5 Inbound Marketing Tips You Won't Want to Miss [HubSpot Research]

Work smarter and generate more leads with these five inbound marketing tips, grounded in HubSpot research.


Despite its name, HubSpot’s '107 Sales Statistics to Help You Sell Smarter' also features a handful of interesting marketing statistics that we think are relevant for anyone looking at improving their inbound marketing.

Expanding on these stats, here's our take on five of HubSpot's inbound marketing tips to help you gear up for a successful year.

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5 inbound marketing tips
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1. HubSpot says... 'The best times to email prospects are 8am and 3pm'

Sales and marketing functions both typically spend a great deal of time emailing prospects. Now, take this statistic with a pinch of salt. We'd always advocate the importance of testing different email times, as well as different days, to find out what's the most effective combination for your contacts.

It's important, for example, to think about your buyer persona. Let's say they're a student — is the best time to email them really at 8am on a Monday morning? Not in my experience. However, this could be the perfect time for a CEO to receive an email.

Inbound marketing tip

Our advice here is not to blindly follow industry recommendations but to put yourself in your buyer persona's shoes and think about when he or she would want to receive an email. Only by doing this and monitoring open rates will you find the best time for your unique audience.

2. HubSpot says... '33% of email recipients open emails based on subject line alone”

Creating an enticing, short, and to the point subject for your email will help drive open rates. Open rates are a good indication of the strength of a subject line, but they don’t measure the success of the actual content.

Judging the impact of your email marketing by its open rates alone is a lot like determining the success of a blog based on how much traffic it receives. Yes, open rate matters, but it's one metric of many you should be looking at together to get a truer measure of how your emails are performing.

To determine how remarkable your content actually is, you’ll need to find out the click-through-rates on your calls to action (CTAs) within the email. (If you're not sure about this, check out HubSpot's helpful article on aims for CTAs.)

Inbound marketing tip

Play around with subject titles and use A/B testing to determine what content style is preferred.

Want to improve your inbound marketing skills further? Read our handy article to find out how.

3. HubSpot says... 'Visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text'

This is an interesting one. They do say a picture's worth a thousand words. The popularity of video and visual content continues to skyrocket, and stats such as this one help to explain why. So what does this mean for your good, old-fashioned written content?

Visuals, alongside whitespace, are a great way to break up content and increase the readability of your articles or resources. A video can be included in an article to make it more interacting and appeal to audiences who would prefer to watch instead of read. Including images in an article can also support its performance in the search engine results pages, by virtue of updating your alt text.

Inbound marketing tip

If a picture says a thousand words, make sure they're the right words. Choose images that are relevant to your content to maximise readability and SEO.

4. HubSpot says... '68% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from it'

This stat is all about building trust. Once you’ve attracted your ideal buyer persona and converted the right leads, the next step is to transform those leads into customers. Yes, you might well have used articles or other content to attract that target buyer in the first place, but the value of your content doesn't have to stop there. We're full flywheel these days, remember?

Providing relevant, educational content can build trust with a prospect and help them become more ready to buy. Blogging is a great way to achieve this across sales and marketing and can help you stand out as an industry expert in your field well beyond the attract stage. Content production can be time-consuming and expensive, so it makes sense to get as much out of your articles as possible.

Inbound marketing tip

Content designed to nurture a prospect can open lots of doors, creatively speaking. Talk to your existing customers to find out what they'd consider helpful or valuable, and evaluate which content is already performing best to inspire new ideas for what to write about next.

Discover the world of inbound marketing with our very helpful (yet slightly long) page.

5. HubSpot says... 'Businesses with websites numbering 401-1,000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages'

In the battle between quality vs. quantity, there's no sure victor. While quality is more important than ever in 2019, there's no contesting that websites with a lot of content relevant to their field perform better on searches.

In this regard, it's also a numbers game. Every time you write a new web page or article, that's one more indexed page on your website. That’s one more opportunity for you to show up on a search engine and organically drive traffic to your website.

Using proper SEO etiquette can aid you in becoming discoverable for your chosen topics. Suddenly, the importance of delivering content consistently and sticking as closely as possible to your content calendar starts to make a lot more sense.

Inbound marketing tip

Blog, blog, then blog again! Whether you're publishing twice a month once a week, make sure you're doing so consistently, making it possible for you scale up your blog predictably and set a clear routine that your readers can look forward to.

Try these inbound marketing techniques yourself

So there we have it. When it comes to research, HubSpot has the data, but there's a lot to be said for making sure the statistics you use to inform or inspire your inbound marketing are considered in terms of your market and your target buyers.

Keeping your buyer personas front and centre in every inbound marketing decision you make is a recipe for success. Evaluate who your target buyers are and what they’d like to receive, produce remarkable content based on this, and you can’t go wrong.

Hungry for more? Download our free, 80-page marketing ebook ‘How to Generate Leads That Close’ now and discover how else you could improve your inbound marketing.

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