What is inbound marketing and how do marketing automation platforms like HubSpot help?
HubSpot, a lot like other marketing automation platforms, only provides the tools you need to foster inbound marketing. But it is up to you or a service partner to use these tools to get the results you desire.
An analogy would be that HubSpot is the garden. They provide the following:
- A garden bed (CRM, email)
- Shovel (blog, website cms, social posts, ads)
- Access to water (reporting, analytics)
- A community of other gardeners to gain insights (this community, inbound conference)
- Guides on how to be a great gardener (academy, blog)
As the gardener you would provide the following:
- Garden plan and strategy (marketing plan, workflows, personas)
- The seeds you want to plant (campaigns, CTA, persona, deals)
- Experimenting with different crops and fertilizers to see what works (ads, campaigns)
- Daily weeding and watering (blogging, social posts, sales follow up)
- Harvesting the crops before spoilage (lead scoring, workflows, sales follow up)
- If you are not seeing results are you spending enough time in cultivating your garden?
Conclusion
As you can see above the daily work lies with the gardener. It takes a lot of time and consistency before any results are seen. If you have the budget to hire a consultant or agency but not the time, it is probably the best approach. However, if you are a small business and have time to devote to consistent blogging you can also start there. Contact me if you have any questions on how to apply an inbound marketing strategy to your business.
