Five months until we cross the pond as a HubSpot partner

It’s five months until we attend the Inbound conference in Boston. More specifically, it’s roughly 137 days, 8 hours and 5 minutes until we see Jack Donaghey (aka Alec Baldwin) giving what I’m expecting to be a transformational life speech. 30 Rock nerdism aside, we can’t wait for Boston! Since becoming a HubSpot partner in Manchester, we have fully embraced the inbound methodology, and we can’t wait to mingle with other adopters from around the world.

“Someone’s trying to get free tickets,” I hear you mutter. However, from strategic development through to channel selection, being a HubSpot partner has truly had a fundamental impact on how we operate within digital. Below, we will tell you how.

 Working with a HubSpot partner agency can complement the technical side of the HubSpot software, and introduce a hugely effective inbound marketing campaign that can take your business to the next level of growth. If you'd like more information, read our blog 'How working with a HubSpot partner agency helps brands grow.'

Old Logic, Flawed Results

I have worked in marketing roles for a host of companies, and have seen many strategies based on stereotyping and opinion:

“Teenagers are dirty, they'll defo be interested in washing up liquid.”

There were other strategies based on arbitrary analytical frameworks:

“We need a 3.5% CTR, conversion doesn’t matter - we just need more traffic onsite.”

Both approaches can work, but they normally take up a lot of budget and resource, as both are myopic in scope creating flaws.

With an inbound approach, one of the key principles is to be far- and wide-sighted in your approach, making strategic considerations around your target audience. Inbound is about the carrot not the stick. You offer consumers interesting content which offers real value, then convert them and send them off into the world to spread your worth.

You can’t achieve this unless you know what your consumers want and how to target them. This is where the fundamental learning from being a HubSpot partner comes in. It’s all about your personas.

Knowing your Audience

A persona is a profile of what your typical consumer looks like and how you think they think. This should be based on previous experience, analytical data, industry benchmarks and possibly even a few stereotypes. You should look at this long and hard, and make it as detailed as possible, as it will become the bible for your ongoing marketing activity. By building an in-depth profile of your consumer, you make your targeting and delivery much more specific.

We have one client that sits between consumer durables and the high net worth space. It was tricky to find a solid position to start from when it came to targeting paid social media advertising and PPC marketing efforts. This was reflected in a rocky couple of weeks were volume was sporadic and CPLs were fluxed.

Luckily, we had just brought an inbound marketing expert into the team, and got to feel the full benefits of their HubSpot partner knowledge. We were able to sit down and figure out how to inject some inbound methodology into our biddable campaigns. The result was more in-depth than endless keyword lists and more complex than last click conversions. It was a map of the consumer, their preferences, and their digital activity from Facebook to PPC to the final sales call.

The results were remarkable. Within a week we had a steady flow of high quality leads coming in, and this has continued for months. We went from scatter targeting huge audience segments to finding niche interests in audiences of around 20,000. That’s the beauty of inbound. The framework gives you a laser scope to target your audience, less wasted spend, less wasted time on bad leads and more profit from better conversions .

Marketers and Consumers Rejoice!

Inbound is very inclusive in terms of channel selection, which for consumers and marketers is a much nicer process. For marketers, we have an ever-increasing number of tools at our disposal, but too often clients get fixated on semantics by channel.

Of course they want to make profit, as profit is how success is judged, but even if a channel is cheap (for example voice broadcast) and initially increases profit, in the long run the quality of the leads and reputation of the company will suffer. This has a far greater impact on companies than some people would like to imagine - just look at vision express in 2015. A multi-channel approach gives marketers the freedom to match price and quality and find out what works for the client, making longer term profit more achievable and sustainable.

For consumers, having a multi-channel approach is also a better process. We all get spam calls like this

"Hi Mr Ak..akbo..e.... Sorry I can't pronounce your surname, anyway we see that you had a car accident”…Dial tone...

Nothing kills a call quicker than misinformed staff. Would you rather your prospective consumers get a bad call, or something they enjoy (i.e. great content) which entices them and prompts them for details and a call time? With inbound automation, you can do all this and get information incrementally. By the time you get to arranging a meeting, you can pronounce the surname, start a meaningful conversation and build some repertoire.

We built this process for one of our clients from scratch, and have seen conversion rates of 36% on leads and a 3000% return on investment. In other words, 200K in, 6.5 million out.

Why this HubSpot Partner wants to get to Inbound

I’ve only touched the surface of the benefits of inbound marketing, and that’s why we’re looking forward to getting out to Inbound 16. Its great being a HubSpot partner in the UK, but we want to meet other agencies and individuals who have cottoned onto the benefits of inbound. We want to discuss and explore the potential of inbound’s influence across the whole marketing spectrum, and Inbound 16 definitely seems the best place to do that… That and Alec Baldwin… and lobster rolls… And beer. Winner.

 Working with a HubSpot partner agency can complement the technical side of the HubSpot software, and introduce a hugely effective inbound marketing campaign that can take your business to the next level of growth. If you'd like more information, read our blog 'How working with a HubSpot partner agency helps brands grow.'