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A company needs an effective go-to-market strategy that makes it easy to buy from and sell to. Go-to-market strategies and plans are a blueprint for how the company will reach customers, streamlining and establishing a strong focus on the steps that a company must take to co-create value with customers.

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5 tips for using hubspot

HubSpot is a premier marketing and sales software platforms for inbound marketing. For HubSpot Partner Agencies, one of the main benefits is that, instead of having various marketing and software systems in place and having to switch between them all, HubSpot allows your business to have a one-stop shop for all of your marketing and sales needs.

However, migrating your existing website and software capabilities over to HubSpot can be tedious at times – albeit rewarding in the end. Once you’ve integrated HubSpot into your technology systems, you have their vast array of features at your disposal.

To help with this process, here are 5 tips for using HubSpot that we recommend for anyone starting out in HubSpot.

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I recently had the pleasure of attending the American Marketing Association Boston event Actionable Marketing Metrics: Tools and Methodologies on Tuesday, 24 January, 2017.

The two guest speakers, Thor Johnson, CEO of Bedrock Data, and Kristen Hambelton, CMO of ServiceChannel, gave outstanding presentations. They raised interesting points on how businesses should approach defining metrics in both marketing and sales.

Here are a few main takeaways that are particularly pertinent to B2B businesses (though, of course, they do apply to B2C companies as well):

Before you publish a blog post, ensure the content, and context meet your company’s standards and the post is optimized and ready.  Too often, authors get off topic or write overly complicated information without proper context resulting in a less than positive response and engagement.  When we publish a post or work with clients on publishing a post, we use a checklist to remind ourselves to address a range of important factors.  Below is a Blog Post Checklist that includes questions you can ask before pressing the ‘publish’ button.

Download and save for later use!

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By John Nielsen

Lead scoring is the process of evaluating and assigning points to prospects and leads using marketing automation tools. Points are distributed based on the attributes associated with a qualified lead.  It is important to understand whom you are marketing to when managing a campaign, sending irrelevant content to your followers is a quick way to lose.  To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, below are a few tips one can easily follow to update your contact lists and help identify priority focus using lead scoring.

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steve-jobs-appeAs started a post on Content Marketing, but learned that Steve Jobs has passed away – very sad news. So, I will postpone my post and take a moment to thank Steve Jobs for all he has done for all of us.

You built an incredible company, great brands, and great experiences. I hope your company carries on your vision and leadership.

We usually recommend that our clients avoid launching their blog under a separate domain name / URL from their primary brand website. The reasons are both related to branding (brand affinity) and search engine optimization (SEO). While this general recommendation remains, with Google’s recent announcement about link treatments, brands can now add some subtle branding structures and URL treatments for their blogs while still maintaining SEO value to their core domain.

Matt Boynton and Laurent Magloire from the Revenue Architects team point out that Google recently announced that sub-domains and domains are going to be treated equally. So blog.brand.com and brand.com/blog will both maintain the same SEO value. Prior to this announcement, blog.brand.com would have been treated as a separate domains and brand.com would not have received the SEO value of incoming links to blog.brand.com.

We will still suggest that to maintain SEO value and brand affinity, you should not create a separate domain for the brand blog (i.e. do not create something called brandblog.com), but now you can make some additional choices for how to brand your blog and structure your blog domain name. Here is the article.

The arrival of ecommerce and other web technologies created a lot of talk about the leveling of the playing field between small / mid-sized businesses and large business. For a while, there was some truth to this. Today, scale and size are back in town. Big and well resourced firms can again spend their way to success supporting multi-channel, content-driven campaigns.

Channels

What started with a web site with some site analytics then advertising is now video, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc, etc, etc. Each channel has its own subtleties and each are rapidly evolving as all the players try to own the future. For the average small or mid-sized business – life in the fast lane is tough. Dizzying is probably the right word.

Content

Participating is a start but you are only really going to engage your target audience if you have some interesting to say. Not sure how many thought leaders there are in your business but inspiration is sometimes tough to find. Making sure the invoice goes out right gets the priority. Even collecting and distributing other people’s creative genius is hard work. How much credit do you really get for retweeting?

Support technology

This is a lot to manage. Staying on top of marketing automation, web analytics and social media monitoring tools etc, etc, etc is tough. Startups with great tools keep turning up but they are often focused on making their money by working with big companies so good luck getting a reply to your email. Otherwise, they are so busy developing their product that they don’t have time to actually sell it. So again, good luck getting a reply to your email. You can try signing up for a trial. Unfortunately, most providers have not taken the lessons of companies like 37 Signals. The monthly fee might be small but you have to donate half of one person’s week to figure out how to make it work. Multiple that by X for every platform that you want / need to try.

So…. What to do?

Don’t give up

Stay involved. Things will improve. Applications will get simpler. New solutions will emerge. Stake your claim on every new thing so you don’t have to come up with some convoluted user name / handle in the future.

Campaign in a box

A campaign in a box is coming. The obvious market opportunity is to wrap services around some good low cost technology applications to give small and mid-sized businesses what they need to compete. No learning curve, help with content and social media management in partnership with your existing team. More to come from us on this. We think that it is time to level the playing field (again).

There are likely different schools of thought on this and there are SEO metrics that can prove or disprove the visibility impact of more posts vs. fewer posts, but in my opinion less can be more and quality beats quantity. As the cobbler’s children, we are still enhancing our blog post capacity and shortly, our core team will be more consistently writing posts. But our objective is not to game the SEO system with inbound leads. Our goal is to share articles and perspectives that we think might add some value to our readers and continue the conversations we have every day.

With the increasing spamming of the social web, we are in danger of losing site of the true value of content. I get very concerned when clients consider mass article writing strategies – particularly those clients that market and sell a complex product or service to a sophisticated buyer. These readers know when they are being trapped with content proliferation. Now the buzz is content curation – we need to be careful here too. We don’t need someone to simply compile articles, but we do value an editorial perspective and a careful selection of relevant posts. If I trust you, I will trust the links and content you collect and share.

So, rather than stuff your website with trash blog posts and articles every day, if you are trying to reach a more discerning audience, think quality over quantity.