This month marks the second anniversary as HubSpot Inbound Marketing customers and the following is a review of what we have achieved and learned in our second year.
We signed up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing platform halfway through the product demonstration, when we realized that it exactly fulfilled our lead generation requirements and perhaps more importantly had the potential to fulfill the lead generation needs of most of our clients.
If you are interested in our first year experience please visit HubSpot-Inbound-Marketing-Performance-Review-Year-1. If you are interested in how we did in our third year, visit our HubSpot Year 3 Performance review.
Prior to HubSpot we had a second generation "presence" Website of about thirty pages for our consulting and training business, but we did not receive any inbound leads from the Website, although we were creating content monthly for magazine placement and did see a small traffic spike with every article we published.
We updated our sales and marketing methodology by replacing our old outbound lead generation methods with HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing Methodology and our lead generation process is dependent on it today.
Since we started with HubSpot we have generated over 220 leads (a lead is defined as a visitor who exchanges their contact details in return for viewing a joint AMC-HubSpot Webinar, downloading our WhiteboardSelling whitepaper or signing up for a free Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation.)
3 min read
HubSpot Inbound Marketing Performance Review - Year 2
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot
3 min read
Inbound Marketing - A Book Review
As Hubspot customers, Hubspot partners and fellow travelers on the inbound marketing journey for 10 months now, we heartily recommend "Inbound Marketing", by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, as this book represents a very readable and do-able playbook for implementing inbound marketing methodology.
Packed with concise guidance, case studies, and practical to-do’s that you can implement today, this book is really a text-book on the subject and is one of the most important books for Internet era marketers published to date.
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot book review
2 min read
HubSpot Redefines CRM in an Integrated Sales & Marketing Platform
It is a first impression from watching the demo video.
Topics: hubspot CRM
1 min read
30 Lessons from the 30 day HubSpot Blogging Challenge
Yesterday I published an article on the WittyParrot website about our experience and learnings from the 30 day HubSpot Blogging Challenge in January 2014. Below is an excerpt.
I joined WittyParrot as VP Marketing in July 2013 and recommended that WittyParrot use HubSpot for Inbound Marketing.
There were no other candidates in our evaluation as I have been working with HubSpot for 5 years and have implemented it in a number of technology companies.
I did not need convincing of the underlying, technology, methodology or ROI on effort and investment… it works as advertised.
We installed the software in July and began work on the new Website for the company launch in October.
We chose the HubSpot Enterprise system because we expect WittyParrot to scale rapidly and need the full functionality of the enterprise system from the start, even though we were starting from scratch.
When HubSpot announced the 30 day blogging challenge, we accepted the challenge as we were beginning to see the fruits of our early blogging effort with the direct correlation between a great blog and leads that followed.
Read the article in full ...http://www.wittyparrot.com/blog/30-lessons-from-the-hubspot-30-day-blogging-challenge
Topics: hubspot content creation blogging challenge
4 min read
What not to do on LinkedIn Groups - advice for sales and marketing
This article is a warning and some sage advice from someone who has been burned by making some of the mistakes listed below.
The industry is rife with consultants offering best practices on Linkedin and selling services around helping you get started and leveraging the power of the network. This is not one of those articles and I have nothing to sell.
I offer this free advice so that you can learn from my from experience.
This article will be of interest to anyone using Linkedin Groups and in particular the HubSpot Social Media Publishing capability.
HubSpot allows you to set up and automate social media publishing and monitor buzz for any number of keywords in an integrated fashion… it's great, it's powerful and it's convenient.
LinkedIN groups are very useful as well, - if you can find the ones that are well controlled and where people you wish to influence are participating in the dialogue.
The fact that HubSpot-Linked combination is so powerful and convenient comes with some warnings and a few things to consider when you start up.
Here are few simple rules to follow:
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot linkedIn
4 min read
Perspectives on HubSpot Inbound13 User Group and Partner Conference
With 5300+ confirmed attendees, more than 1300 partners and outstanding keynotes, HubSpot made a very strong impression that they have arrived as a corporation to be reckoned with.
Beyond Inbound Marketing
Co-founder, Dharmesh Shah indicated a broader future for HubSpot beyond the traditional Inbound Marketing theme. The customer HubSpot seeks to serve wants inbound everything, not just Inbound Marketing and they want to be delighted with the experience of interacting with your company. While this wasn't a product announcement, Inbound Marketing, Inbound Sales and Inbound Customer Support make up the new end-to-end, human-focused experience.... watch this space.The HubSpot Methodology
HubSpot’s progress in the past 12 months
Co-founder Brian Halligan reviewed the achievments for the prior year.- R&D investment up 58% YOY,
- 300 major product enhancements including custom lead-scoring, email A/B testing, iPhone and Android Apps, Social Publisher, Custom Reporting App. Product quality better, UI better
- Doubled investment in support. Av. support wait time 1 minute.
- 600 HubSpot employees
- 2 acquisitions in Chime and PrepWork for IP and people for bottom of funnel developments
- 10,000 customers in just 6 years – and Brian still calls HubSpot a start-up.
Major product announcements:
- New Content Optimization System (code for CMS), this is the first of a new wave of CMS’ that will offer contextual personalization based on buying cycle maturity and responsive design to optimally render on any device.
- Social Inbox, a very powerful way to pull the needles out of the social media hay and to give context to the communication.
- Signals, a product incubated inside HubSpot that runs independent of HubSpot, to provide near real-time alerting. Signals is a freemium product that enables users to be notified when the email is opened, when a link is clicked, or when a lead or customer visits your Website. You can download Signals and start using it in a minute or two and prove its value.
Social Inbox
Context is a core theme for Hubspot's offering; today’s social media apps are all hay and no needles. Very early adopters of social media tools, reimagined how they work to match the modern buying experience.- Easy to use, Brian demoed it. Listening for HubSpot on Twitter, lines next to pictures indicate context, prospect, lead, customer
- Create a stream – Who do you want to listen to? – Reuse lists in Contacts app.
- What do you want to listen for? “Inbound marketing” or “HubSpot”
- How would you like to be notified? Email, email digest, login to app?
- Awesome new social media stream, - orange stripes are leads… drill in and get additional context, who is rep, what contact record looks like. Get context, forward tweet to rep (who has context) to respond.
- Runs on iPhone.. Droid in a few months.
- Social Inbox created on top of Contacts - contacts is core to all HubSpot new apps.
- Set up list of leads per rep, keywords mentioned, get alert!
The Content Optimization System
Wildly competitive content management industry… no context. Then and Now.Visitors keep getting the same experience regardless of #visits or status. Applies to 99.99% of Websites.
- Websites can't tell difference from complete stranger or customer or where you came from iPhone or computer (13% of HubSpot visitors from Mobile)
- Re-imagined for modern buying experience, optimized for where they are in buying cycle and what device they come from.
- CMS turns your brochure into a Website, COS turns your Website into your best sales rep
- Helps marketers accomplish the mission of thinking about the visitor as a human.
- Conversion rates much better for COS vs. static CMS - others in the market will follow HubSpot's lead.
- Demoed personalized landing page with context to give 3 different experiences for first time visitor, lead, customer.
- Demonstrated responsive design and difference between mobile and desktop versions of blog
- Complaints from designers in past with difficulty of designing on old CMS – (agreed)
- New COS, designers will love it,
- Context creates the inbound experience.
Signals
- Big gap in sales technology available and what’s needed.
- Most technology built in 1990’s – how to enable reps to have context when context wasn’t even an afterthought in designing those tools .
- Dramatic power shift in sales - salespeople are now facilitators in the buyers journey, little control.
- Sales process – a problem for sales - lack context and ability to keep up - in sync.
- Signals was developed as Startup inside a HubSpot. HubSpot bought 2 companies this year to infuse context into sales.
- Signals lives inside other apps. HubSpots’ existing technology for lead revisits can take 20-30 minutes to deliver lead revisit notification into a browser. Signals does it in a minute. (Works in Outlook on Windows, not on Mac, works in SFDC and Gmail) Rep gets notified when the email is opened, notified when link is clicked, notified when a lead or customer visits the Website. When a salesperson picks up phone to call a prospect, know so much, more context, then ever.
- Don’t need anything to make it work, go to getsignals.com. Call to Action: Get sales and service set up on Signals. Basic version for email $0, SFDC and HubSpot $10/mo.
HubSpot Partner Program Highlights
Exciting changes for Hubspot partners building on the success of the existing partner program that leads to 18% higher customer retention.- HubSpot partner strategists will work with Partners to help move prospects through the buying process.
- Content to help generate leads has been expanded and enhanced for easier partner co-branding to drive more inbound lead conversions.
- Co-marketing with HubSpot and editorial support for partner featured articles on HubSpot main blog and social media to increase reach.
- Shared landing pages on HubSpot main Website for registered leads to leverage HubSpot content and landing pages for nurturing for middle and bottom of funnel prospects.
- Automatic lead registration connectors for HubSpot leads and synchronization with HubSpot to enable tighter collaboration for partners who install the software.
Topics: hubspot inbound 13 brian halligan dharmesh shah
2 min read
Hubspot Review - Year 3 a 250% increase in leads, ROI of > 60:1
This HubSpot Review marks our third anniversary as a user of the HubSpot system for Inbound Marketing.
We had a record year last year, which we attribute to increasing inbound traffic more than 50% and doubling our average visit lead conversion rate. Our ROI on HubSpot license fees last year in terms of revenue directly attributable to our inbound marketing activity is more than 60:1
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot hubspot review
1 min read
Transforming Marketing - Time to put up that Facebook page?
Here is an awesome and comprehensive summary of the transformation under-way in marketing. If you're in sales and struggling for leads, you might want to pass this on to your marketing colleagues and your exec team.
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot effective presentations
3 min read
Hubspot Review – HUG2010 First User Group Meeting
Technology companies come and go, but only a small fraction of 1% of founding teams discover a scalable business model and steer their company to an IPO or acquisition with valuation more than $100 million.
Topics: inbound marketing hubspot
3 min read
HubSpot Shopify Integration a BIG DEAL for SMB online marketing
Big news this month at HubSpot is the integration between HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform and Shopify's e-commerce platform.
