The moral of this story is that there are many uncertainties to consider when using HubSpot on your own. The learning curve is half the battle. While you’re spending time and money to learn a new skill, your business can suffer from neglect. You can’t do it all, no matter how many hours of sleep you miss and cups of espresso you drink. Even with a clear understanding of HubSpot, it’s totally possible to still fail at Inbound Marketing, due either to impatience or missed opportunities.
HubSpot is a great software company run by a team of extraordinary people. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter how great HubSpot is if the person operating the software lacks something necessary to achieve success with inbound marketing. By now, you should have a clear understanding of why DIY users struggle with HubSpot.
and inbound marketing campaigns is essential for any business owner who is thinking of investing in this software. Not knowing causes one to underestimate the task at hand and underappreciate the expertise of professionals who live and breathe inbound.
A few clients of ours started out by purchasing HubSpot with every intention of doing it all in-house. After struggling to learn and operate the software during their downtime, they decided to hire us so that they could to focus on running their business and get some much needed rest and peace of mind - a wise choice.
Clients like this understand and believe in the power of inbound marketing enough to purchase HubSpot. They also have a sincere appreciation for the complex beast that is inbound marketing. They start to accept that it takes a person or team with specialized knowledge in specific areas to really get things running. By the end of a really tiring and costly DIY experience, they can appreciate and respect the process.
So, how can you develop a winning strategy to improve HubSpot’s results? Try these simple steps:
- Understand your audience – The first step in any content/inbound marketing strategy is to really understand who your ideal customer is. The best way to get this information is to interview your customers. Find out what first triggered their search for information, the steps they went through to research, consider different vendors, and finally choose your solution. What factors influenced their decision each time they narrowed their list of potential vendors?
If you don’t have the luxury or time to interview your customers, talk to your staff, especially the ones that spend the most time with your customers i.e. sales people, customer service, etc.
- Perform Keyword Research – Use tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google trends, Google Suggest, ubersuggest, and twitter advanced search to find the keywords that people search for in search engines and social media. Knowing your target keywords will give you an idea of what type of content your audience is most interested in.
- Perform a content audit on your website – Before you figure out what content you need to create you need to know what content you already have. You might have some great stuff you created a long time ago that just needs to be updated and cleaned up that could fit right in to your content strategy.
To perform a content audit, download all your website pages from the Page Performance tool in HubSpot. For each page, label who the content is targeted towards, what question it answers, whether it’s usable, what it links to, and what stage in the buyer’s journey it best fits in to.
- Map Your Content To Your Buyer’s Journey – Take what you learned in your customer interviews or from talking to staff, and map out the journey that your buyer goes through when searching for your product or service. Then take the content your already have and plug it in where it fits. Now you can sit back and find where the content gaps are and fill them smartly.
- Build an Editorial Calendar – Now that you know your content needs, you can plan the creation of that content using an editorial calendar. Plan out your editorial calendar at least 6 months in advance, highlighting any important holidays as well as industry and company events.This will give you themes to create content around if you need inspiration outside of the strategic topic-driven content you need to develop to fill the holes in your buyer’s journey.
- Execute The Plan – Now that you have the editorial calendar and know what content you’re creating, determine when you need to get this content written and ensure its both formatted and optimized so that it gets found by your audience and engages them when they find it. Find writers on proven writer marketplaces like Zerys and WritersAccess. Find designers via resource sites like Odesk, Dribble, and 99designs.
