Smart Spots

Watch Spot On's Smart Spot for a helpful, step-by-step guide on setting up an email in HubSpot.

Watch this week’s Smart Spot for a step-by-step guide on setting up a thank you page in HubSpot.

In this Smart Spot we’ll show you how to set up a smart CTA in relation to list membership, with the instructions written out below, along with some bonus ideas for your own Healthcare SaaS Smart CTAs.

Watch this week’s Smart Spot for a step-by-step guide on setting up an email in HubSpot.

In this week’s Smart Spot, I share step-by-step how to set up blog posts in HubSpot using best practices.

Watch this week's Smart Spot for a step-by-step guide on setting up a landing page in HubSpot, and read on for the play-by-play with some additional tips.

As marketers, we know that trends and technology are changing everyday. You can’t continue doing what’s always been done, even if it has worked in the past – before you know it, your method might become outdated. 

Inbound marketing "best practices" involve data and analytics. Both words have a tendency to send marketing professionals into the doldrums of despair due to number intimidation.

Paid ads and inbound marketing together? Say it ain’t so Joe!

For years we’ve talked about how you should focus on drawing traffic to your site through relevant content. Build it and they will come. Provide relevant content that resonates with your target audience and they will love you for it. But what if you want to jumpstart your inbound lead generation efforts through paid ads? Promote it and they will come... faster.

The key to successful inbound marketing is... (drumroll please) AWESOME CONTENT. But you already knew that, didn't you?

As marketers, we have to make decisions about how to accomplish several things in one campaign:

• Give the best user experience
• Delivering the right message in the right context
• Meet marketing and sales goals

With HubSpot, we have a lot of tools at our fingertips to accomplish all of these; smart content is the biggest tool in the marketer’s toolbox. 

Why use it?

Smart content allows you to personalize the user experience far beyond just a simple personalization token (“Hi Joe!”) in an email or on a landing page. It can be built around country, device type (desktop, tablet, smart phone), referral source, or a specific list membership or lifecycle stage. This flexibility allows you, for example, to deliver a different experience to a prospect than you would a customer.

Announced this week at Inbound 2014, HubSpot is revolutionizing sales in the same way they have revolutionized marketing by launching an integrated CRM tool.  According to Brian Halligan, "We started HubSpot because we felt the way consumers shop and buy had fundamentally changed. The inbound movement has helped transform the world of marketing, and we really feel like there's a huge opportunity to transform the customer experience with sales technology that enables companies to sell more, better, and faster."

Recently, in my quest to remain fit, I ordered a little gadget to help monitor my progress. I love analytics so much that we joked that I had to have them in every part of my life. After I placed the order, I anxiously awaited the arrival of my new toy. 

It arrived on a Monday around lunch time. I opened the package, noted that the monitor had to be charged first and set up my account online. Once it was charged, I put it in the wristband and wore it all day while it monitored my activity. Since it also records sleep patterns, I wore the wristband to bed. 

Much to my disappointment the next morning when I checked my account online, it showed that the device had stopped working around 10:37PM the night before. So I did some trouble shooting, reset the device and tried again. No luck. 

As marketers we are often taken in by the marketing campaigns of products that we are interested in. Maybe you could say that being in this line of work makes us easier to be marketed to…or maybe we just love the thought of unlimited power and marketing automation domination.

If you’re evaluating marketing automation software, Marketo may be one that comes to the top of your list. It definitely looks good on paper. In their words, “Easy. Powerful. Complete.” They certainly have a lot of the features that we look for as marketers:

• Integration with Salesforce CRM
• Revenue analytics from multiple sources
• Sophisticated email marketing automation

In April 2014 we had the pleasure of spending two days in Boston at the HubSpot office for the very first "Hubspot Agency Partner Days". In addition to hearing directly from Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah and other HubSpot execs on the future of HubSpot and inbound marketing, we were able to compare notes with our fellow certified Gold and Platinum agency partners. What an exhilarating experience!