Inbound Marketing Insights

HubSpot’s inbound marketing conference this year, Inbound 2013, was again, the most energizing conference I have been to since…well, last year’s Inbound 2012 conference. 

If you are not familiar, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that integrates tools to deliver relevant content optimized for personalized interactions across marketing channels including email, websites, blogs, landing pages, and social media.  We were all expecting great things at Inbound 2013, and HubSpot impressed us again.  The new HubSpot product now includes a Content Optimization System, a social media tool called Social Inbox, and updated analytics that bridges the gap between web analytics and a CRM solution.  One of the most exciting launches was also the new free sales application called, Signals.

Let’s learn about the key product updates to HubSpot’s new inbound marketing platform:

Content Optimization System (COS):

This new COS is revolutionary.  It’s not only a CMS, with which you are probably familiar.  The COS optimizes the website experience for each individual visitor that reaches your website.  This is going to completely change the marketing world, and how we interact with our prospects and customers.  The COS is a fully-integrated tool that has the same interface across your website, blog, landing pages, and emails making it incredibly streamlined to further integrate the various channels of your marketing strategy. 

Let’s dive into the personalization piece because that is the most exciting part!  Within HubSpot, you can actually personalize the visitor experience based on their geographic region, job title, buyer persona, age, industry….pretty much anything you can imagine.   This is the next wave of context marketing.  Also, there is no coding or development experience necessary!

Social Inbox:

Have you ever wanted to know if a prospect, or a long-time customer, is talking about your company, your industry, or your product on social media?  Wouldn’t this make the sales and customer service piece of your business so much more actionable and sustainable? 

You’re in luck!  HubSpot’s new social media tool, Social Inbox, gives you the social stream messages identified as prospects, customers, and active opportunities.  This allows marketing, sales or customer service to respond back to the individual in the right medium at the right time.  For example, if you have a lead that could be a top of the funnel lead that is still looking at you, but also your competitors, you might send a tweet to their follower base asking for recommendations.  This would be an ideal opportunity to send them a reply tweet or even a direct message with a link to an e-book, blog post, or article that helps to answer their question and build your thought leadership.  This will dramatically enhance how we communicate with prospects and customers, and ultimately decrease the sales time to close, and increase retention rates.

Enhanced Reporting Analytics:

We are all able to pull our general analytics from Google Analytics, manual reporting, and more.  But, have you ever wanted to see which marketing channels are most effective at converting your different customer bases, or “buyer personas”?  With HubSpot’s new reporting tool, you will be able to do just that.  This new engine adds the context element to the analytics.  You will be able to see what marketing channels are working for what industry, job function, job title, location, and more.  This will make your reporting seamless, providing you with analytics that will give you insight into how to better optimize your marketing campaigns. 

Signals:

One very important element that was focused on during Inbound 2013 was that inbound marketing is shifting from just inbound marketing to a combination of:

I think we have all believed it would move in this direction all along, but haven’t seen a seamless way to bring it all together.  HubSpot has done just that. 

Signals, a Google Chrome based notification app “signals” to sales and customer service representatives when someone has opened an email they sent them, went to a page on your website, and even interacted on social media.  I know we have all wondered if that person we sent an email to last week ever opened it – now we will have that answer.  Not only will this dramatically help with the sales team to increase conversation rates and decrease time to close, but it will help to align marketing, sales and customer service around the needs of the prospect or customer. 

These new product updates are going to dramatically change how we think about marketing.  While content is still king in the world of inbound marketing, context is becoming more and more important to personalize the buyer experience and increase engagement with your prospects and customers. 

Start your free 30-day trial of HubSpot to gain access to these tools, or if you’re already using HubSpot, contact us and learn more about how to integrate these tools into your business.