As B2B marketing & sales continue to evolve, it has quickly become both art and science. Well-crafted and engaging content is still required to catch the attention of prospects and drive them into the sales funnel. Advanced analytics help us determine what works and refine both the content and the delivery mechanism.
That’s why 69% of B2B marketers report they have a documented content strategy for their inbound marketing. The days of throwing spaghetti up against the wall and seeing what sticks are long over. That’s no better than picking up the phone and making cold calls without taking the time to look at a prospect’s website.
With the abundance of data points available today, the right tracking and tactics can dramatically improve conversions. 95% of B2B marketers are using metrics to measure performance.
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing
B2B prospects are researching solutions online long before they ever connect with someone from your sales team. Developing content that educates, engages, and provides value helps build brand awareness while establishing your organization as a trusted authority.
Inbound marketing generates leads by attracting prospects that have an interest in the products and services you offer. By nurturing and driving leads through the sales pipeline, inbound marketing delivers more sales-qualified leads to your sales team.
When it comes to developing content, top-performing B2B marketers point to four key strategies as the path to success when developing inbound marketing that works:
- Prioritize the prospect’s need over your organization’s sales message
- Develop content based on specific phases of the customer journey
- Deliver relevant content when – and where – a prospect is most likely to see it
- Provide optimal experience across their customer journey
For B2B marketing, delivering relevant – and high-value – content at the optimal time is crucial.
Timing is Essential for B2B Marketing
With B2B marketing, timing is essential when it comes to product launches and new initiatives.
Streamlining marketing deployment using automation can ensure the right content is delivered at the right time. We recommend HubSpot for B2B marketing as part of your inbound marketing strategy. HubSpot is a marketing software that allows effective management of multi-channel marketing and the ability to report on prospects at all stages of the buyer journey. It’s a super-fast tool that can make your life easier and get things done more quickly than ever before.
HubSpot’s toolset allows you to easily start marketing at scale and provides a wealth of value-added features for other departments in your organization such as customer service and sales as your organization grows. Using the tools effectively allows you to put more valuable time back in your marketing team’s hands so they can focus on the bigger picture of the brand and strategic elements that can’t be automated.
HubSpot scales marketing work that traditionally would need to be handled by an in-house team. Luckily, the pros at Riverbed Marketing can help you get set up in no time. It can be an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy.
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Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the key to inbound marketing at scale. Automating tasks frees up your time while optimizing the sales workflow. Here are just a few examples of the power of marketing automation:
- Build email offers and automate email distribution based on triggers
- Tie offers to actions and goals
- Advanced lead segmentation
- Personalization at scale
Email Nurturing
Email nurturing allows you to create multiple offers that can be customized and delivered to prospects at various stages of the customer journey. Automation can filter out the uninterested leads, and help you continue to nurture warm leads until they are ready to make a purchase.
An essential part of email nurturing is A/B testing. This means, testing out different imagery, subject lines, and even style of content within your marketing collateral. A/B testing can ultimately help your marketing team improve open rates, click-through rates, and optimize conversions.
Lead Management
By tracking contact information and interaction with all marketing collateral (such as website visits and white paper downloads), targeted campaigns can be created to better manage leads.
Lead scoring is an effective way to automate lead segmentation. High-value leads can be prioritized by your marketing team for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) efforts. High-priority leads can be automatically sent through to your sales team for rapid follow-up.
Historical Information
Historical information can help optimize future campaign strategies. By tracking each piece of content and marketing efforts to every lead, you can track response rates. Over time, this can provide important insights about the effectiveness and be used as part of your predictive analytics to better forecast closing rates by segment.
Funnel Reporting
An end-to-end reporting solution helps you track how many prospects are at each stage of the funnel. You’ll see a snapshot of all your current pipeline opportunities sorted by selling stages. This helps managers quickly understand where prospects are in their journey and where sales and marketing teams are focused.
Top to bottom reporting allows you to monitor how quickly prospects move through the funnel, where they get stalled, and what actions lead to better conversions.
This is one place where HubSpot can save you tons of time. It’s out-of-the-box reporting template library lets you grab the information you need without spending hours creating and formatting reports. Click, save, and report!
How HubSpot Connects Marketing, Sales, Service, and Website Development
Hubspot works across four distinct areas: marketing, sales, service, and content management system (CMS).
Marketing Hub
The marketing hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing solution to help B2B marketing teams procure, engage, and nurture leads across multi-channel marketing efforts. HubSpot for B2B marketing helps you:
- Get found online
- Connect your blog, content strategy, SEO, social media, landing page, and ads
- Convert and nurture leads
- Connect email marketing, video, live chat, marketing automation, forms, CTAs, and A/B testing
- Measure revenue
Campaign reporting, traffic analytics, and attribution reporting can help you track ROI
Sales Hub
The sales bug helps you track and connect with B2B prospects. By automating basic tasks, it frees up sales teams to focus on high-quality leads.
- Streamline outreach
Tools include email tracking, notification, task automation, email sequencing - Connecting with prospects
Manage your scheduling, live chat, tasks and activities, and video conferencing - Tracking and Testing
Optimize your pipeline management, deal forecasting, and review sales team productivity
Service Hub
HubSpot also provides customer service tools to help with customer support and retention.
- Track Customer Interactions
From ticketing and contacts, create detailed records of each interaction - Customer Support and Service
Use deep knowledge bases and templates to automate tasks, tickets, and email sequences based on customer queries - Measure Customer Experience
Monitor the CX, including time-to-close, tickets-closed, first-call resolution, support staff performance, and customer surveys
CMS Hub
Hubspot’s newest hub is designed to power your website.
- Pre-built Website Themes
Beautifully designed themes can be customized simply to create engaging websites - Build without Code
The drag-and-drop editor lets you update and create pages without needed coding or a developer - SEO Recommendations
Free recommendations to improve your site performance with step-by-step instructions
Can you tell we like HubSpot? You will, too. HubSpot has a robust set of tools that can power your inbound marketing automation.
However, it also takes an experienced inbound marketing agency to create and manage the content in the HubSpot platform for an effective and efficient solution.
Riverbed Marketing is a HubSpot Agency Partner. We can help evaluate your situation, find the right solution for your organization, and set you up for HubSpot success
Riverbed Marketing, Riipen, and HubSpot: A Case Study
Riipen is a B2B SaaS platform that creates collaborative learning experiences between businesses, educators, and teachers using experiential learning. With a great platform, they needed to improve lead generation from their website to ramp up their sales pipeline.
They had a great website design but lacked landing pages that targeted key development areas. They also need better lead scoring and segmentation to prioritize high-value leads.
Riverbed Marketing designed a comprehensive campaign to refine home page content and landing pages to improve inbound traffic and lead generation. By integrating HubSpot analytics and lead attribution, Riipen was able to get richer insights into the leads being generated from its multi-channel marketing. They built a lead scoring system for each of their three key selling areas to prioritize high-value prospects from casual queries.
This allowed Riipen to significantly strengthen their inbound marketing and lead generation strategy to effectively generate, capture, segment, and prioritize leads to deliver the appropriate offers.
Effective Lead Generation
Rippen isn’t alone. Riverbed Marketing has created similar results for other partners using effective inbound marketing strategies:
- BrightVolt had a 1,000% increase in web traffic and 2X more leads
- Pro Bed Medical Technologies saw four times more leads, reduced their cost per lead by 31%, and increased web traffic by 1,461%
- The Pacific Training Institute doubled their leads and shortened their sales cycle by 20%
- Connected City tripled their leads and grew website conversions by 900%
These are just a few of the results we’ve generated using inbound marketing as a fundamental building block. You can view more case studies here.
A Certified HubSpot Agency Partner
Riverbed Marketing is a HubSpot Agency Partner, certified in HubSpot, and fully-trained in inbound marketing methodology, integration, and management of HubSpot marketing campaigns. We can efficiently manage – and optimize – your marketing investment for predictable and cost-effective growth.
We believe in taking an organized approach to B2B marketing and lead generation to focus on attracting your ideal prospects. Robust inbound marketing strategies go beyond email to better understand customer needs and attracting and engaging B2B prospects. Our data-driven B2B marketing process delivers measurable results and better ROI.
Contact Riverbed Marketing today and let us show how your HubSpot can help grow your business efficiently.
