There’s some confusion around the concept of inbound marketing. A lot of people search the web for “HubSpot inbound marketing” and one of the “People Also Ask” questions in Google is “What is HubSpot inbound marketing?”
But there’s really no such thing. There’s just inbound marketing.
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What is HubSpot Inbound Marketing?
HubSpot and inbound marketing are two different things. Inbound marketing is a strategy, and HubSpot is a tool designed to help marketers implement that strategy. So let’s break this down and consider the two terms separately.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a software company that popularized the term “inbound marketing” by creating informative inbound marketing resources as a part of their own inbound marketing campaign to promote their software.
And now, HubSpot’s software does much more than just inbound marketing. They have tools for sales and support as well. But their software is always based around the HubSpot Inbound Marketing approach, which focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on providing value to potential customers that entertains and informs them as they make their way through the buying process. Whereas an outbound marketing strategy might use ads or cold calls (interruption-based marketing tactics), inbound marketing aims to deliver the information your potential customers need when they need it.
So instead of calling someone out of the blue to ask them if they’re happy with their CRM, HubSpot provides tools and resources that people in their target market can find on their own. For example, HubSpot Academy offers a wide range of courses to help marketers implement the inbound methodology more effectively.
Who Uses HubSpot?
There are a lot of software companies and startups that use HubSpot. Companies like Mention, Trello, and Zapier all use HubSpot to generate, qualify, and nurture leads.
Mention
When Mention wanted to get more customers for its enterprise plan, Head of Marketing Ben Twichell used HubSpot’s marketing platform to make it happen.
Up until my arrival, all of our efforts revolved around getting people to our website, where they would sign up for our product in a self-serve way. Our enterprise product required a different approach. You can’t buy it on the website, you have to have a sales conversation about it first – these are deals ranging from €3,000 to €40,000.
Ben Twichell, Head of Marketing, Mention
Ben’s team used HubSpot to build forms and landing pages in order to generate 5,000 leads over 5 months. They were then able to nurture these leads with HubSpot Workflows, a marketing automation tool.
Trello
When Trello wanted to increase organic search traffic and develop a more organized infrastructure for converting that traffic to leads, International Marketing Manager Amanda Alvernaz turned to HubSpot.
In 2018, we were challenged to scale our content strategy into five languages. We already had our blog localized in Portuguese and French. However, the process to localize that content was very manual and we were still using WordPress for the Portuguese blog, which was our first non-English blog.
Amanda Alvernaz, International Marketing Manager, Trello
Amanda’s team used HubSpot’s CMS easy to duplicate existing content for easy translation while maintaining the look-and-feel of their main website across all content. They also used HubSpot’s Smart CTAs (a tool that allows marketers to personalize calls-to-action based on user data) to track their global campaign from one piece of software.
Amanda credits the switch to HubSpot for a 40% increase in organic traffic and a 29% increase in overall traffic.
Zapier
Zapier doesn’t have a sales team, so they rely almost entirely on inbound marketing to generate new business. Head Marketing Operations and Email Lindsay Rothlisberger chose HubSpot to provide potential customers with the right messaging at the right time.
One-size-doesn’t-fit-all at the company level. They all have different problems they’re trying to solve, and we needed an email tool that could address their uniqueness at both the individual and company level.
Lindsay Rothlisberger, Head Marketing Operations and Email, Zapier
With HubSpot, Lindsay’s team began delivering content to potential customers based on each customers buyer persona. This approach doubled Zapier’s conversion rate and led to a 50% increase in demo uptake.
There’s No Such Thing as HubSpot Inbound Marketing
So HubSpot inbound marketing isn’t a thing. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use HubSpot to make inbound marketing easier and more effective. At Raindance, we have experience with many platforms, but (if it’s in your budget) HubSpot is definitely one of the most user-friendly options. The key is making sure you have the content strategy in place to get the most out of the platform.
