How to generate stronger leads with HubSpot and inbound marketing

Huw Roberts 05 September 2022

Inbound marketing is one of the most effective strategies businesses can implement to generate more consistent, better-quality leads. Cheaper, too! Inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than outbound leads (Invesp).

But the scope and complexity of inbound marketing can be overwhelming if you’re new to the concept or managing on your own.

There are many moving parts, from content and social (no more social channels, please!) to technical automation and sales enablement, that shift your marketing campaigns to a truly inbound approach.

> What is inbound marketing? <

That’s why it’s so important that you implement the right technology, processes and partnerships from the beginning, making sure your entire business is moving in the right direction.

Read on to understand…

What’s the best platform for implementing inbound marketing
The lead generation process
Nurturing leads into conversions
Delight customers so that they become advocates

What’s the best platform for implementing inbound marketing and why is it HubSpot?

So you can’t really talk about inbound marketing without also talking about HubSpot. They pretty much invented it as a concept, with their entire software suite designed to support the core concepts of inbound: attract, engage and delight.

They go together like fish and chips, Ant and Dec, gin and tonic (peanut butter and jelly if you’re American…)

You can, of course, implement inbound marketing principles across your marketing strategy without HubSpot but you’ll likely achieve much better results if you do – customers see an average of 181% increase in website traffic and 159% increase in inbound leads one year after purchasing HubSpot.

There are other alternatives on the market but HubSpot is the only one that’s been built from the ground up to enable inbound marketing and maximise its business potential.

The lead generation process enabled by HubSpot

Most marketers are faced with a common key challenge: generating more leads. Whatever sector or size of business you’re in, the marketing department’s core KPIs revolve around lead generation – attracting the right audience to your business and than engaging them through nurturing to eventually convert them into a customer.

Whilst sales teams come in towards the end of the buyer journey to help aid conversion, the generation and engagement all start with marketing.

You need to create highly targeted, relevant content that’s genuinely helpful to your buyer personas, without being intrusive. It’s combining all of the channels you have at your disposal; social, content and SEO in particular, to provide solutions and information to their pain points.
So how does HubSpot help you to do this?

The comprehensive Marketing Hub suite provides you with all of the necessary tools, all under one roof.

Marketing Hub tools designed to help generate leads:

Blog: Easily write and publish content relevant to your audience, with built-in calls-to-action that convert readers into customers.
Video: Host and manage video content in HubSpot to better engage your audience with analytics and embed options
Ads: Track and manage your ads from within HubSpot so that you can accurately measure ROI and see which campaigns generate leads
Social media: Publish and schedule across all key social channels with monitoring and analytics built-in
SEO: Plan and optimise your content as you go with live recommendations to highlight keywords and improve SERPs potential across blogs and landing pages

Nurturing leads into conversions via HubSpot

So it’s not enough these days to simply generate interest. In order to build lasting relationships and stronger customer foundations, you need to create trust. Everyone’s fed up with intrusive, spammy messaging, irrelevant ads or useless, outdated information.

By presenting your business as a trusted source of truth and insight, solving problems rather than pushing solutions, you’ll provide more value for the right-fit customers and in turn, nurture more leads into conversions.

HubSpot has a whole host of powerful tools to aid conversion across the Marketing and Sales Hub to help teams seal the deal…

Conversations: Meet prospects on the channels they prefer to use with a centralised place to compile messages across apps
CRM: Take advantage of contextual data to create more personalised, relevant communication via targeted ads, emails and landing pages
Lead flows, CTAs and forms: Capture people ready to take the next step with seamless interaction points that make it easy for prospects to become leads
Email marketing: Send helpful content based on previous actions to pop up in your buyer’s inbox to improve long-term engagement
Chatbots: Provide fast, simple forms of communication and site navigation via chatbots for those that want to use them with a super easy build and out-of-the-box templates
Marketing automation: Arguably the heart of inbound marketing, automation enables efficiencies without risking relationships. Workflows can trigger specific actions depending on user behaviour at specific times for optimum conversion

Using HubSpot to delight customers so that they become advocates

Inbound marketing is based on the flywheel concept – the more fuel you provide, while reducing friction, the faster your wheel spins.

The final phase is ‘delight’ – keeping customers happy and supported long after they’ve made a purchase. This hopefully means they’ll not only remain a customer but also go on to become advocates of your brand. And we all know how valuable word-of-mouth referrals are… especially in the day and age of social media when virtually everyone has a platform.

Customer service is key to providing assistance across all interactions regardless of how big or small they are. Your support teams need to be trusted advisors and experts on your products or solutions in order to best help customers.

HubSpot’s Service Hub comes into play here, providing a suite of tools dedicated to managing queries, providing feedback and providing further information.

Help Desk: Helping you spend less time on data entry and to prioritise critical issues first
Omnichannel Service: Meet your customers where they are across channels so that you’re always there when they need you
Fully integrated CRM & automation: Combine customer data with automation and feedback to build customised, seamless service solutions
Email marketing: Continue to provide helpful information long after the first sale
Attribution reporting: Understand your customer behaviour across the buyer journey to make data-driven decisions that constantly evolve and improve your service for new and existing customers