After earning my Inbound Marketing certification in my first week at WordWrite, my new appreciation for inbound marketing led me to immediately take the next step and strive for HubSpot certification. 
The concept of inbound marketing just made so much sense to me that I was eager to find out how the HubSpot platform tied everything together.
I’ve been sharing what I am learning in our blog because I’m discovering that inbound marketing is just as new to most marketers as it has been to me. In this post, I wanted to share a few of the key features of the HubSpot inbound marketing platform that led WordWrite to become a HubSpot agency partner and recommend HubSpot to our clients.
It’s all about the people!
HubSpot is built to help companies reach their ideal buyers by understanding them at an intimate level using a tool called buyer personas. Simply put, a buyer persona puts a name and face to those demographic characteristics that define the ideal buyer for your company’s service or product.
It seems obvious that very single person in your company should understand your customers. Buyer personas help make that happen.
Once you define your ideal buyer personas (including their needs and the factors affecting how and what they buy), you can build a marketing experience completely around them. This is where HubSpot’s Contacts tool can be very useful. Contacts allows companies to manage lists of clients and prospects to match their ideal buyer persona. Contacts enables you to build detailed, individual profiles to better understand the specific needs of each prospect or customer, including their previous interactions, and where they might be in their buying process. Understanding these characteristics is critical to creating marketing that people love, marketing that delivers what they need, when they need it.
As a specific example of how this works, HubSpot’s platform makes it easy to create tailored email marketing campaigns around lists that are stored and updated when changes are made. According to HubSpot, email marketing was the third biggest lead source for marketers in 2013, producing 13% of all leads. The HubSpot platform offers companies the ability to monitor the leads who receive the emails, as well as track and measure the actions taken as a result of an email campaign.
Everything a marketer needs – in one place!
As someone new to inbound marketing, one of the most impressive elements of HubSpot is the tight-knit integration of all inbound marketing activities. From the (extremely) user-friendly dashboard, you are able to seamlessly switch from monitoring your social media through custom search streams to managing specific lists of contacts to publishing a new website landing page, complete with a call-to-action and next steps page. There’s no need to switch from website development software to a social media monitoring platform or email program to create, publish and share content.
Personally, since I have no website development background, the ability to easily edit all pages of a company website from the HubSpot platform is a compelling benefit to a marketer like me. It’s a tremendous freedom for marketers to be able to integrate calls-to-actions and landing pages seamlessly into a website – without any web development experience or software.
You can measure your success!
In addition to the extensive integration that HubSpot offers, its tracking capabilities and metrics are remarkable. It’s easy to view, compare, and track metrics and analytics from varying timeframes and campaigns from one platform. As marketers, we must track tons of data, so this one-stop resource makes it simple to analyze metrics on an ongoing basis.
HubSpot’s customizable reporting features provide up-to-the minute data and trends for a multitude of marketing actions, saving time and effort. As well, you can export the data quickly and easily into an Excel document or email the analytics.
Final Thoughts
As one of the earliest companies in the field, HubSpot had a reputation as an inbound marketing innovator. Now that I’ve had the chance to learn and experience HubSpot’s “all-in-one” solution for marketers, I’ve found a level of convenience and control I haven’t had using other tools.
In this age of instant information sharing, having the ability keep tabs on your customers in real-time is invaluable as we strive to keep up with our ideal buyers and share relevant marketing content with them. The HubSpot app and dashboard do exactly this – keep marketers “in the know” of what ideal buyers are doing and what to do to keep them engaged.
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Christy Goodman is senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. She can be reached at christy.goodman@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter @christylgoodman.
