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Why is HubSpot so different from other hosting platforms and CMS solutions?
Inbound Marketing is a buzzword that gets tossed around a lot these days, but HubSpot is the organisation that understands what it’s all about. After all—they created it.
HubSpot doesn’t just talk about inbound as a theoretical concept—they build it right into the core of the platform.
On its website, HubSpot defines inbound marketing as:
“a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.”
Essentially, inbound marketing is all about building meaningful, lasting relationships instead of just a transactional one, which is a much more fulfilling experience for customers and employees alike!
The inbound methodology has three principal pillars: Attract, Engage, and Delight.
HubSpot uses these principles to guide everything they do—including the creation and use of its flywheel concept.
Their thought is that if they attract and engage with prospective customers rather than seek them out, the customer-company relationship is far more valuable, and far more likely to delight and build lifelong business relationships.
The Flywheel Concept
How do these principle principles fit with the inbound flywheel concept—and what exactly does “inbound flywheel” mean?
The inbound flywheel is a business model defined by HubSpot that demonstrates how your organisation can build momentum when you prioritise and deliver exceptional customer service.
You spin and build momentum by investing in strategies to acquire and maintain customers.
Compared to a traditional sales funnel, which doesn’t foster growth or momentum, the flywheel is about building upon what you’ve created.
The idea behind creating momentum is that anything that slows your flywheel creates friction.
In the business world, this friction typically happens when one team hands off a customer to the next team, like when marketing teams pass new leads onto the sales teams.
By reducing friction, alignment and communication between teams are improved and momentum is added to the flywheel. With an inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and service teams can add more momentum without friction.
Once you attract customers and continue to engage and delight them, they will also help keep your flywheel spinning by promoting your brand and bringing new customers.
The inbound buyer journey
Whether we realize it or not, we experience the buyer journey as consumers nearly every time we purchase.
Sales and marketing teams should have a deep understanding of their prospect's buying journey.
A typical B2B customer begins their buyer journey when they experience some problem that triggers a need to search for a solution.
Consumers go through three stages of the buyer journey:
- The Awareness Stage
- The Consideration Stage
- The Decision Stage
Having a complete understanding of your audience and their needs at each stage will help move them through their inbound journey.
Successful Inbound Marketers build a documented content strategy to map content that helps consumers at each stage of the inbound process.
How does this buyer journey tie in with what we already know about inbound marketing and HubSpot?
Pairing these two principles together, organisations can create a pretty powerful combination. When applying this buyer journey to the principles of “attract, engage, delight,” content marketing might look something like this:
The inbound benefits of content personalisation using HubSpot
We all love individualised attention. It’s the same reason we feel more important or connected to a topic when the person we are talking to continually uses our name.
Knowing this information, it might be easier to answer why we should personalise our marketing, sales, and service efforts.
Creating unique experiences for every customer will help you provide buying experiences that are more relevant, useful, enjoyable, and helpful to the consumer.
Personalisation is powerful. It can have a big impact on what you do. Over 20 per cent of marketers say that personalisation improves email engagement, and 99 per cent of marketers agree that personalisation advances customer relationships.
More importantly, Eighty per cent of customers are more likely to purchase when a brand offers a personalised experience.
We live in an age where we have access to a plethora of data about our customers. Each year, we create more and more data as a society. In 2010, about 1.2 trillion total gigabytes existed since the inception of data-based technology. And in 2020? The number reached a staggering 40 trillion gigabytes.
We can carefully use all this information we are creating as a society to craft personalised, “human” marketing experiences and leave clinical, impersonal strategies in the dust.
HubSpot inbound software
HubSpot is designed to be a nearly all-encompassing software suite, eliminating unnecessary friction in the flywheel, especially when one team hands off a customer to the next team at the next phase in the buyer journey.
This means much work is done in one place, either because of included features or simple integrations.
One of the major perks of Hubspot compared to other CMS solutions like WordPress is that it doesn’t require nearly as many integrations.
Everything is built into HubSpot out of the box.
- Meeting scheduler app
- Social media tools
- Email marketing
- Sales email automation
- Social Ads
- Pipeline management tools
- Landing page builder
- Marketing Analytics
- Live chat software
- Online form builders