Developing an Inbound Marketing Strategy with HubSpot

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is an effective marketing strategy that attracts prospects using high quality content that is valuable and relevant to their specific stage of the user journey. Inbound marketing does not interrupt your target audience the same way that outbound marketing does. Instead it helps to form connections with them and solve problems. It’s about adding value and helping people reach their goals in each stage of the user journey. The aim of inbound marketing is to…

Attract: attracting the right people at the right time to start conversations whilst they research a problem.
Engage: offering a solution that aligns with your target audience’s problems.
Delight: providing support to your customers to ensure they find success in their purchase.

When customers are delighted with the purchase, they are more likely to share the success with others and refer new people to your business. There are many types of inbound marketing strategies, such as blog posts, social media and customer reviews, some are more suitable depending on the stage of the user journey a customer is in.

Developing an Inbound Marketing strategy

To create a successful inbound marketing strategy, there are a few steps that you should follow with HubSpot at the heart …

Set goals

First and foremost, it’s important to know what it is you want to get from your inbound marketing strategy and where you see your business going. Identify your goals and set KPIs so you know how well your efforts are going. To provide a thorough understanding of your audience you should also create buyer personas to ensure a deeper understanding of your customers, their pain points, behaviours, buying decisions and the direction your content should go. In addition, to set goals, understanding competitors and similar companies within your industry will help show gaps in the market and areas where you can add more value to your target audience.

Increase visibility

SEO: keyword research is an integral part of developing an inbound marketing strategy and HubSpot can play a key part in this. It’s important to ensure the right content is going to the right audience at the right time and understand how and what keywords your audience are searching for. This helps to understand the ranking difficulty and search volume for your chosen keywords. Implementing the correct keywords and optimising content onto your website, blog posts and image tags will ensure traffic is increased. HubSpot has built in tools to help with SEO, like live recommendations and a topic cluster content tool that helps you structure content to rank higher.
Blog posts: blogging is a great way to increase traffic and generate leads, relevant content will engage the relevant audience, leading to a sale. Creating content with your buyer personas in mind, along with relevant industry topics is a must to bring customers to your site. Again, HubSpot offers an intuitive content management system where you can upload, edit and optimise blogs.
Social media: social media is the perfect place to share content and engage with your target audience. Sharing relevant and engaging content helps to lead potential customers to your website and leave them wanting more. Social media posts can be scheduled in HubSpot, with built-in monitoring and reports so that you can assess and optimise for better engagement.

Acquiring leads

Creating high quality content is important in order to convert prospects into loyal customers. Content will differ depending on whether customers are in the attract, engage or delight stage of the buyer’s journey. In the final decision stage, landing pages are often where you find these pieces of content, such as webinars, ebooks and case studies. Therefore, landing pages should be simple to navigate and look appealing to the eye, which can be created from scratch in HubSpot with a simple drag-and-drop editor or a there are a range of templates that can be used. CTAs should also be strategically placed across all pieces of content to seamlessly move customers to the next stage of their journey. A/B testing can also be implemented on HubSpot to ensure your design and placement is just right to maximise the chance of conversion.

Retaining customers

Once a customer has purchased a good or service, inbound marketing should not stop there. The relationship should continue so they can become an advocate of your brand and continue purchasing from you, as well as potentially refer you to help fuel your flywheel funnel further. This can be done through newsletters and referral programmes. The HubSpot CRM allows you to see customer behaviour from their first interaction to their last, meaning you can utilise the automation tools like workflows and surveys to re-engage customers with helpful, relevant content to their purchase, like user guides or cross-sell opportunities.

Analysis

The trends in inbound marketing are constantly changing as well as consumer behaviour, so it’s important to keep analysing your strategy to see what can be improved. To keep track of your goals, in depth reports can be analysed in HubSpot based on KPIs. The sales, marketing and service team can see these reports, boosting collaboration and communication across the whole company.

Developing an inbound marketing strategy with HubSpot is not an overnight process and often takes much consideration. However, in the long run it will be worth it to get results and turn prospects into customers.