Inbound Marketing Is Not A Crockpot: How Reporting and Analysis Are Crucial To Inbound Marketing
October 26, 20175 Must-Haves for an Effective Marketing Campaign
November 9, 2017Did you purchase HubSpot and it’s just not producing the qualified leads you’ve been hoping for? Do you feel like you tried HubSpot and failed?
Let us reassure you—you’re not a failure. Neither is HubSpot.
Sometimes we find that you and your software platform just aren’t on the same page, and you need to bring your strengths into alignment. Analyzing what did work for you—and what didn’t—during your HubSpot experience could help you improve your performance and make HubSpot the software solution you need to help your business grow and succeed.
Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Investment
We’re not talking about money—you already invested that when you purchased HubSpot’s marketing automation software in the first place.
What we’re talking about is time and manpower. To get good results, you need to be prepared to put in the work to earn them.
Inbound Marketing is best-served by building up a content marketing strategy, taking the time to research what your competitors are doing right (and what they’re not doing right), and implementing your strategy through social media marketing, email marketing, video… anywhere your potential leads are likely to go.
Maybe HubSpot didn’t work because you’ve been active on Twitter when your leads like to hang out on LinkedIn, or you haven’t been planning campaigns to offer premium content or building your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.
Maybe your blogs just aren’t speaking to your Buyer Personas, and neither is your site content. Maybe your personas’ research process takes much longer than you initially thought, and you just haven’t set realistic expectations with regard to how quickly new leads will come in.
All of these things can be fixed—but it’ll take time, effort, and elbow grease to get there.
Did You Forget About Buyer Personas?
For Inbound Marketing to succeed, you (or whoever is in charge of your marketing efforts) need to understand the Inbound Marketing methodology. A key part of the Inbound Marketing methodology? Buyer Personas.
We’ve heard it a thousand times—building Buyer Personas is just too much work and besides, are they really necessary?
Developing your Buyer Personas is an essential step to ensuring your marketing team is all on the same page as to who you’re trying to reach, how, and why.
Make sure these Buyer Persona profiles are shared with your team before you start a campaign, and that they inform every single step of your efforts with HubSpot. This will help you stop bringing in spam leads you can’t use and instead target the specific qualified leads you’re looking for.
You’re Using Marketing Automation Software, But… Not Automating
HubSpot is an amazing product that can simplify marketing automation down to a science, but it just can’t do the work unless you get in there and do your part. Sending one follow-up email isn’t going to cut it.
You’ll want to build entire campaigns to work primarily by automation. Think through every step you want your prospective client to take and be sure that those steps match what your Buyer Personas are searching for. Workflows, lead scoring, conversion cycles—these are all essential tools for successful marketing automation.
Dropping them by the wayside is a great way to get 40% results on a software that is designed to work at 100%.
Automate each step the user may take, from signing up for regular newsletters, to filling out a form in exchange for premium content, to follow-up contact to show you’re listening to them and ready to help them take the next step.
You can’t just sit back and watch HubSpot go… you need to work with HubSpot and build your marketing foundation.
You Need to Look Beyond Your Website
We’ve seen clients before who had a website built, updated the blog a few times, and then simply sat back and waited for the leads to roll on in.
If you’re getting nothing but tumbleweeds rolling slowly across your computer screen, maybe it’s time to take a look at what steps you could take to build online visibility, your company’s reputation within your industry, and a powerful referral network.
Where are your competitors active? What are you doing to build your online reputation within your community?
We’re not telling you to chase after your customers like in traditional outbound-style marketing—we’re telling you to figure out where your potential customers are searching for a solution to their unique problem, and make sure you’re already there when they arrive.
Build a Team that Thrives on HubSpot
Asking one single person to run an entire marketing department all on their own is asking for superhuman abilities. Asking the marketing director to write content, edit, maintain active social media, implement email campaigns, redesign the website, craft compelling CTAs, maintain their Google rankings, check keyword reports, and do all this while also working on print or traditional advertising?
That’s asking one person to do five jobs, and eventually all those plates they’re spinning are going to crash.
To effectively utilize Inbound Marketing with HubSpot, you really need a team devoted to helping your business grow. If you just don’t have the budget to build a multi-person in-house marketing team, that’s okay—outsourcing digital marketing can help you receive the creativity, skills, and experience of multiple people for the price of one full-time employee.
Your marketing director can focus on the non-digital side of things while the outsourced digital marketing team takes over your faltering HubSpot efforts and turns everything into a well-oiled marketing automation machine.
HubSpot’s a tool, in the end. If you try to use a screwdriver to do a hammer’s job, all you’ll end up with is a bunch of dents and a really confused nail.
It’s how you use the tools that counts.
Ready to Succeed With HubSpot?
If you’ve purchased HubSpot’s annual subscription, but you’re struggling to utilize it effectively and feel like you’re failing at HubSpot, we’re here to help. Waypost Marketing provides Inbound Marketing services, with everything from content marketing to video marketing and more.
Get started improving your HubSpot success today. Give us a call at (864) 288-6162 or contact us online at any time.