Growing your understanding of the basics of digital marketing and the value of an inbound approach to your business's marketing and sales is crucial in growing your business today.

Follow these steps to gain some new understanding and access to some valuable resources.

This Blog post is what is called Pillar Content. Here, we cover topics that address many of the most popular marketing and sales issues and questions. 

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business. How do you do that? You attract prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. And finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert.

Unlike outbound marketing, with inbound marketing, you don’t need to fight for your potential customers’ attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business. Source: https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing

Read our post, What is Inbound Marketing? You will pick up some tips and suggestions for advancing your understanding.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business. 
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-definition-under-100-sr

In an upcoming Blog post, we will elaborate. Stay tuned!

Is HubSpot a COS or CMS?

While HubSpot coined the term Content Optimization System (COS), the company announced at the 2017 INBOUND Conference that its platform is, in fact, a Content Management System. CMSs help companies manage websites and blogs. The COS component of HubSpot software includes more marketing and sales functionality out of the box than other programs, including marketing tools to help manage analytics, social media, landing pages and calls-to-action. This makes HubSpot software basically a CMS on steroids. While these tools can be added to other CMS applications, they don’t always come standard like they do with HubSpot. It should be noted that in 2016, G2 Crowd named HubSpot its top CMS software, and was named No. 1 in both Market Presence and Customer Satisfaction with a total score of 87 out of 100.
source: https://www.kunocreative.com/blog/hubspot-questions-answered

Who can use HubSpot software?

Today, any company that is not firmly entrenched with another CMS application should consider switching to HubSpot to gain the many benefits of inbound support for the entire customer journey. For example, creating campaigns in HubSpot allows companies to easily organize and align marketing channels, making it easier to measure results. HubSpot has worked with hundreds of companies that have made the move to the sales and marketing software—with upticks in productivity occurring almost immediately.
source: https://www.kunocreative.com/blog/hubspot-questions-answered

What are inbound campaigns?

At a very basic level, inbound campaigns are all about directing leads in such a way that they become new customers. 

An inbound campaign aligns all marketing channels around a single offer and goal. Campaigns are made up of several key elements, including landing pages, calls-to-action, emails, blog posts, social messages, keywords, pay-per-click visits, traffic from other sources and workflows. HubSpot’s powerful dashboard lets marketers monitor and tag each distinct piece of a campaign.

What are the benefits of running campaigns in HubSpot?

In the book Building A Story Brand, author Donald Miller says "Most companies waste enormous amounts of money on marketing. ... When we see the reports, we wonder what went wrong...". "... we're just in a race to get our products to market; we're also in a race to communicate why our customers need those products in their lives. Even if we have the best product in the marketplace, we'll lose to an inferior product if our competitor's offer is communicated more clearly."

Running campaigns in HubSpot are about focusing on the buyer's story, not ours. In an upcoming Blog post, we will elaborate. Stay tuned!

How do we attract and convert new leads with HubSpot inbound marketing campaigns?

Most marketing campaigns target leads that don't yet express a need. They fit a target market profile (usually not an Ideal Customer Profile). The emails received by the passive lead are an interruption and end up in the trash folder. This type of marketing is ineffective. 

An inbound marketing campaign is oriented around helping the prospect through the buyer journey. 

The buyer journey starts with a prospect who is a stranger. That stranger becomes a visitor who then becomes a lead and then a customer and then a promoter of your company.

In an upcoming Blog post, we will elaborate. Stay tuned!

How does HubSpot support the sales process of converting leads to customers?

Put simply, when a lead passes the criteria for becoming a sales qualified lead, the lead passes from marketing to sales. Since the process is automated and you are notified via email when this occurs, having a sales department or VP Sales in place is not a prerequisite. HubSpot supports the sales process of converting leads to customers and we'll get into the details in a later Blog post. Stay tuned! 

How do we delight customers with HubSpot inbound marketing campaigns?

In the above Inbound Marketing Methodology graphic, customers become promoters. Many companies do not include the important step of nurturing customers to become promoters. In a soon to be released Blog post, we'll get into how you can delight customers with HubSpot inbound marketing campaigns. Stay tuned!

Where can we learn how to use HubSpot to get the most out of its marketing and sales tools?

One of the biggest benefits of being an Agile client is that you also become a HubSpot customer. With that includes access to all of the inbound marketing learning resources that HubSpot produces. Agile team members have extensive experience in implementing and our job is to help you be as successful as you can possibly be. 

Need some inspiration? Check out these "How-To" examples:

• How to Write a Blog Post
• How to Do Keyword Research: A Beginner's Guide
• How to Write an Effective Meta Description (Yes, They Still Matter)

What marketing analytics questions should I be asking and addressing?

For many years, Agile has helped clients address marketing analytics questions like, How many visitors are coming to my website? What time of day and day of week are most visitors coming to my website? What are the different websites that are referring/sending visitors to my website? What's the split between organic visits and paid visits.

In an upcoming Blog post, stay tuned (!) we address 10 common marketing questions using analytics.

CONCLUSION:

Growing your understanding of digital marketing will put you light years ahead of the competition. At Agile, we exist to help our clients generate traffic, leads and new customers and we do it in a way that is consistent with the above -- by helping your customers through the buyer journey. And keeping the focus on them! We then help you to use HubSpot so your customers go from satisfied to delighted with your company and the product or service it receives. 

Want to learn more about Agile services? We offer a complimentary consultation as a way to help your business on the way toward inbound success! Fill out the form below and an Agile team member will be in touch shortly.