Why Your Boss (& Business) Would Love HubSpot & Inbound Marketing

Pitching inbound marketing software to your risk-averse boss can make even the most stoic Marketing Manager perspire.

You’re effectively selling what’s seen as an outlandish service, compared to good old-fashioned marketing. How can you convince your boss to invest?

These proven HubSpot benefits will help. Use them to build a case for inbound marketing as Miracle-Gro for their business.

Traffic That’s High Velocity and Quality

Got a bad case of slow-moving traffic? You aren't alone. More than two-thirds of marketers in a recent State of Inbound report say:

“Generating traffic and leads from their website is their biggest challenge.”

The problem often lies within your marketing strategy. When you rely on outbound marketing, such as direct mail, cold calling and paid adverts, you might not be delivering enough value to your customers. It’s impersonal and misdirected.

As Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, says: “Content marketing is more than a buzzword. It is the hottest trend in marketing because it is the biggest gap between what buyers want and brands produce.”

HubSpot helps you craft, optimise and distribute content that attracts lucrative leads and nurtures them throughout the entire buyer journey.

Without ever leaving the platform, you can:

The leads HubSpot draws in will be 100% organic (but you can track paid leads). That’s the beauty of inbound marketing. It guides people to you naturally, attracting users who love your content and can see it at a time that suits them.

As a result, they are more likely to make a purchase. An Inbound marketing strategy used in conjunction with HubSpot will get you results like ours:

In one year, customers reached 3.5 times more leads per month, according to HubSpot's annual ROI report.

They experience this because once you’ve set up workflows properly everything clicks together. We explain why in our blog: Using HubSpot Correctly: Maximising Your Account Potential.

No more disappointing numbers for website clicks and page views. Imagine if you could say that to your boss and really mean it! With HubSpot, you can make it happen.

No Need To Play the Guessing Game

Are you always wondering what the sales team are getting up to? Which customers have they called about your new offer? Which leads have been closed?

You get the information eventually. But your job would be a lot easier if you had immediate access to critical customer data — something HubSpot provides.

On this platform, you can give teams access to as many hubs as they need. So both sales and marketing can view all your business contacts, and understand which part of the buyer funnel each user is in.

The marketing team know what content should be sent to who and when. And the sales team know who to email or call at the right time.

The customer experience becomes fluid, faster and more personal because sales and marketing help each other.

This does great things for your business, as the Harvard Business Review puts it:

“There is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”

Would this appeal to your boss?

Less time playing the guessing game means employees can focus on driving customer engagement.

Sales teams gain the extra time to strengthen customer relationships and shorten the sales cycle. Marketing teams can concentrate on producing quality content and generating high-quality leads. The result: your revenue will grow!

Lead Nurturing Made Easy

Customers buy from brands they trust. Getting people to trust you takes time, but HubSpot make it quicker and easier.

It’s about you consistently delivering value to prove your worth, engaging with customers on a personal level, and creating meaningful relationships with new leads.

Say a customer visited your business’s blog twice. The platform automatically notifies you, so, if the visitor has downloaded a resource, you can follow up via email asking what they thought of the resource, and offer them something else. This is a supreme tactic to drive value and nurture a contact.

You can also access dashboards for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram on the platform. Here, holding one-on-one dialogues with social media users is seamless, and you can quickly send them relevant content to keep them hooked, since HubSpot can automatically post your blogs.

Through your social media tabs, you can also listen to what your customers are talking about. You can understand what they need from you, translate this into your content and connect with them on a personal level.

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” — John Russell, president of Harley-Davidson

Likewise, sales can effortlessly nurture customers one-on-one via telephone or email thanks to instant access to contact details. Plus, lifecycle stages are updated via activity triggers, so the sales team are always getting the best quality leads.

The sell here for your boss is that long-lasting engagement supercharges business growth. As Gary Vaynerchuk puts it: “To get customers, you need to go from the heart to the brain to the wallet.”

Next-Level Analytics

With HubSpot, you can understand your audience on a deeper level. You learn about what they need and want because you measure their responses to your content.

This is all achieved through HubSpot analytics. Via this dashboard, you get versatile reporting tools that give you detailed engagement levels across all your customer touch-points (such as social media or email marketing).

You can also import your business contacts on to the platform’s free customer relationship management system (CRM). This way, the sales team can access critical lead insights.

For example, salespeople can see detailed interactions between a contact and your website in a single place, including page views, form submissions, sales activity and more.

With incredibly accurate results, they have the information they need to shorten the sales cycle and drive gross revenue. And using HubSpot’s CRM is a cakewalk, as one customer writes:

“Hubspot takes away the nonsense, the extra 'features', and the unnecessary noise associated with other CRMs. It allows you to focus on your pipeline. The layout is clean, smooth, and easy to learn - if you can post on social media, you can use Hubspot.”

This is the area where HubSpot shines. Anyone with basic IT skills can captain this ship: it just takes a little training, and you’re good to go.

Money (That’s What I Want)

More sales, more revenue, bigger budgets - it all leads to further growth and success. HubSpot is your best friend for increased revenue. It helps you direct prospects away from competitors and towards your door.

To get awesome results for a small or medium-sized business, you’ll probably need HubSpot's ‘Professional’ package which costs £655 per month and includes 1000 contacts.

Or if you work for a behemoth business, you’re looking at £1,960 a month for HubSpot’s ‘Enterprise’ package.

If you know the cost of HubSpot is the biggest barrier for your boss, show them these stats:

• 67% of customers who responded to a HubSpot survey saw an increase in sales revenue within seven months.
• 83% of the customers saw an increase in lead-to-customer conversion rate.
• And in a study by an MIT Sloan MBA student, Hubspot users’ average two-year growth was seven times higher.

This is why HubSpot saves you money in the long-run: Everything you need is on one platform. In addition to marketing automation, users can access a free CRM and sales tools without spending more money on other applications.

It also saves you time (and more dough): without HubSpot, you’d be switching from one platform to another for every task: scheduling socials and emails, hunting down customer details, writing content, updating your website… all those different logins and setting adjustments gobbling up your time.

You might need to dig out some case studies to reinforce the economic benefits to your boss. But a financially-savvy leader should see the light.

Can You Pitch HubSpot as Marketing Miracle-Gro?

Yes, but only if you put in the work. It takes a little bit of training and a lot of attention (especially at first when setting up workflows) to maximise the platform’s potential.

BUT once you’ve done that you’re set to reap awesome rewards. You’ll be able to get the results needed to succeed AND make your boss crack a smile.

Saying that, we know it’s a considerable commitment. If you want to know exactly how much HubSpot costs compared to similar tools on the market, give this a read.