effective marketing plan that incorporates all the above features into the company’s goals and comes out as a success you deserve.

If we are to elaborate on each of these terms a little further, we can actually decipher the implications they have on our business –

1. Specific

When setting goals, you need to be very specific about what it is that you are hoping to achieve and why. Use real numbers and deadlines to achieve the targets you have set for your business.

2. Measurable

You need to make sure you can track your goals and measure your success, or else you may start feeling really unmotivated after a span of time.

3. Attainable

There is no point in setting goals that you know are impossible to achieve or too far-fetched. Your goals should be challenging but still realistic.

There is no point in setting your team up for failure in any manner whatsoever.

4. Realistic

The target you wish to achieve in the end may seem either super difficult to yourself or super easy. Make sure that you’re being honest with yourself and are framing your goals realistically, for the betterment of yours and your team.

Keep in mind that the team has to work together, and not being realistic enough can drive them away from the core strength you possess.

5. Time-Bound

Always remember to place before yourself a deadline as to when you want to achieve your goals. Otherwise, you are just going to be beating around the bush with no accomplishment of goals.

Setting a proper and specific deadline will help you plan your tasks and also help you in judging whether or not you are heading towards the target for hitting your goal.

Exploring Ways to Setup SMART Business Goals

1. Summarize the Goal

The first and foremost step that you need to take is to summarize the goal at hand. You need to convince yourself as well as your team that the goal at hand is attainable.

To do this, you need to first begin by describing what it is about and how you think it is attainable.

Summarize your goal in a few impactful words that can resound with every team member as well as you when you proceed to achieve it.

2. Set a Specific Numerical Goal

Numbers are much more definite than words. They lend us a better sense of targets and deadlines than sentences do. Therefore, it is important that you set a numerical goal to be specific.

It could be in the form of the number of campaigns you want to complete, the number of posters launched on a particular social media platform, or even the number of customers you wish to have engaged within a specific time frame.

3. Decide on a Completion Date

Another very important process for achieving goals in the SMART way is by setting a particular deadline for the completion of the goal.

A rough idea of how long the process is going to take for you and how quickly and efficiently you can manage to finish it must give you a fair picture.

Setting a particular deadline also gives you the zeal to continuously work towards it, for with every passing day, the deadline keeps coming closer and closer.

4. Write Down Your Goal

Another way of achieving goals the SMART way is to remind yourself of the goals you have in mind continuously.

You can write down your goal somewhere, which can constantly remind you to take action for accomplishing the set goal before the deadline.

Coming across the written goal will stop your attention from diverting. It also helps you in the long run by making you more focused and attentive.

5. Break Down the Bigger Goal Into Smaller Attainable Tasks

Now, you should proceed to break down your goal into smaller, simpler tasks that are attainable within smaller-respective time frames.

Again, this helps in boosting confidence because, with each completed task, you feel like you are approaching closer to the ultimate task.

You cannot ignore any potential obstacles that may come your way if you are not alert enough. There is no way you can rule out these possibilities.

6. Communication is the Key

Communicate with your team members about any issues they might be facing or the hurdles that they might have come across. After all, you can accomplish your goals only with them by your side, isn’t it?

Also, make sure that they are all aware of the deadlines, the smaller targets, and also fueled with the drive to fulfill them.

7. Proper Analysis of Whatever You Have Done So Far

Regular analysis of whatever you have done so far, like revisions, is important to rule out the occurrences of mistakes and loopholes.

It can also help by acting as a boosting mechanism to gain confidence when you realize you have been attaining all the targets in the said time.

Alternatively, it can be a check to make you realize that you have been going too slow compared to what you had scheduled in the beginning.

8. Regular Assessments and Update of Work Schedule

Unless you incorporate regular assessments, feedback, and updates of the work schedule, you cannot expect to proceed forward, especially when it is teamwork.

Exploring the Various Types of Content

There are eight main types of content to explore and choose from:

1. Blogging

Blogging is an ideal and powerful tool for building solid relationships with your readers, which can finally lead to conversions and potential customer generation.

Maintaining a dependable blog where you keep posting amazing content from time to time, as HubSpot does, can also help in driving a significant amount of traffic to the site and making people familiar with your brand, ideas, and products.

Blogging, most-certainly, is the most accessible type of content marketing. Besides, more and more people spend time reading multiple articles on the internet, which makes it a great tool to attract your target customers towards your product.

Blogging is, in fact, one of the central parts of the content marketing strategies of several businesses and companies worldwide. This happens because of an array of reasons.

Firstly, blog posts typically don’t take too long to write, they show up quite easily and quickly as Google search results.

Users are happy to read and can easily relate to them. A well-written & connecting content does titillate them share it on other platforms.

This makes it a quick way to offer amazing value at a relative or negligible cost.

2. Longform Content

There are several long-form contents available in the online market today that are free and also counts as an amazing read.

This makes them one of the most brilliant ways to build a particular school of thought, at the same time gaining loyal subscribers for the business.

The end of the content in every installment can ask the customer of either subscribe or sign up for your sit. This notifies them for each of your newly published guide or piece of write-up.

Such ultimate guides are one of the best types of long-form content that can be used by businesses to gain a hold over the audiences like never before.

3. Case Studies

Case studies are defined as an in-depth analysis of a specific situation or business deal. The case study aims to provide not just data but also knowledge and experience around the respective situation.

This is the reason a case study is considered to be a very effective content marketing tools. It comes with a very straightforward mechanism and nature, which includes –

• Write a Synopsis of the Study
• Explain the Problem or Hypothesis You Were Assessing
• Explain Your Resolution
• Go Over the Outcomes and Why They Matter

4. Whitepapers and eBooks

White papers are also known as information-dense content because they offer extremely expert knowledge and in-depth facts and figures about the topic at hand.

The focus here is all in the details. It can serve as an excellent content tool for people who are looking out for data and figures.

eBooks are somewhere on the lines of long-form content and whitepapers, a balanced blend of both, except they do not have the extreme technicality of the whitepaper or the prolonged suspense of the long-form content.

5. Infographics and Videos

These are two forms of visual content that can be used to grasp the viewer’s attention in no time.

We are all quite familiar with the use of the two tools in the social media world these days, which makes them come out as equally important tools.

• Deciding the Appropriate Content Form
• Asking Few Questions

The few questions you need to ask before finalizing the medium of content and the platform to be used are –

• What is my Target Audience?
• What is their Age?
• What are their Beliefs and Customs?
• What are the Matters They Consider Sensitive and Controversial?
• 5.What are the Current Matters that are Most Relevant to My Target Audience?
• 6.What are their Pain Points?
• Are they Ready to Accept Humor With an Open Mind?
• What is the Message I Want to Convey with my Content?
• What is the Core Idea behind my Brand?
• How is my Brand going to Impact the Customer and his Life?
• Is there a very Specific Caption I want to Associate with my Idea?
• How much Money am I ready to Invest?
• How much Time am I ready to Invest?
• Do I have Skilled Personnel for This Content Marketing Style?
• Do I have the Expertise Needed to Handle this Work?

Creating an Actionable Content

It is common these days to say; content is king. A big reason behind the success of most e-commerce websites is usually the kind of blogs they create, which naturally attract wandering minds on the internet.

If you think of it, even you might have spent quite a few minutes online reading some really interesting article on some product you are interested in, without knowing that you are actually playing your part in some e-commerce website’s marketing strategy.

Therefore, it becomes really important to devote ample time to creating actionable content after all the research and analysis you have gone through.

What Is Conversion Path?

“As a marketer, a big part of your job is to convert qualified website visitors into leads. Simple enough.
But as an inbound marketer, your job is to convert qualified website visitors (aka your buyer personas) into leads by offering remarkable content for which they’ll want to trade their contact information in exchange.
Ideally, those leads turn into opportunities, who turn into customers and even promoters.”
-Rachel Goodman Moore

The conversion path, as defined by HubSpot, is the process by which an anonymous website visitor becomes a known lead.

A conversion path is comprised of a remarkable content offer, call-to-action, landing page, and thank you page.

n order to convert a visitor into a lead, the content needs to offer something of that interests them (that’s your remarkable content), trigger clicks on the call-to-action button to access that content and then take them to the landing page.

Once on the landing page, the visitor can provide their information on a form in exchange for access to the offer itself.

Upon submitting that form, the converted-visitor is taken to a thank you page where they receive the offer.

The basic factors that make for a good conversion path are:

• Content that Fits the Context
• Landing Pages Appropriate to Your Buyer’s Persona
• Attractive Calls to Action
• Well-designed Thank You Pages

Crafting A Basic Level Conversion Path

As mentioned above, a typical conversion path has the following constituents – a content offer, call-to-action, a landing page, a thank you page, and at times a kickback mail.

The stepwise procedure for converting into a lead:

• 1.The visitor comes across some content or offer or product that interests them
• 2.The visitor clicks on the call to action button to reach your page where the content is
• 3.The button leads him to a landing page
• 4.The visitor’s information is gained either through forms or bots, against the offers you make available for them
• 5.The submission of the form leads the visitor to a thank you page where they actually receive the offer

What HubSpot offers is a much-reduced level of friction between the different steps involved, aiding to a smoother experience as well as a modified version of the stepwise procedure you came across above.

This, therefore, involves experiments and interactions with visitors for added value. A few of the basics are discussed below.

1. Generating Call to Action

A call to action could be either a line of text, an image, or simply a web button that the visitor clicks on after being prompted to for some particular action. It leads the customer to take some action, therefore the nam

General Tips for Creating a Call to Action

• Create a Design that Stands Out – You do not want the ‘Call-to-Action’ to get camouflaged with the rest of the web page, do you? This makes it essential for the Call-to-Action to stand out in terms of design as well as its presentation. This could include the use of contrasting colors, fonts, and style while not letting out on the theme of the web page in all.
• Use of Proper Language – The Call-to-Action, first and foremost, has the job of attracting the visitor. Therefore, the language used should be in accordance – use actionable, attractive words instead of the simple directive ones.
• Create a Call-to-Action that Aligns with the Landing Page – When the Call-to-Action is leading to a particular landing page; there should be some alignment between the two. This could be in terms of the heading, for example, or the kind of words used on the Call-to-Action.
• Personalization to Appeal to Customers – You can make good use of marketing automation software and discover ways to personalize the Call-to-Action for visitors, customers, and leads.

2. Creating a Landing Page

The landing page is essentially a web page where the visitor is led to from the Call-to-Action. This means that the basic requisites of a good landing page need to be – creative, visually appealing, informative, and purposeful.

General Tips for Creating a Great Landing Page

• Value and Purpose – The landing page cannot just exist. It needs to have an intention as well as be of some value to the user. Instead of beating around the bush with too many unnecessary graphics, just stick to the core purpose, be straightforward and as minimalistic as possible. Also, ensure that the landing page answers what the customer has been looking for.
• Restrict the Number of Exits from the Page – At this stage, you want the visitor’s complete attention to be on your page. Hence, try avoiding or limiting the number of exit links available on your landing page.
• Mention About Your Social Hype – People may not believe what their friends tell them in person about a certain product. They are, however, sure to believe it is great if it has been rated well online. Use this to incorporate tweets, likes, followers, comments, and shares from common social media platforms to build a level of trust among your visitors.
• Conduct a Few Surveys Prior to Creating One – This way you can have an exact idea how long the customer actually browses through your page, would he be ready to take a form-based questionnaire, of what length would he prefer it to be, et al.

3. Creating a Thank You Page

The thank-you page is the one where the visitor actually avails and accesses the offer. Again, the thank you page needs to be designed wisely in order to be true to its purpose and be appealing enough to attract the visitors.

General Tips for Creating the Thank You Page

• Reintroduce the home page or the landing page on this thank you page itself so that the customer can go back and continue browsing for more offers.
• Add relevant links to any guides, websites, eBooks, et al, which will lead the visitor to where you wish to take them.
• Add a subsequent offer related to their first choice, or some related content that they might be interested in based on their likes.
• Reintroduce the home page or the landing page on this thank you page itself so that the customer can go back and continue browsing for more offers.

Factors to Consider Before Launch

1. Know Your Audience

The first and foremost thing to consider when you are planning to launch a campaign is whether you know your audience well. For example, let’s say your brand deals with niche products. Working with an e-commerce niche provides the businessman the option of handling unexplored areas or areas that haven’t been paid the requisite attention to.

It goes without mentioning that you have a fairer chance of success and big numbers with the niche store compared to a general one.

At the same time, it can also help you finalize upon a specific target audience to cater to. Before you launch your campaign, it would be advisable to keep them in mind.

2. Establish Your Goals

At the onset, the most crucial part of a business venture is the idea itself. A successful business idea might come overnight, as well as after long-drawn inspiration and meditation.

The idea must have the potential of being launched as a full-fledged business venture and must be unique, enterprising, and innovative.

Having already done these, the next important step is to establish a business goal for yourself as well as your team.

There could be multiple goals, as well. Unless you do this, there is no point in initiating the business campaign.

3. Have a Content Calendar

Deadlines are important, and so is the schedule. Therefore, maintaining a content calendar can be a healthy & profitable habit.

You can naturally have a planned timeline about what to upload when to upload – so that it all sounds interconnected and properly structured.

4. Use Different Platforms

The most brilliant of business ideas come only after brainstorming for hours, days or months at length. It is this reaped fruit of creativity that fosters a solution.

The brainstorming eventually leads to problem-solving, and this leads to product creation – all products of a creative mind, or many creative minds.

So, when the time comes, do not forget to engage on multiple platforms, displaying this creativity.

Use multiple social media platforms for the idea or product launch so that you gain wider appreciation and criticism.

5. Be Prepared to Make Changes

Just because you are ready doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. There’s always be multiple improvements that you may need to do before the actual launch. So, you should be ready to adopt those changes. It will lay a great foundation for your campaign.

6. Get Some Help

Use the help of professionals in achieving some of the best marketing campaigns for your company. They can guide you on the path of greatness, without even the slightest of doubt!

Factors to Consider After Launch

1. Measure Your Results

Use internet tools wisely to measure the results and your performance when it comes to seeing how well did your campaigns performed on social media platforms. You can easily assess what the audience likes and what it doesn’t.

2. Invest Time in Making Changes

You need to spare some time out for making the necessary changes. So, always calculate on this share of time. Don’t assume that the idea you have conceptualized is concrete, keep the scope open for a more enhanced and effective version of the same, even if it clicks closer to the launch. Be open to last-minute changes with a readiness to adapt & implement it.

3. Read the Customer’s Perspective

A successful business venture comes only when it has been monitored well, giving valuable significance to honest and helpful feedback.

The business idea needs to be propagated enough for people to try and test it in order to grasp whether it is still relevant or not.

It is not uncommon for people to try to see things from others’ perspectives. This ensures pointing out of discrepancies that one might have missed out in the first place.

It makes the customer’s perspective of prime importance. Read it, analyze it, and try to bring out the most out of it.

4. Assess Comparative Performances

You can compare your work with that of your competitors for better performance analysis. That will help you to know how much market you’ve been able to cover. It will also allow you to plan things better for your future campaigns.

5. Hold a Feedback Discussion Panel

A range of inputs coming in from users of different backgrounds not only helps you judge the range of acceptance of the product, but also a greater number of errors that you might have overlooked can be spotted and rectified.

KPIs To Analyze

Basic Level

• Site Traffic – The number of visits, likes, hits & views that your website gets.
• Contacts – The number of new contacts generated in a particular duration of time.
• Conversion Rate – It could be either the conversion rate of visitors into converted customers, or of existing contacts into customers, or even the number of items being actually purchased out of the total number of products that were previously been added to the shopping cart.
• Customers – The number of visitors or contacts who got converted into customers in a particular duration of time.

Advanced Level

• CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost – The combination of sales and marketing costs. This includes a summation of – advertising expenses, salaries, bonuses, incentives, overheads, and miscellaneous charges taken for a fixed duration, divided by the number of new customers gained in a particular duration.
• Marketing Percentage of the CAC – This is computed as the marketing portion of the CAC. Any change in the M-CAC over time indicates some changes in your business marketing strategies or the effectiveness of your business. The M-CAC for a company might range anywhere between 10-90% based on its sales processes and cycles.
• Sales Per Month – The total annual sale divided on a monthly basis.
• Avg. Order Size – The number, value, and type of items being ordered by a customer in a single transaction.
• Value Per Visit – Total website revenue divided by total visits on the website
• Traffic Source – The different sources customers have used to land on the respective website, social media, google search results, et al.
• Social Media Followers – The increase in its number and the engagement that comes from it.
• Customer Lifetime Value – An estimated amount of the total purchases a customer is likely to make from your venture, through the period that they’re associated with your venture.
• The Ratio of LTV: CAC (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost) – It helps in estimating the current value of a customer in comparison with the cost your company has incurred in trying to acquire them as customers.
• Time to Pay Pack CAC – The number of months taken by you to earn back the value of CAC you had spent on acquiring a new customer.
• Marketing Originated Customer Percentage – The ratio that depicts the percentage of your new business being driven by marketing efforts. More simply put, it is the number of customers acquired through lead conversion initiated by the marketing team divided by the total number of new customers taken in during that period, expressed as a percentage.
• Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage – It is quite similar to the case of marketing originated customer percentage. The difference/addition is that it also takes in the cases where marketing has influenced or lead to the converted customers from a new generation.

Channels to Consider for Reporting

Breaking Down the Channels

• Links and visits from other social media sites
• Organic searches from search engines
• Referrals from other websites
• Responses to email marketing campaigns and newsletters
• Visits through pay-per-click advertisements online
• Visits as a from the website’s URL is typed directly
• Offline sources such as manual additions of the web address, usage of APIs and importing addresses, and so on.

Channel Effectiveness Metrics

Here are a few channel effectiveness metrics to consider while studying the performance of the channels leading to your website.

1. Close Rate Per Channel

An easy and effective way of understanding the effectiveness of a channel is by determining its close rate per channel. This means assessing which channel drives more customers or leads to your website. Mainly such channels are expected to be SEO and social media sites. The one with a higher close rate is most-certainly a more effective option. And hence, it needs to be utilized more for generating more leads.

2. MTD Goal Per Channel

MTD stands for Month-to-Date. This kind of metric helps you in attaining your goals in a certain set time-frame. As mentioned before, numbers are much more effective and goal-driven than mere expressions. This also makes the MTD goals per channel an excellent way of keeping track of your channel performances, along with structuring out a properly laid goal.

3. Paid vs. Organic Lead Percentage

There are always these two types of leads for a business – paid, where you have invested money in marketing and campaigns, and have led the customer in a structured and planned way to the specific landing page that you targeted for.

The second type is the organic type, which involves customers landing on or discovering your website simply via search engines, without any marketing tactics. You might want to keep a close tab to see what works better for you and accordingly plan your marketing ventures in the future.

Marketing Tools

Blog

HubSpot’s blog tool gives content creators a powerful platform for building authority around your topics and generating traffic of your site. Learn more about the features of the blog tool and how to set up your blog in HubSpot.

You can create a new blog or manage your existing blog options in your blog settings. This is where you’ll set defaults for your blog root URL, language settings, comments, subscriptions, and more.

You have the option to create and edit a new blog post in your blog post editor. Each of these posts can be displayed by publish date, by author, or by topic.

In addition to the classic editor, HubSpot has a draft mode editor that allows authors to focus on their content without worrying about the layout of the same.

Your individual posts are grouped together into blog listings. You may feature blog posts in order of publish date or sort them by author or blog tag.

You can view your live listing page by clicking ‘View Blog’ at the top of your blog dashboard. The content of your blog’s listing page renders dynamically based on your blog’s template and blog options in your settings.

Your blog dashboard gives you an overview of all your blog posts and analytics. You can also manage the details of your blog, such as tags, authors, and settings. This is also where you can create a new blog post.

If you’re managing multiple blogs in HubSpot, click the blog name and dropdown menu on the left for selecting a different blog dashboard.

Click ‘Make the Default Blog’ option to set the selected blog as your primary blog. This will be the default blog dashboard you see when you navigate to the blog tool.

All blog posts for the selected blog will display in the dashboard by default. In the left sidebar navigation, you can filter the dashboard to display draft, scheduled, published, or archived blog posts.

You can also see your comments, tags, and authors. There’s a ‘More Tools’ menu to edit your blog settings, view your subscriber lists, manage your blog template, and more. To analyze your overall blog performance in the website analytics tool, click ‘View Blog Analytics’.

Landing Pages

You can also use HubSpot for quickly designing and launching professional-looking, landing pages without any help from designers or IT.

You can choose from HubSpot’s built-in library of mobile-optimized templates that are proven to convert or build pages from the ground up. With the on-page editor, adding copy and inserting images and conversion forms is a snap.

You have the option to preview how your page looks on different devices before publishing; followed by the facility of watching the respective leads rolling in.

There are features to display personalized content, CTAs, and forms for each and every visitor to improve the performance of your landing pages.

There are features to display personalized content, CTAs, and forms for each and every visitor to improve the performance of your landing pages.

HubSpot allows you to gather more information about the prospects using dynamic forms, which doesn’t ask the same question twice.

Thinking about the benefit of the same? When you tailor landing page content to individual visitors, your conversion rates will skyrocket.

CMS

There are so many things that go into the making of a great website platform. All of that and much more becomes possible with HubSpot’s content management system.

You have the option of creating and editing blog posts, landing pages, site pages, and emails with ease, whether you choose from one of our pre-built templates or start from scratch.

You’ll be backed by a world-class content delivery network to serve your content all across the globe in the fastest way possible.

Besides, you can then manage, optimize, and track the performance of your content with the same platform you used to create it.

Other than that, your website is assured of a responsive and speedy structure. As discussed earlier, a responsive design means your content will automatically be optimized for every device, be it a desktop or mobile.

With SSL built-in, you’ll secure your website with a safe browsing experience for your visitors and benefit from better search rankings.

Because your content tools are a part of HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software, you can easily add calls-to-action and forms that can help you in converting anonymous visitors into qualified leads.

SEO

HubSpot allows you to plan your content strategy and build search authority easily and effectively. Today, search engines reward websites whose content is organized by topics.

HubSpot’s content strategy tool makes it easy to discover and rank for the topics that concern you and your customers.

You’ll get topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity, as well as access to monthly search data so you can estimate how ranking for specific topics will translate to organic traffic gains.

Then, you can use HubSpot’s integrated content tools to create clusters of web pages and blog content around each of your core topics.

You can also easily designate canonical URLs to focus your search authority on your most influential pages, track all your important topic clusters in one dashboard, and watch your traffic increase over time as you build search authority.

Other than that, you get on-page SEO advice in the same place you’re creating blog posts, landing pages, and site pages.

Built-in to-do lists make it easy for you to optimize content for search as you create it — no third-party plugins required.

With standard SSL included, you’ll secure your website with a safe browsing experience for your visitors and improve your search rankings to boot.

Social Media Monitoring & Publishing

HubSpot offers you the opportunity to publish on social networks in the same place where you build the campaigns.

This means you can easily share blog posts, landing pages, and other content with the same tool that you use to build your marketing campaigns.

This allows you to manually publish content directly to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or connect your social accounts to your blog and automatically share new content as it gets published.

You may also schedule content for later, and get suggestions for the best times to post so you can get your content in front of your followers at exactly the right moment.

Forms and Calls-to-Action

HubSpot allows you to build free forms for your website, including CTA forms (Call to Action forms).

The free online form builder can be used to build customized forms, which connects with your contacts database.

This means you can create online forms in seconds using the drag-and-drop form builder option that HubSpot provides you.

Everyone who fills out your form will be automatically routed into the HubSpot CRM.

You can further manage the relationship with that person by setting reminder tasks, calling them, or sending them a personalized email.

Besides, you can easily add your form onto your website in seconds, or use a standalone form page to share your form with others quickly.

Email

Can you imagine if you could create beautiful emails without designers or IT-experts? Well, with HubSpot, you definitely can.

The platform can be used to quickly draft email campaigns that look professionally designed and can be displayed perfectly across all devices, all by yourself.

You can choose to get started with one of the HubSpot’s goal-based email templates or choose from a dozen other templates, available on our marketplace that is proven to be capable enough to convert visitors into customers.

Besides, you can also make it your own with the easy-to-use drag and drop editor. Customize your layout, add calls-to-action and images, and modify your content and colors to match your brand.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is defined simply as using software to automate marketing activities.

Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media postings, and even ad campaigns. It does not just provide efficiency, but also a personalized experience for the customers. The technology of marketing automation makes several such tasks easier.

At the very onset, marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy used in a skilled manner to derive the best marketing strategies.

“It should allow you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers.”

-HubSpot

This is exactly what the platform tries to focus on while trying to deliver the best of marketing automation and being the one-stop solution for all your marketing needs.

Sales Tools:-

Besides content and marketing strategies for any business, HubSpot also tries to focus on the salient aspects of sales departments for companies. This is because HubSpot truly believes that inter-department collaboration is the only way to run a successful organization these days.

CRM

HubSpot CRM has free tools for everyone on your team, and it’s completely free. With the CRM feature, you get full visibility into your sales pipeline in real-time, along with a to-the-minute view of your entire sales pipeline. Everything on a clean, visual dashboard.

With detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, you’ll never be in the dark about how your team is tracking toward quota, and you’ll have all the data you need to coach your team to success.

At the same time, you are arming your sales team with time-saving tools to use. It helps them in closing more deals with less work, and remove friction from their sales process.

Your contact records are automatically enriched with data from over 20 million businesses. With tools that notify your salespeople the minute a prospect opens their email or visits your website, they’ll have all the context they need to follow up with the right leads at the right time.

Truly, connecting with prospects has never been easier with free meeting scheduling, live chat, email templates, click-to-call functionality, and more.

Email Templates

This unique feature of HubSpot allows you to send template emails from inside your inbox.

You can access the rich library of built-in templates designed for every step of your customer’s journey, or create your own from scratch with HubSpot, a feature that shows the level of customization the platform offers to your company.

Besides, your templates are always just one click away inside your inbox – whether you use Outlook or Office 365 for Windows or Gmail.

You’ll save hours when you can send your most repetitive emails in seconds. Other than that, there are real-time metrics to show you which of your templates are performing, and which ones need attention now.

Your open rates tell you which subject lines your leads and customers can’t help but click. And your click rates tell you which buttons, links, and attachments they explore.

You can see metrics across all of your templates for an individual sales rep, and over any time period – it’s all there in your dashboard. Nothing gets more insightful and helpful than this.

Meeting Scheduling

All you need to do for accessing this amazing feature by HubSpot is to integrate your Google Calendar or Office 365 Calendar with the platform.

The result is the power to eliminate the back and forth of meeting scheduling. Instead, you could put that power to book meetings in the hands of your prospects.

Meetings sync to your Google or Office 365 calendar, so prospects can always see your most up-to-date availability.

When you let prospects automatically schedule meetings with HubSpot’s meetings tool, you’ll save hours of time spent on unnecessary emails.

HubSpot allows you to send group meeting links to allow prospects to schedule time with more than one person in your organization.

Even if there is no designated sales representative in the company, it will take no time to set up a round-robin meeting link so prospects can schedule a meeting with the sales rep whose availability works best for their schedule.

These meeting links can be embedded on your site, making scheduling appointments with HubSpot’s meetings tool is convenient for all.

The process you need to follow, as dictated by HubSpot, is as follows :

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to your contacts, companies, deals, or tickets.
• Click the name of the record.
• In the left panel, click the ‘Meet Icon Meetings’. And set up your meeting in the window that opens at the bottom of the screen:
  • Enter a title for your meeting.
  • Click Select meeting type to select the meeting type. This setting is available only if you have enabled customized call and meeting types.
  • Click the Attendees dropdown menu to search and select other contacts who should be included in the meeting.
  • Set the start date and time of your meeting.
  • Click on the ‘Duration’ to set the length of your meeting.
  • Enter a description for your meeting.
• Click the video icon insert video to insert either a Zoom or UberConference video into your meeting.
  • Click the Associated with a dropdown menu to search and select the records to be associated with the meeting, or deselect any records that should not be associated with the meeting.
  • Select Add to Google Calendar or Add to Office 365 Calendar for adding the event to your Google Calendar or Office 365 Calendar, respectively. You can also send an invite to your contacts.
• If Add to Google Calendar or Add to Office 365 Calendar is selected, click ‘Save’.
  • If Add to Google Calendar or Add to Office 365 Calendar is selected.
  • The contact needs to have a valid email address populated in the email property in order to receive an invitation.
  • Once the meeting is scheduled, your contact will receive an invitation via a .ics file that can be added to their calendar.
  • An accepted meeting will automatically be created for you in your calendar.
• If you haven’t selected ‘Add to Google Calendar’ or ‘Add to Office 365 Calendar’ option, no meeting invitation will be sent.

What is Hubspot Integration?

HubSpot grants you the option to integrate your company platform or software to the best software you wish to consider, completely based on your choice.

If you think about it, every business tries to integrate its own platform with another that is doing well in the market, and that can help one accomplish their interests.

However, it can be so hectic trying to find the perfect one and later, handling all the technicalities.

Researching, pricing, and connecting all the different integrations can prove to be an unnecessarily hectic job that demands a lot of your time and energy.

HubSpot comes to the rescue, here again, this time with its HubSpot app partner program. It acts like a trustworthy and loyal friend when it comes to discovering the best solutions to run a business.

HubSpot has a specially dedicated team that takes care of everything involved in the matter of integration of applications and platforms.

Besides, they have the right sources to take care of integrator certification and verification. All this and many more features assure the value HubSpot holds for its customers.

You also have the benefit of integrating your CRM with the HubSpot API that guarantees more efficient performance. The steps to do this are listed below, as dictated by HubSpot.

• Start by identifying the data you’d like to pass between the two systems
• Typically, it is recommended that information for segmentation, personalization, or reporting purposes is synced to HubSpot.
• Several objects can be used for data storage in HubSpot:
  • Contacts (Contact/Lead type objects)
  • Companies (Account type objects)
  • Deals (Opportunity type objects)
  • Tickets (Support Ticket type objects)
  • Engagements (Task and Activity type objects)
  • Products (Library of SKUs type objects)
  • Line Items (Specific product variation associated with a purchase or sales process type objects)
  • Timeline Events (Custom defined type objects that can ‘happen’ to their associated Object)
• After identifying the data correctly to be synchronized, you can begin to map out the various object relationships between your system and that offered by HubSpot.
• Map the relevant data fields to be synchronized between the two systems.
• Create any custom properties on the available objects above as needed, selecting the most appropriate data type.
• Plan out the development of your integration utilizing the information contained within this document, developing the required use cases, and then beginning implementation.
• It’s not possible to create two contact records with the same email address. Email address across contact records must always be unique. However, they do not always need to be present.
• Follow the below links if you wish to change the metadata of CRM objects that were applicable.
  • Create a new Contact Property
  • Create a new Company Property
  • Create a new Deal Property
  • Create a new Ticket, Product or Line Item Property
  • Define a Timeline Event Types

The Most Popular HubSpot Integrations

HubSpot Gmail Integration

About HubSpot Gmail Integration

HubSpot Gmail Integration is a tool through which you can get access to all of your sales productivity tools, like templates and meetings. You can also use the HubSpot sidebar and see full HubSpot CRM details about your contacts without leaving your inbox.

You can also track all your mails by just logging in the emails sent from Gmail into HubSpot CRM with one click, track opens and clicks in real-time, and see every detail from your CRM without leaving your inbox.

There are multiple features that HubSpot offers for the integration:

• Canned Snippets
• Contact and Company Insights
• Contact Management
• Documents
• Email Scheduling
• Email Templates
• Email Tracking Notifications
• Gmail and Outlook Integration
• Meetings

There are three plans – free, basic, and business that differ from each other in terms of pricing and features offered.

What are the Major Benefits?

• You can log emails sent from Gmail in HubSpot CRM with one click.
• You can track email opens and clicks in real-time.
• You are allowed access to the tools you need to work more efficiently, like templates, sequences, meetings, and more; right from your inbox.

HubSpot Zapier Integration

The HubSpot Zapier integration automatically saves new form entries to your spreadsheet for you. You can thus save all new HubSpot form submissions into new spreadsheets.

Besides, you can also create or update HubSpot contacts from new Google Contacts if you want to make sure your contacts are on every list they need to be.

Simply integrate them through Zapier. Thereafter, new contacts that you add on Google Contacts will have its data sent to HubSpot. Each of these contacts will either be created or updated if it already existed.

You can also log new Intercom users in HubSpot if you need to track the results of your marketing.

Whenever a visitor turns into a user, Intercom will register it and by using this integration, you can use add that registered data to your HubSpot account or update their contact entry in there with their signup info.

Zappier integrates with the following features of HubSpot:

• Blog and Content Creation Tools
• Contact Activity
• Custom Event Reporting
• Forms
• Lists
• Social Media
• Ticketing
• Workflows

There are three pricing plans depending on features and packages – free, starter, and professional.

What Are the Major Benefits?

Connect HubSpot to Over 1000 Apps

Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between HubSpot and your apps automatically so that you can focus on your most important work.

Link your apps over a few clicks so that they can share data, without any requirement of the code. Also, the time-saving workflows called Zaps are set up in minutes.

Save Time With Automation

By setting up automated workflows with Zapier, you can cut out manual effort and tedious copy-pasting, and utilise that time to your customers and for more important work.

Scale Your Productivity

Zapier workflows go beyond copying information. You can look up data across multiple tools before feeding it all into your central repository. Work can be scheduled, delayed, summarized, and parsed.

Your info can be transformed, formatted, sliced, and diced as needed. With the ability to have an event in your system signal a sequence of updates and actions across all your tools, you’ll be able to set up processes you didn’t even think possible before.

HubSpot MailChimp Integration

Integrating Mailchimp with HubSpot

Engage Your Contacts

Once you send your HubSpot CRM popup forms contact lists over to Mailchimp, it’s time to engage with your contacts.

As a marketer, you can use these lists to put together a one of a kind; personalized email sends to delight your leads and customers.

See Mailchimp Email Activity in Hubspot

Sync Mailchimp email activity, including sends, opens, clicks, bounces to existing contacts in your HubSpot CRM. Use that email activity to create lists or enroll contacts in workflows based on those lists.

The only thing worse than a sync error is not being able to resolve one. While our integration with Mailchimp is airtight, if a sync error should ever occur, we’ll provide you with all the details you need to resolve the problem and continue engaging your contacts.

If Mailchimp is your email service provider, this integration is for you. Nothing is more powerful than connecting your email services to a CRM – and this integration makes that as easy as pie.

Automatically Sync Your Hubspot CRM Contacts to Mailchimp

HubSpot empowers you to fill your CRM with website visitors through pop-up forms. With this integration, you can quickly create lists from these conversion points and start creating email campaigns in Mailchimp.

See Mailchimp Email Activity in Hubspot

Sync Mailchimp email activity, including sends, opens, clicks, bounces to existing contacts in your HubSpot CRM. This activity can later be used to create lists or enroll contacts in workflows based on those lists.

Monitor Sync Errors

This integration comes equipped with intelligent error handling so that if anything, if ever off, we can get you back in sync in no time, without missing a beat.

Key Features Involved in the Integration

• Contact Activity
• Lists
• Popup Forms

There are three types of plans available in reference to the costing – free, essentials, and standard.

Error Handling

The only thing worse than a sync error is not being able to resolve one. While our integration with Mailchimp is airtight, if a sync error should ever occur, we’ll provide you with all the details you need to resolve the problem and continue engaging your contacts.

HubSpot Slack Integration

How does the Slack – HubSpot Integration happen?

Turn Slack Messages into a HubSpot Task/Ticket

When chatting with a coworker over Slack about a hot lead, you can easily create a task in HubSpot to follow-up on the lead later that day.

Tasks and tickets automatically sync with your HubSpot CRM – exactly where

Use Slash Commands to Search or Post Info from Hubspot

Need help from a coworker while working on a ticket? Use the slash command “/hs-search-ticket” to search and post the ticket in a channel on Slack. And then collaborate away!

Get HubSpot Notifications in Slack

Get notified when a lead opens a pricing document you emailed to them earlier that day — and use that perfect moment to call them up and close the deal.

Send Slack Notifications through HubSpot Workflows

Boost your team’s morale by creating a workflow that sends a celebratory notification to a Slack channel each time an employee achieves a set milestone.

What are the Major Benefits?

Sales, marketing, and services are all about building relationships. But it can be difficult to form those relationships. Especially, when a representative spends precious time completing menial tasks.

In fact, a recent report from HubSpot Research found that sales reps spend up to a quarter of their day on tasks like writing emails and data entry.

In fact, a recent report from HubSpot Research found that sales reps spend up to a quarter of their day on tasks like writing emails and data entry.

Actions

With Actions, create the following objects and associate them with a contact, company, or deal in HubSpot, directly within Slack:

• Add a Task
• Add a Ticket

Slash Commands

With slash commands, you can search and post the following HubSpot objects or actions directly within Slack:

• Contact: /hs-search-contact
• Company: /hs-search-company
• Deal: /hs-search-deal
• Deals Assigned to You: /hs-search-my-deal
• Task: /hs-search-task
• Ticket: /hs-search-ticket
• Playbook: /hs-search-playbook
• Knowledge Base Article: /hs-search-kb
• Set Availability Status for Live Chat: /hs-chat-away OR /hs-chat-available
• Provide HubSpot with Feedback about the Integration: /hs-feedback

Conversations

With live chat, team email, and an easy-to-use chatbot builder, HubSpot gives you the messaging tools and context to have personalized conversations with prospects and customers at scale. And each of these for free! Slack seamlessly integrates with HubSpot conversations:

• Get notified in a designated Slack channel about incoming chats from your website
• See conversation status within the chat notification
• Respond to those incoming chats within Slack – or, click ‘Reply in Inbox’ and get redirected to the chat in HubSpot (either way, the whole conversation will be logged in real-time in your inbox)

Notifications

• Receive Notifications: Stay connected to activities in your HubSpot CRM by receiving notifications for reminders, mentions, form submissions, and a lot more within Slack.
• Send Slack Notifications Through Workflows: Notifications send for Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.

Say goodbye to the days, when the time was being wasted on switching between tools. Instead, work where you want with HubSpot and Slack.

Key Features of the Slack-HubSpot Integration:

• Contact and Company Insights
• Conversations Inbox
• Deals
• Knowledge-base
• Live Chats
• Playbooks
• Smart Notifications
• Tasks
• Ticketing
• Workflows

There are three tiers to the Slack pricing plans – free, standard, and plus.

HubSpot Eventbrite Integration

How does the Eventbrite – HubSpot Integration happen?

Sync Registrations to HubSpot Automatically

When someone registers for an event you’ve synced to HubSpot, you’ll see an Eventbrite registration event on that contact’s timeline.

If the person registering for the event is not a contact, a new one will be automatically created for you.

Segment Based on Event Information

Create lists, set workflow triggers, update scoring criteria, and more based on event registration and attendance.

What are the Major Benefits?

Improve Event Promotion and Follow-up

Segment email lists and creates automated workflows based on the event information. So that you can create the perfect experience for every registrant.

Increase Event Engagement Visibility

New registrants for your events will automatically be created as contacts in HubSpot, so everyone on your team knows the full scoop on your events.

Turn Event Engagement Into Action

Use event information to inform lead scoring, so your reps reach out to the most ready-to-buy prospects first. Or use event attendance to create smart content to personalize your website for your attendees.

Please note:The email address used to log into Eventbrite for connecting this app must be the account administrator in the connected Eventbrite account.

Key Features of the Eventbrite Integration With HubSpot:

• Contact Activity
• Contact Management
• Lists
• Predictive Lead Scoring
• Workflows

There are three layers of pricing plans – essentials, professional, and premium.