Inbound Marketing

Everything you need to know on one very helpful page.

1. Inbound marketing explained

Inbound marketing focuses on providing useful content (articles, surveys, reports, white papers etc.) that people find when they research a purchase or problem online.

Inbound marketing is all about creating value for the reader. It works on the idea that readers who learn from your content grow to trust your brand. You help them to answer their questions and solve their challenges. And when the day comes that they can’t solve those problems themselves, yours is the brand they turn to for new products or expert support.

Did you know…

The term ‘inbound’ was coined by growth platform HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, in 2005. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the concept began to really take off. Since then, advances in technology and buyer behaviour have meant that inbound marketing is the perfect way to position your products or services to modern audiences.

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Inbound vs outbound

If inbound marketing is all about the buyer approaching you, then outbound marketing is the opposite. Outbound marketing can be thought of as interruptive — think paid tactics and social promotions designed to push your messaging to the right people. Conversely, inbound marketing pulls your audience to you. Because your marketing is of value to them and they are actively searching for information in various places online, they take the first step.

Is inbound the most effective marketing strategy? It’s not quite that simple. Both inbound and outbound marketing strategies have their time and place, and many of the best inbound marketing campaigns leverage outbound tactics to complement the inbound approach, whether it’s advertising your most successful website pages to capitalise on their impact or putting some budget behind new articles to help them build organic momentum.

We’ve written all about the differences between inbound and outbound marketing here, but generally speaking, inbound leads are of a higher quality than outbound leads as the buyer often has more trust in you and they have already decided to come to you to help them with their problem. Sales has much less of a job trying to ‘sell’ to them because they came to you.

Related read: Account-based Marketing vs Inbound Marketing: Getting Started with Both Using HubSpot  

EXAMPLE: inbound marketing in action

You can see a great example of inbound marketing in action in the following case study.

How Vacuum Furnace Engineering generated £4.8m using inbound marketing

Vacuum Furnace Engineering (VFE) provides a range of equipment, sales, servicing and upgrade options to the heat treatment industry. To meet its ambitious growth plans, VFE sought to diversify from the aerospace industry across a range of target sectors, including power generation, motorsport and pharmaceutical, as well as the general engineering and heat treatment sectors.

Up until this point, VFE had taken a traditional approach to its marketing and sales consistent with the manufacturing industry and the markets it was engaging. To adapt its processes and hit its business goals, a new, inbound marketing approach was identified.

Over the course of two years, VFE saw significant results, in parts influenced and in other parts directly driven by the inbound marketing strategy it followed and the inbound marketing systems it adopted. 

Highlights included a 700% increase in website sessions from social media, £9.9m new business pipeline generated in six months, and £4.8m sales from inbound in six months.

For more details of the exact strategy they followed, read the full case study.

“Before partnering with BabelQuest, I didn't fully appreciate how silent our business was in what we had to offer. Since then, Tom has worked very closely with the senior leadership team to create a personal and unique voice for us as individuals and collectively for VFE, with which we now effortlessly communicate with our customers. I have personally basked in the reflected ‘excellence’ of his writing.”

David Byrne, CEO, VFE

2. Why is inbound marketing important?

When an industry-wide survey, carried out by Adobe in 2018, revealed that marketing had changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50, we had to ask ourselves “why?”

Look at your own market for the evidence around you:

  1. It’s likely that greater connectivity had upturned the conventional seller/buyer focus
  2. At the same time, there's been a substantial increase in opportunities for you to connect with prospects

What this means is that people today are much more likely to do their own research before reaching out for a sales conversation, and with the abundance of technology at everyone’s fingertips, they might look to find you through your website, Google, social media, on forums, through emails you’ve sent, using QR codes, over a messaging app… The list goes on.

This was in 2018. Digital adoption and the shift it was driving in buyer behaviour has increased steadily since then, before skyrocketing during the global health crisis.

Related reading:

National lockdowns, stay-at-home directives and the overnight need for businesses to operate remotely acted like rocket fuel for these trends. The result is nothing short of a transformation of the way we buy and sell. Have your marketing strategies adapted?

Inbound marketing caters to all of these trends. Creating informative content and sharing it online will attract new audiences to your website and social media channels. From there, you can start building relationships and capturing the new contacts your business needs to grow.

For this reason, the future of inbound marketing looks stronger than ever, and businesses are increasingly turning to it to adapt their marketing strategies and improve their results. 

Take the guesswork out of customer-centric marketing

And discover how to generate leads that actually close

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3. What is inbound content?

Once upon a time, content marketing was the new kid on the block. It took a while for the value of content marketing to climb the corporate ladder, but today you’ll be hard-pressed to find a successful global brand that doesn’t leverage content to reach and engage customers.

  • So how does content marketing fit into inbound marketing?
  • What are the differences between inbound marketing and content marketing?
  • And what is inbound content?

We’ve mentioned content a few times on this page already. It’s the core of successful inbound marketing, the vehicle by which inbound marketing strategies deliver value to their audiences.

Those helpful emails you receive, the interesting posts you engage with on a company’s social media channel, the articles and case studies you learn from on their blogs or across their website — it’s all content designed to help you overcome a challenge, learn more about a subject, or make a more considered decision in regard to the products or services you buy.

And when you think about the trends we just discussed — how more people than ever are going online to research their own solutions to their problems — you can see just how much of an opportunity it is to create content that meets those search terms and provides help.

“Given that 70% of the buying decision is made before a prospect contacts you, creating standout content that answers their research questions makes so much sense. If the content is good, they will contact you when they're ready. Without that content, they may never hear of you.”

Operations Director Emma Harris, Triaster Ltd

It’s still content marketing. But by creating it as part of an inbound marketing strategy, you’re ensuring it has the research behind it, the methodology beneath it, and the distribution in front of it to attract your audience, engage your prospects, and create new customers.

Don’t miss:

Inbound content examples

Inbound content takes all kinds of different forms depending on your strategy, your goals, your target audience, and the content creation resources available to you.

Generally speaking, these could include:

  • blog articles
  • case studies
  • social posts
  • opinion pieces/thought leadership content
  • landing pages
  • service pages
  • pillar pages (like this one!)
  • other webpages
  • emails (including nurture sequences)
  • guides
  • ebooks
  • white papers
  • surveys
  • quizzes
  • and much more

4. How does social media marketing fit into the broad topic of inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing doesn't mean you can't still implement paid marketing tactics.

Distribution plays an important part of an inbound marketing strategy’s success. With millions of new articles being published every day, it’s a challenge to get your content seen over that being produced every day by your competitors, for example. Social media helps.

“Social media is a great way to get your content seen by the right people,” reveals Bridget Reid, one of our senior inbound marketers. “The people following your social media accounts are usually either your existing customers or potential prospects interested in your products or services. Even if they’re not ready to buy now — and many won’t be — building their trust and keeping them engaged through regular social media posts is an effective way of keeping them hot while you move them along the buyer journey toward a purchase.”

And social media isn’t just a distribution channel for your content. Your social media posts can themselves be thought of as a form of content with which you can inform, engage, or entertain your audience. 

“Taking this approach will help you to strike the right tone across your social media channels,” Bridget explains. “A LinkedIn account that only ever shares links to the company’s content might start to look and feel like a soapbox. You don’t want that. Delivering value through your social media posts themselves and sharing links to (and snippets from) other thought leaders in the industry — trade magazines, guest posts, thought leadership — will keep your channel fresh, your content interesting and your audience engaged.”

5. Why is goal setting important to inbound marketing?

In case this talk of ‘delivering value’ and ‘creating helpful content’ is starting to sound like inbound marketing is ‘fluffier’ than the traditional approach to marketing — it’s not.

In case this talk of ‘delivering value’ and ‘creating helpful content’ is starting to sound like inbound marketing is ‘fluffier’ than the traditional approach to marketing — it’s not. 

As with your previous marketing strategies, inbound marketing should follow a clearly defined strategy documenting your target audience (or ‘buyer personas’), your brand’s positioning and messaging, timeframes, service-level agreements between Sales and Marketing and, yes, goals. 

Like any form of marketing, goals are important to keep your activities on track. Inbound marketing goals can take a myriad different shapes. 

  • Some organisations will need to drive up traffic to a new site to raise brand awareness
  • Others will charge themselves with increasing conversion rates.
  • Bottom-of-the-funnel inbound marketing strategies, supported by mature sales teams, may measure success through revenue closed, with deals attributed back to inbound leads.

The goals you choose will largely be informed by the business strategy, and depending on your particular goals, you will prioritise some activities over others. In this way, inbound marketing goals are incredibly helpful for helping you to narrow down your activities and develop a successful strategy that goes on to support the wider needs of the business.

What are SMART goals?

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Ensuring that your business goals adhere to these guidelines goes a long way towards ensuring your goals are ambitious yet realistic. HubSpot has a great page on five best practices when setting SMART goals – for further reading, check it out here

6. How much does inbound marketing cost?

Let's look at all the various components of inbound so you get a better understanding of your marketing costs.

Fully migrating and integrating with an inbound platform, such as HubSpot, is required in order to track, monitor and iterate — all essential components of your ability to grow using inbound. Depending on the size of your organisation, this can be anywhere between £140 — £1,680 a month. 

Then there's strategy and analysis to consider, including the goal-setting we just discussed. Your marketing's performance depends on you continually monitoring, testing, and optimising your content and conversion paths. This usually takes the shape of an annual inbound marketing plan that aligns all your inbound activity around your business goals. This is the most valuable part of any inbound marketing and key to achieving your goal. How much this costs you will depend on your team's salaries and how long the activity takes you.

Moving on to activity:

  • Have you considered the cost of weekly blogging and social media?
  • Don't forget visual content such as videos, call-to-action images, and infographics.
  • You should also be regularly reviewing the content on your website, for example your landing pages, service pages, and forms
  • And you’ll likely need premium, long-form content such as white papers, ebooks, and guides to act as compelling conversion points and support lead nurturing

This requires marketing resources, whether in-house or contracted through an inbound marketing agency. Do you have quality copywriters on your team with the capacity to produce this content and marketers capable of delivering inbound marketing activity daily?

When all’s said and done, how much inbound marketing costs you will ultimately depend on a huge range of factors, from the size of your team (and the size of their salaries) to inbound marketing technology overheads (more on that later) and the costs of any inbound marketing specialists you engage.

Find out more about other pricing factors and variables when assessing inbound marketing costs.

Unlocking inbound marketing ROI 

Because of the methodology it follows, inbound marketing has incredible potential to deliver a long-term return on your investment (ROI).

If you’re interested in working out the ROI of your existing marketing operations, you can see the formula for calculating marketing ROI in this article

What’s interesting about this formula is that higher acquisition costs (ie. more expensive marketing operations) can still generate significant ROI if the lifetime value of your customers is high. 

To look at it another way, a marketing team with low overheads and few costs doesn’t necessarily mean it’s saving the company money. In fact, if the leads it generates create customers with low lifetime values — customers who don’t stick around, customers who don’t buy much, customers who don’t buy again or consider recommending you to other customers in their networks, it could actually be costing the company revenue. 

When you think about how quick some organisations have been in the past to cut spend in Marketing when times get tough, this is really eye-opening.

Making the decision to invest more in your marketing could be one of the best ways of turning your marketing function around and actually maximise on opportunities to generate revenue for the business. Fund your marketing team well and:

7. Can you do inbound marketing in-house?

Knowing your team as you do, can you confidently say your organisation has the skills, the capacity, and the passion to plan and launch a successful inbound marketing strategy?

Your in-house marketing team knows your business from the inside out. They’re well positioned to promote your company, and you can see and talk to them about their activities every day, whether face to face or remotely in the case of hybrid teams.

We hope the following sections help you to learn more about the practical side of implementing an inbound marketing strategy in-house and weigh up the benefits for your organisation of considering how an inbound marketing agency could help you.

Take the guesswork out of customer-centric marketing

And discover how to generate leads that actually close

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8. Inbound marketing strategy: where to start

Imagine you’re building a house. Without solid foundations, anything you put together will fall down fast. Set those foundations in place, however, and you have the groundwork on which to build predictable, scalable, and repeatable business growth.

Your inbound marketing strategy is those foundations. We’ve written all about how to set up a successful inbound marketing strategy in the guide below, so go ahead and download your free copy to learn the ins and outs and get started.

In the meantime, you might like to consider the following questions. Your answers to these questions will help you to inform the kinds of activity you build into your inbound marketing plan. And of course, everything should feed back into your overarching goal you need to hit.

7 questions to help you define your core activity

  1. Have you defined your value proposition and buyer personas?
  2. Have you mapped the buyer journey?
  3. Which activities are your marketing team currently engaged in and which are missing?
  4. Are there activities your marketing team is struggling to manage in-house?
  5. Does your marketing team need training or upskilling in any particular areas to be able to deliver on the plan?
  6. Which core marketing activities can your team confidently deliver?
  7. Crucially, how long do you currently spend on what we would consider core marketing activities, and what is your internal marketing capacity?

How to implement a successful inbound marketing strategy

In HubSpot’s own words, “The inbound principles guide you in connecting the methodology with its execution. The inbound principles of standardise, contextualise, optimise, personalise, and empathise are designed to build upon each other, enabling you to execute the inbound methodology with excellence.”

When planning inbound marketing, think of these principles as best practices or guidelines informing the way your team should aim to carry out its activity.

You can read all about HubSpot’s inbound principles and how to apply them in relation to your business strategy at the HubSpot Academy.

9. How to implement an inbound marketing strategy

In HubSpot’s own words, “The inbound principles guide you in connecting the methodology with its execution. The inbound principles of standardise, contextualise, optimise, personalise, and empathise are designed to build upon each other, enabling you to execute the inbound methodology with excellence.”

When planning inbound marketing, think of these principles as best practices or guidelines informing the way your team should aim to carry out its activity.

You can read all about HubSpot’s inbound principles and how to apply them in relation to your business strategy at the HubSpot Academy.

10. 3 inbound marketing techniques to improve your results

1) Use A/B testing to optimise your performance 

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.

“33% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.” HubSpot

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.)

Learn more about A/B testing and how it can help you to improve your marketing results.

2) Support your written content with relevant images to maximise readability and SEO


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

“Visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text.” HubSpot

Visuals, alongside whitespace, are a great way to break up content and increase the readability of your content, improving the user experience. A video can be included in an article to make it more interactive and appeal to audiences who prefer to watch, not read.

Including images in an article can also support its performance in the search engine results pages, by virtue of updating your alt text.

Related read: How to Implement Inbound Marketing Without Redesigning Your Entire Website

3) Speak with your existing customers to find out what content they’d find helpful or otherwise valuable

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

“68% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after having consumed its content.” HubSpot

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.

When adapting your strategy towards inbound marketing, you’ll almost certainly want to get some training in place to improve your inbound marketing. In-house teams will want to make sure they have a working knowledge of inbound marketing best practices.

And even if you’re leaning on an inbound marketing agency for specialist skills and support, many will advise that you and your team set up some learning so that everyone is working from the same page, with a clear understanding of the approaches taken (and wins made!)

For casual learning, we recommend listening to some inbound marketing podcasts. For more structured inbound marketing training, there are many free certifications available.

Don’t miss these inbound marketing podcasts

Here at BabelQuest, we love a podcast, and we’re not alone. As of April 2021, 25% of adults in the UK were regular podcast listeners. And it makes sense — they’re a great way of learning on the go, fitting in neatly around our busy lifestyles.

If you’re a fan of earbuds and audio content, there are loads of inbound marketing podcasts — and more general marketing podcasts — for you to choose from. 

  • Marketing Against The Grain

Becky, our managing director, was quick to recommend ‘Marketing Against The Grain’, a new podcast that will be hosted by Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s Chief Marketing Officer, and Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot’s SVP of Marketing.

In a nutshell, keeping up with the latest trends in digital marketing is an essential part of ensuring that your core business strategy is best aligned with your customers’ goals and needs. This is true of marketers across industries. This podcast helps its listeners keep up with the trends and grow their businesses while offering behind-the-scenes glimpses into how some of the world’s leading experts are thinking about what’s next in the space. 

WHERE AND WHEN? 

Marketing Against the Grain is produced through HubSpot’s Podcast Network and is published on a weekly basis, with a new episode airing every Tuesday. 

 

  • Nudge

Jasmine, one of our inbound strategists, has recently started listening to Nudge. While not inbound-specific, she says that its psychology spin has a lot to offer inbound marketers looking to understand how they can better attract, engage, and delight their audiences.

In the show’s own words:

“Learn the science behind great marketing. Every bite-sized 20-minute show comes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientists. Nudge is fast-paced but still insightful with real-world examples that you can apply - this is not your average marketing podcast.”

At time of writing, there are already over 80 episodes for you to dive into, covering subjects from ‘habit-moulding marketing’ and ‘the primacy effect’ to debunking myths about the brain.

Where do we sign up?!

WHERE AND WHEN? 

Nudge is available to listen to here and is produced on a fortnightly basis.

Don’t miss: The Top 42 Digital Marketing Podcasts That Will Enhance Your Inbound Marketing

HubSpot’s inbound marketing certification

Inbound marketing certifications are a great way of growing your team’s inbound marketing capabilities.

  1. Certifications will advance your team’s technical inbound marketing skills.
  2. They will help your team to feel more confident in the subject.
  3. They will help other people to feel more confident in your team’s abilities, too.

When it comes to inbound marketing certifications, nobody does it like the HubSpot Academy

As the ‘creator’ of inbound marketing, HubSpot is a real authority on the subject. Their academy – free training courses, practicums, certifications, and more — are helpful to new and seasoned inbound marketers alike, covering everything from the fundamentals of inbound marketing to advanced courses that help users to unlock the full potential of their inbound marketing using HubSpot.

Best of all, the certifications provide a handy framework around which you can easily structure your team’s personal development programmes. Whether they want to build up their basic knowledge of inbound marketing or specialise in, say, email marketing or social media for example, the courses are there, and all easily searchable.  

There are far too many courses for us to list here, but just a few include:

  • Inbound
  • Inbound Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Content Marketing 
  • Digital Marketing
  • SEO
  • Creating Calls to Action in HubSpot
  • HubSpot Sales Software
  • and so much more

If you’re interested in learning from the HubSpot Academy but aren’t sure where to start, check out our article on the nine best HubSpot certifications to get (from someone who’s completed them all!)

12. Inbound marketing agencies

Learning to ride a bike is easier and safer if you've got help. An inbound marketing agency provides you with the same kind of support.

You're excited to implement inbound marketing, but you've also identified a skills or resources gap between your company's capabilities and the requirements for an inbound marketing strategy that performs. This is where agency help comes in. An inbound marketing agency acts like your stabilisers, keeping you aloft while you learn your way around the gears (never mind the road ahead).

Typically, an agency will start by getting to know you and your business. This should involve a dedicated strategy phase that the agency can use to build up a picture of your business, your customers, the space in which you operate — and your goals.

An agency will then use these insights to create an inbound marketing strategy and plan that fits your business, and help you get it moving. 

“This usually involves filling the gaps between your sales, marketing and customer service processes, improving your content marketing processes, and helping you to unlock the potential of the contact data in your sales and marketing software.”

Depending on your goals and the inbound marketing services involved, a partner agency should also be optimising your SEO, your website, email, blog, landing pages, effective content strategy, social media and anything else that has a role to play in turning strangers into happy customers. You might ask them to replace the whole lot, or just improve what you have already.

However, the real value an agency should bring is building a process into your business that attracts, engages, and delights your customers consistently, a process that is measurable and constantly reviewed and iterated for constant improvement.

13. Inbound marketing tools to help you work better

To unlock the full potential of your team, your activities, and your investments, inbound marketing relies on certain tools and technologies.

But with thousands of apps, platforms, and other software solutions clamouring for your attention (and your investment…) it can be difficult knowing which ones to work with, never mind how far the wrong choice could set you back — in time and budget. What can you do?

To help you make the right choice, we’ve put together a list of the top seven best inbound marketing tools you could be using to improve your campaign performance, generate leads that close, and grow better.

Check out the infographic below for an overview, then head over to our article on the best inbound marketing tools to read more on each solution and how you can use it.



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NOTE: The inbound marketing ecosystem is huge! We could write all day about the different inbound marketing tools available. For wider reading, you might also be interested in:

14. HubSpot’s inbound marketing software

When we’re talking about inbound marketing software here, we don’t just mean helpful tools but the platforms designed specifically to enable inbound marketing across an organisation.

When we’re talking about inbound marketing software here, we don’t just mean helpful tools but the platforms designed specifically to enable inbound marketing across an organisation. 

Nobody does inbound marketing software like HubSpot. Whether you’re looking for sophisticated analytics and tracking to prove where your marketing is adding value in your sales process or you're fed up with switching between different platforms and wish there was a way to make delivering your inbound marketing much more efficient and effective, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub solution offers all this and so much more.

But just because we think it's the best inbound marketing solution available, that doesn't mean it's automatically right for your business. What does it offer and how could you benefit?

Introducing Marketing Hub

With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are on one easy-to-use, powerful platform. You’ll save valuable time and get all the context you need to provide a personalised experience that attracts and converts the right customers at scale.

Standout Marketing Hub features:

Blog

Publish content your audience is looking for, and get discovered in search, social media, and beyond. Add calls-to-action that convert readers into customers.

SEO

Build your search authority and outrank competitors with tools that help you plan your content strategy and optimise your content as you type.

Ad Tracking & Management

Stop struggling to justify your ad spend. Manage Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google ads right inside HubSpot, and track which ads are turning prospects into customers

Social Media Management

Stop letting important interactions go unnoticed. Monitor and prioritise conversations, and publish to social networks with the same tool you use to create campaigns

Video

Enhance the impact of your content through the power of video. Host and manage files right inside HubSpot, and easily embed them in social media, web pages, and blog posts.

Live Chat

Connect with and convert visitors in real time — when your product is top of mind. Use chatbots to qualify leads and scale your efforts so you can focus on the conversations that matter most.

Related reads:

HubSpot solutions partners

HubSpot’s partner agencies are called HubSpot solutions partners and they play a vital role in helping businesses to unlock the full potential of the HubSpot software.

As decisions go, choosing a new sales and marketing automation platform is a big one. You’ve already recognised the phenomenal opportunities to transform the way your organisation aligns its sales and marketing activities, but don’t overlook the need to plan for how you set up and implement your new technology.

  1. Who is going to be working on the platform?
  2. What will they be accountable for?
  3. Where will they be accessing the technology?
  4. When should you roll out the new launch?
  5. How will your teams learn their way around the software?

To get to the point, there’s a lot you need to define to ensure a successful rollout, and how much value you get from your new platform can depend a great deal on how you purchase it.

To help you make the right purchasing decision for your organisation, we’ve put together this article sharing what we perceive to be the key benefits of buying HubSpot through a partner agency — whomever you choose.

No agenda and (almost) no bias, just a handful of pointers in the hope that you’re equipped to make the best decision for your organisation when it comes to crunch time.

Further reading:

15. Problems implementing inbound?

There are plenty of reasons why an inbound marketing strategy might not work. If inbound was easy, everyone would be doing it with their hands tied behind their backs (and we’d be out of a job).

The good news is, whatever’s holding your strategy back from delivering the results you need can usually be fixed.

The less good news is that diagnosing those problems isn’t always simple. 

Eric, our head of revenue, speaks almost daily with inbound marketing leaders and other marketing professions whose marketing isn’t always giving them the return they want. He put together this article exploring some of the key challenges faced by marketing leaders in today’s world, based on the millions of conversations he has with our prospects.

Perhaps there’s something helpful in there that could help you to overcome your inbound marketing challenges and produce the results you’re looking for.

And if not, this is where inbound marketing agencies like us come in.

16. Inbound marketing with BabelQuest

At BabelQuest, we work with B2B clients across a range of industries on a retainer basis to help them unlock the potential of HubSpot and hit their marketing targets.

  • You want to rise above the noise and to the top of the SERPs? We’ve got SEO specialists and writers who know how to hook a reader. From blogs to emails, from UX to PPC, you’ll work with our experts.
  • You want a steady flow of leads that turn prospects into loyal customers? With the right strategy, high-quality content and HubSpot’s automated workflows, you’ll do just that. 
  • You want to prove the impact your marketing is making? One of HubSpot’s smartest features is reporting. With performance reports that break down your marketing activities, analysis has never been easier, and you’ll easily demonstrate to the rest of the business the value you deliver.

You’ll work with a team that knows and uses every HubSpot tool. Whether you want to generate leads or draw more eyes to your website, we’ll work together towards clear, measurable goals.

Together, we’ll create an inbound marketing strategy and run your campaigns.

Find out more about our inbound marketing services and how you could benefit

Inbound marketing strategy creation

We cover our inbound strategy creation in much more detail on this helpful page, so head over there for the full details. 

In short, we run a series of discovery workshops with clients to understand their business, their target audience, and their goals. Using the information gathered on these sessions, one we’ll then create an action plan, while the wider team gets you set up correctly on HubSpot. 

Over the course of the strategy phase:

  • you’ll think deeply about your purpose and your customers
  • you’ll explore what content you need, and what stories will help your values shine
  • we’ll craft an inbound marketing strategy and a 90-day action plan
  • we’ll create reference documents to guide us
  • we’ll deal with the tech, so you’re set up and ready to go

We’ll stand with you as you hit your targets. Dozens of clients work with us on a retainer basis. We’ll be there for as long as you need us.

Related read: Strategy Planning: How We Set You Up for Inbound Success

Don’t take our word for it: inbound marketing case studies

Over the years, we’ve helped more businesses than we can count to unlock the potential of HubSpot, solve their communication problems and join the dots between Sales, Marketing and Service to generate more revenue through inbound marketing.

You can see all of our case studies on the Our Work page, but here are three recommendations when it comes to recent case studies focused on inbound marketing and the marketing/revenue results we have helped our clients to generate.

  1. How We Helped VFE Unlock the Potential of HubSpot and Achieve £4.8m in Inbound Sales
  2. Spotlight: Increasing Website Traffic and Lead Volume for Forklift Manufacturer TCM
  3. Increasing Westminster City Council Commercial Waste Services online presence by 200%

Looking for help with HubSpot and inbound marketing?

Click here to contact us and one of us will be in touch to find out more.