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Marketing techniques for business enterprises have evolved over the ages. Earlier the marketing methods adopted were outbound. However, businesses are opting for inbound marketing tactics these days.

Let us first understand what the traditional outbound marketing implies. Outbound marketing is done through trade shows, seminar series, cold calling, email marketing though purchased lists, etc. These methods are known are ‘outbound’ because all these steps are taken to spread the message outside with the hope that customers will respond to them.

However, as the customers are exposed to more and more outbound marketing messages, these techniques are becoming ineffective. Due to this reason, marketing techniques changed to become more focused. And, it led to the techniques of inbound marketing where instead of the business reaching out to the customer, the customer tries to find the business. This is a more economical method and yields better ROI.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing essentially implies attracting visitors through social media, search engines and blogging through a website for your products or services.

The Inbound marketing process involves 4 steps:

1. Attract:

You can attract the right visitors to your site by providing the relevant content. The timing of presenting the content is also important. Content is presented in the form of blogs through a content strategy. You can enhance the visibility of your content by sharing on social media.

2. Convert:

These visitors are converted into leads by establishing communication with them. You can connect with them through messages, forms, or meetings.

3. Close:

Once you have attracted the right visitors and converted them into visitors, you will need to close the leads (convert them into customers) at the right time. The techniques for closing are Pipeline management, lead nurturing, Email, predictive lead scoring, etc.

4. Delight:

Once you have customers, it is vital to keep them engaged. For this, you will need to delight them. This will ensure their loyalty and they will refer your product/services to their friends. You can establish a customer hub, keep posting smart content and always respond to their messages.

There are numerous inbound marketing tools that are being used such as Hubspot Marketing Automation, Hubspot CRM, Gather content, Beacon, etc. with specific uses. However, one of the most popular tools is Hubspot.

The reason for its popularity is that Hubspot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer success with a CRM at the core. This combination helps in effective inbound marketing.

What is Hubspot Marketing?

Hubspot Marketing can be understood as an advanced system that directs all your marketing efforts towards growth of traffic to your site and enhancing conversions.

Hubspot Marketing enables creation of attractive and personalized landing pages for your campaign. They also facilitate the distribution of static and dynamic HTML messages that help you in receiving the expected response.

Hubspots helps you in designing workflows as required, and prepare and format content for publishing and integrate data from other systems.

The greatest benefit of using Hubspot is that you can do all these without any prior coding experience.
Through Hubspot Marketing you can create and optimize attractive content and distribute it to your target audience. It offers numerous SEO and social suggestions for sharing content with the influencing audiences so as to drive traffic. You can meet the specific needs of your visitors and create engaging Call-to Actions(CTAs).

Components of Hubspot Inbound Marketing:

• Blogging
• Landing Pages
• Email
• Marketing Automation
• Lead Management
• Analytics
• Website SEO
• Social Media Monitoring
• Calls-to-Action
• Ads
• Salesforce Integration

Let’s see how marketing efforts can be enhanced using Hubspot:

1. Personalized marketing

Email marketing campaigns can be improved drastically through Hubspot. This is because users can design their own workflows, prepare, format, and publish content. It also permits seamless integration of contact profiles and information. It enables segmenting, nurturing, and evaluating leads in a personalized manner.

2. Compact and ready-to-use marketing funnel

It provides a ready-to-use marketing funnel. You can use the marketing funnel by:

• Creating an account
• Placing contacts in the appropriate stage of the funnel
• Scoring your contacts
• Personalizing them
• Distributing the content

This tool also facilitates accessing the traffic data through which you can analyze how your marketing strategy is affecting the sales and overall performance.

The tool for email marketing lets the user create static and dynamic HTML messages which can be customized as per the customers’ persona and buying pattern that could give you the desired response. Besides this you can also access contact database, scheduling, mobile marketing, etc.

3. Social Media Marketing

As far as social media is concerned, Hubspot enables distinguishing between sources that bring you qualified leads instead of managing various profiles. This helps in focusing only on those leads that are likely to close the deal. Hubspot updates information instantly using CRM and Sales solution. This makes it easy to maintain customer relationship from the beginning to the end.

4. Optimized content for smarter targeting

• It has become an ideal choice for most startups and small businesses because it facilitates creation of attractive landing pages with a drag and drop tool.
• You can distribute the best content and manage how your leads interact from a single dynamic dashboard by using system’s keyword tools and SEO optimization.
• You can use your own branding instead of Hub Spot’s so that your customers know that they are dealing with you.
• Customization and configuration are also possible for Sales and CRM modules.

5. 
   A fully analyzable impact

You have the provision to record and examine all customer interactions with your brand through Hubspot CRM or Salesforce. Since all the relevant information is available in one place, you can create accurate and confident reports. This will enable an analysis of impact of your campaigns on your sales.

6. Well-connected

It is a tool that has probably the best connectivity. It is integrated with marketing assets such as leading CMSs (Content Management Systems), email service providers and communication tools, productive E-Commerce platforms and marketplaces and social networks.

7. Mobile-ready

Hubspot ensures complete access on mobile devices and provides users control of their campaigns even when not in office.

8. Support

Hubspot Marketing offers reliable and timely support through an experienced team of marketing professionals. You can connect with them through live chat, email, phone, etc. In addition to this you can look up the solutions independently through the platform’s vast resource and study library.

9. Cost-effective

For the numerous benefits this tool offers, it is very reasonably priced.  While paid plans vary between $50 for the Starter Package and $2,400 for enterprises interested to manage more than 10,000 contacts.

Is Hubspot Marketing the future of Inbound Marketing?

Buying and selling have undergone revolutionary changes over the years. At the current time, it can be said that your website is your salesperson and your customer is your marketer! It seems that the future will have the customer’s lifecycle powered by machine learning technologies. This will create an opportunity for more targeted and personalized customer experience.
Hubspot is already preparing for the imminent future through tools such as ‘Hubspot Marketing Free tool’ etc.

Some features of what the inbound marketing strategies have to prepare for:

• People are not limited to searching on search engines. They will look on Facebook for specific people or Amazon, etc. for specific products. Hence, it is not enough to optimize for social media alone, you need to optimize for ‘HEO’ or Human Enjoyment. In other words things no longer need to be optimized for search engines, but optimization is needed to appeal to ‘Humans’.
• Although there is a lot of stress on optimizing for mobile devices, facts indicate that mobile is mainly used for messaging rather than other purposes. Therefore, it is not all that necessary to direct all your efforts in designing mobile apps.
• Chatbots are more a thing for the future. They will assist sales and marketing professionals in everyday tasks such as running reports, creating blog posts or launching social ad campaigns.

In future, AI will definitely have its impact. Currently, we tell the software what we want, but soon software will understand what we expect. The software will enable businesses to transform how they interact with their customers.

Hubspot aims to provide customers the means that will streamline their operations, enhance their revenues and create pleasant user-experience.

Therefore, Hubspot has envisaged the following products and updates:

• Visual Workflows:
  It is a visual editing interface through which marketers can learn, create and nurture their business.
• Enhanced Reporting:
  Improved analytics with a new dashboard which provides details to marketers about what is working and what is not on top of their marketing funnels.
• Unified Hubspot Mobile App:
  The three separate Apps for Marketing, Sales, and CRM will be integrated into one simplifying their use.
• Content Strategy:
  It works with two new tools, “Collect” and “Composer”. This will enable users to strategize by determining relevant topics that rank and create interesting content. They can also get a feedback. Everything will be available on a simple interface.
• AMP:
  All pages published on Hubspot COS will be AMP optimized.
• Facebook Ads:
  Customers will soon be able to create, measure, and optimize their Facebook Ads in Hubspot platform.
• Projects:
  This is a tool that offers readymade project templates so that teams can collaborate and organize their work within Hubspot.
• Deeper Functionality in CRM:
  This enables advanced sales teams to track and connect with their contacts.

Conclusion:

Inbound Marketing is here to stay. Very soon it will make the traditional outbound techniques obsolete. Among the various inbound marketing tools, Hubspot has definitely made its mark due to its exceptional features. The future of marketing is bound to undergo phenomenal changes with advancements in technology. In order to stay ahead of the competition, an organization will need to stay updated with the latest inbound marketing techniques. Hubspot Marketing has some great products and updates that will help you adapt to these changes in technologies. It is recommended that you seek the services of a certified Hubspot Marketing services provider to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Professional Hubspot Marketing Agencies are updated about the latest in the field and provide services as per them.