How To Build a Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy with HubSpot

Inbound marketing is the process of responding to a need customers are already aware of, versus the outbound marketing practice of contacting your audience out of the blue to make a sale. It's the most effective type of marketing, as inbound marketing leads typically convert at 10 times the rate of outbound marketing leads.

Since your customer reaches out to you, it's much easier to build trust and elaborate on the value of your product or service. The key is to create a winning inbound marketing strategy. HubSpot can help you do just that with marketing automation.

Guide To Building a Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy With HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the world's leading marketing platforms. Its comprehensive inbound marketing software is complete with a customer relationship manager (CRM) and all the automation tools you could want.

Read on to learn how to use this powerful platform to create a winning inbound marketing strategy for your company.

Identify Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas

Before you create your marketing strategy, it's important to define who you're marketing to, also known as your target audience. If your company is like most, your target audience will be made up of multiple buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of a customer who's likely to purchase your product or service. For example, if you sell a software solution designed to help writers improve their grammar and sentence structure, your buyer personas will include various categories of writers like bloggers, book authors, magazine writers, and more.

Consider who you designed your product or service for and the different personas who will benefit from it. Narrowing this down will help you better identify your audience and create ads that appeal to them.

Once you define your buyer personas, you can use HubSpot's Personas property to create a new persona profile and tag your contacts automatically based on specific criteria (such as demographic, behavioral, or industry information).

Create Valuable Contact To Attract and Engage Your Audience

When it comes to digital marketing, content is king. So, you'll want to create plenty of valuable content to attract and engage your audience across all channels. Focus on the following types of content:

• Articles, Blog Posts, and Press Releases: Written content designed to place your product on a pedestal or provide solutions for common problems in your industry is a great place to start.
• Banner Ads: Your inbound marketing strategy will likely include pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Be sure to create banners for these marketing concepts.
• Videos: Videos are one of the most popular forms of content online today. Create videos to answer questions, offer solutions to problems, or simply showcase your product.
• Surveys: Surveys are a fun way to connect with your audience while learning more about them.

Keep in mind that you're not creating content simply for the sake of it. You want to connect with your buyer personas, so consider what content will resonate most with your target audience.

Use HubSpot's analytics tools to determine which types of content perform best for your audience, leading to more conversions. With this information, you'll create more meaningful content for your audience that converts for you.

Optimize Your Website

Your website will be the first point of contact you have with most of your audience. So, you want to make sure it shines. There are two types of website optimization you should take part in:

• Search Engine Optimization: If you want your web pages to rank highly in search engines for certain topics, you'll need to use those keywords in your content. Also, think of questions your audience will type into their favorite search engines and answer them on your website. Search engine optimization also includes optimizing code, meta tags, and more. If you're not well-versed in this area, reaching out to an expert is a good idea.
• User Experience Optimization: If you only optimize your website for search engines, you're not likely to produce many leads or sales. It's important to consider the user experience too. Make sure your website is easy to navigate and answers all common questions your users might have. Also, be sure that each piece of content adds value by providing unique advice or solutions for common problems.  

HubSpot's analytics can provide a helping hand here, too. Use the analytics to determine where users are leaving your website and what you can do to keep them working through your sales funnel.

Build a Lead Generation Strategy With HubSpot's Tools

HubSpot features many tools that will help you attract new leads. Some of the most important include:

• Dynamic Landing Pages: Create dynamic landing pages to connect with each segment of your target audience.
• Lead Capture Forms: You can create a wide range of lead capture forms, each aimed at attracting a specific segment of your target audience.
• Email Campaigns: You can also incorporate personalized email campaigns so members of your audience won't feel like they're just another number in your downline.

These are just three of a long list of lead-generation tools available at HubSpot. Comb through the platform and take advantage of the tools that fit well with your marketing strategy.

Implement Lead Nurturing and Scoring

One of the most powerful aspects of HubSpot is the relationship between its CRM and marketing tools. This relationship makes it easy for HubSpot to track where in the customer journey each member of your audience is and allows you to create workflows that nurture and score your leads to push them further through the sales funnel.

For example, set up email campaigns that introduce your brand, products, and services to your newest leads. Continue to nurture these leads with free solutions to common problems to deliver value upfront, and score each lead as they engage with your brand.

Use Social Media and Email Marketing To Keep in Touch

The most important aspect of lead nurturing is staying in touch with your audience. The two most popular ways include:

• Social Media: Keep in mind that more than one-third of the global population is active on Facebook at least once monthly. That means that if you don't take advantage of social media, you're failing to make the strongest possible connection with your audience.
• Email: Send regular emails to members of your downline. These emails can introduce your brand or product, solidify your stance as an industry professional with free tips and hints, or keep in touch during special occasions like birthdays and holidays.

The best part is that you can automate much of this process with HubSpot, so you won't have to send each email or publish each social media post manually.

Measure and Analyze Your Performance

When you launch a new marketing strategy, it's typically a good idea to start slow and gather data. As your strategy rolls out, you can use analytics to measure your performance and determine which areas of the strategy work well and which areas need to be adjusted.

HubSpot provides intuitive analytics to help you determine where it's most effective to spend your advertising dollars. The platform also makes it easy to measure which segments of your audience are responding best to your messaging and which messages are most effective.

Optimize and Scale Your Strategy

Once you analyze what's working in your inbound marketing strategy and what's not, it's time to optimize and scale your efforts. Here's how that works:

• Optimization: Incorporate what you've learned about underperforming areas of your inbound marketing strategy. You may even decide to get rid of underperforming messaging altogether and focus more on the aspects of your strategy that are working well.
• Scaling: Once you've optimized your strategy and are happy with your current ROI, it's time to scale your inbound marketing efforts. Use your marketing budget to reach more people and generate more sales.

Resources for Learning More About HubSpot

HubSpot is a complex platform. It may be best to reach out to an expert to help you set everything up and learn to use the wide range of features faster.

Here are a few resources that can help you learn more about the platform:

• HubSpot Academy: The HubSpot Academy is 100% free and allows you to learn at your own pace. There are several lessons available, each designed to teach you about a new feature or new strategy to implement.
• YouTube: There are also several training tutorials on YouTube to help you properly use HubSpot.
• Belt Creative: At Belt Creative, we've put together educational content and downloadable resources to help you understand and take advantage of all the tools HubSpot has to offer.

Keep in mind that while there are plenty of resources that will help you learn about and how to use HubSpot, you'll quickly find that each of these resources has additional lessons and other pieces of content. HubSpot is a powerful platform that comes with a wide array of features. If you plan on going at it alone, you'll have to confront a steep learning curve.

That's why many business owners opt to work with HubSpot experts, like the team at Belt Creative. If you want the most bang for your buck out of the HubSpot platform, you'll need in-depth digital marketing knowledge — the kind that typically only comes with years of experience.

How Belt Creative Can Help

If you've never marketed with HubSpot in the past and simply don't have the time to go through entire training courses on each tool available, don't worry; you can still take full advantage of the platform. The team at Belt Creative is here to help.

Belt Creative has been helping customers create and deploy winning inbound marketing strategies with HubSpot for years. Contact the Belt Creative team today to learn how we can help you.

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