Inbound Marketing Blog

Tribute Media has been a HubSpot Agency Partner for about three years now. During that time, we've learned a lot. When we started with HubSpot, there were, if I remember correctly, only four certifications from HubSpot Academy. HubSpot has worked very hard to improve their training offerings for their clients and their agency partners.

When we first signed up as an agency partner early in 2015, I knew that the only way we'd be successful was to embrace HubSpot fully. It's paid off in spades for us and for our clients who have done the same. The Inbound Methodology is paramount to that success.

The most important question that I'm hoping to answer is: Is it worth your time to invest in attaining HubSpot Certifications?

Imagine this scenario: You have spent three to four months planning your new website or redesign, hired the best website development and marketing team around. You and your team have spent countless hours designing the layout with all of the best-practices in mind. Workflows have been carefully thought out and implemented. In short, you have designed your website to effortlessly guide your users through the buyer's journey and convert them into customers and delight them into becoming raving fans.

The eight-hour workday is a tired and old concept. It's time to put aside this tired, arcane way of thinking about work. In order to understand how to fix it, we have to understand why we have the eight-hour workday to begin with.

In the late 1800s, full-time manufacturing employees would work around 100 hours per week. Death and injury were commonplace.  It wasn't uncommon for children to put in far more hours than we think reasonable today in the factories, fields, mills, and mines.

If you’re a data nerd like me, then you know that one of the most frustrating things in marketing is to *not8 know information about the users browsing your site content. Sure, you could sift through all the information that Google Analytics provides, but there’s got to be an easier way to get some quick insights about leads and users…

What’s this? HubSpot has software that does this? And it’s FREE?

Last year we tested, and then made official, Office Free Friday. It's been a very cool thing for us as a company because it's provided us some much-needed focus time each week where our customers expect us to be a little less available.

If you aren't interested in clicking through to that announcement link, I'll give you the simple gist here. On Fridays, we officially close our office and our phones go directly to voicemail. It's still a working day, but because the office is closed, our employees have an option to work wherever they want.

You've pored over buyer personas and invested in understanding your audience. You've concocted a compelling offer, a valuable piece of content, a meaningful event. You've got what they want. You've got what they need. You're a marketing genius. 

The goal of any inbound marketing campaign is to convert your audience, your contacts, your leads, your prospects, into paying customers and raving fans of your business. And when you create an offer or an event, you are engaging that audience and showing them you've got what it takes to earn their business. You are building a relationship and earning trust and proving that your company can best serve their needs or that your product will solve their problems.

The best part is that people will just know you've done all that work and will just find your offer. 

Oh, wait. That's not right.

This is where your campaign collateral comes in. These assets are the big flashing arrows pointing people to your offer. They are placed where your audience already spends time online and create a path to your offer.

Below, we've listed a few of the major assets associated with pretty much every inbound marketing campaign and provided best practices to increase conversions. Keep these in mind when creating collateral for your next campaign. 

This may not sound encouraging, but research shows us that the average online user will stay on a website for less than one minute. So you obviously have to make a strong impression with visitors to keep them coming back for more. Since you only have less than a minute to do this, it’s best to learn web usability principles to improve your chances for success.

Facebook, like every other social media platform, is always evolving. Most recently (rolled out in summer 2017), they updated some key components in their news feed algorithm. If you’re one of the millions that noticed a recent change in your Facebook News Feed, you may have had the initial reaction I did, which was annoyance.

“I’ve seen all of these already… days ago, because they’re a WEEK old. Why am I seeing them again?”

Okay, I know that sounds petty when it’s written out, but isn’t that how social media has wired us now? We want to see the most recent news, not week-old news.

After doing more research, I realized that Facebook actually did something right.

Let’s be honest - if you aren’t blogging, then you need to be; and if you are blogging but don’t see the benefit, then it’s time to re-evaluate your blogging strategy.

There are a number of ways to determine the ROI of your blog, and those ultimately depend on your goals. However, we’ve determined one way that may help you in determining if you are getting the ROI you need and what’s included in that calculation.

See, here’s the thing: if you are only blogging for blogging sake, then you are going to see a minimal return on investment. Read on to learn about what it takes to get a maximum ROI for blogging.