3 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing Must be in Your 2015 Strategy

It’s that time of year again. Organizations everywhere are looking ahead to a new year, reevaluating goals and business objectives, while taking a look at what worked and what didn’t, in 2014.

If you’re a marketer like me, or if you are responsible for your organization’s marketing, you’re always looking to be on the cutting edge of new and innovative strategies and tactics to inspire action and move hearts and minds. One discipline on the forefront of marketing innovation is inbound marketing.

As a silver-tier certified HubSpot partner agency, WordWrite practices what we preach. We focus on incorporating best practices in inbound marketing every day. We participate in HubSpot’s beta program to learn about and implement new tools and functionality within the platform. We have a team of certified inbound marketers equipped with the knowledge and tools to help your team deliver results and achieve success.

Here are three reasons why inbound must be incorporated in your marketing strategy in 2015.

HubSpot’s new CRM

This is probably the component I’m most excited about in 2015. HubSpot announced at INBOUND 2014 the creation of an integrated sales CRM. The CRM is everything a sales- and marketing-aligned team would want it to be — and more.

For our friends in sales, the new HubSpot CRM makes it easier than ever to connect with prospects. From a customizable dashboard and extensive contact profile database, sales reps are able to send emails, place calls, and schedule meetings right from any contact’ record. Plus, it’s constantly working as your right hand behind the scenes — tracking emails and phone calls so you don’t have to. As HubSpot says, “say goodbye to the days of logging emails and calls.” Isn’t that every sales person’s dream come true?

HubSpot didn’t forget about our fellow marketers, either. Since the CRM is seamlessly integrated within the HubSpot portal, marketers are able to effortlessly capture, score, and hand off leads to the sales team. There’s also a seamless integration between linking contacts on the company website and social media channels, all of which is tracked back to the sales team for a holistic view of the prospect’s journey.

Possibly the best part? It’s a free component with your HubSpot subscription.

All of this supports continual alignment within a company’s sales and marketing teams — a process HubSpot calls “smarketing.”

As our friends at HubSpot put it, “Integrating your marketing platform and CRM however brings marketing and sales back into harmony and gives you powerful insight into what works to grow your business.” Getting that 360-degree view of prospects, leads and customers can be one of the most powerful drivers in any smarketing strategy.

Increase in ROI

According to an MIT study on the ROI of using HubSpot’s marketing software, 69 percent of companies saw an increase in revenue within one year.

ROI is a top challenge for modern marketers and remains a primary focus for marketing departments across the board. According to Tim of circle S studio, marketers that measure inbound ROI are 17 times more likely to see the same or greater ROI over the previous year than marketers that don’t.

HubSpot’s reporting features are like a Swiss army knife of measurement, with tools for website visits, conversion rates, social media performance.

If you’re not using inbound marketing now, then what are you using to demonstrate ROI?

It just makes sense

Is your company blogging? How about using social media? Surely you’re sending out an email every once in a while. Why not integrate what you’re already doing onto one platform?

By adding inbound marketing to your strategy, and employing the HubSpot platform, you take what you’re already doing and supercharge it with one integrated platform. No more having to log in to multiple portals with separate analytics, or having to piece together varying elements in your overall marketing strategy.

In the HubSpot platform, analytics are all monitored on the back end of everything you’re publishing in your marketing strategy on one clean and simple dashboard. This means no more relying on Google Analytics to tell you the IP addresses of individuals visiting your website. HubSpot metrics can show you the individual who visited your website, what pages they viewed, and even how long they stayed on the pages.

Have you set up your marketing goals for 2015 yet? It’s not too late! Our friends at HubSpot created this marketing planning template to help you align your marketing efforts with SMART goals. Download it below!

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