The inbound marketing strategy was developed in response to how people today move through the buying cycle: Instead of spending a little time researching (say 20 percent of their total time), and then contacting a sales team member to learn more, the process has flip-flopped: People now spend the majority of their time (up to 80 percent) researching a product before they ever engage with a sales member.
The key takeaway here? By the time someone actually engages with your sales team, they are well-versed in your product’s features, and they’ve been actively comparing your product to the competition’s offerings.
Which begs the question: What are you doing to nurture this process as they explore what your product offers? Are you keeping their attention, and are you on their radar even as they research the competition?
If you’re executing a well-planned inbound marketing strategy, you will be. But the sheer number of leads a mid- to large-sized company receives can make this process difficult to manage and stay ahead of. For this reason (and many others), we’re big fans of HubSpot Enterprise.
HubSpot Enterprise integrates features that are essential to the inbound process. Their intuitive platform is easy for digitally savvy companies to implement, and the Enterprise version saves companies loads of time—WordPress (as great as it is) and custom-built sites simply aren’t built around an inbound marketing strategy, even though they may incorporate features helpful for inbound marketing.
To illustrate what we mean, we’ve broken down essential features in HubSpot Enterprise (beyond contact storage) that will help drive leads, conversions and customers.
Executing a successful inbound plan requires you to pay attention to the data and understand how even subtle nuances in campaigns can have big effects on end user actions. HubSpot Enterprise provides extensive reporting—some of which we’ll be covering here. An especially helpful element is the Revenue Report. With this report, you can track the overall revenue that’s tied to marketing efforts and see the contacts and companies that convert on your website. You’ll also be able to see how much revenue you generate from non-website efforts, such as social media. This feature will help you take a long-term strategy (very important in inbound marketing) so you can accurately pinpoint your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
HubSpot Enterprise offers another extremely useful feature called Attribution Reporting. Your team probably puts a lot of time into the site design, site flow, calls-to-action, and the content itself—the blogs and the downloadable content. With an Attribution Report, you can map out the customer journey, so as soon as someone lands on your site, you can trace their path to see what's influencing them. Armed with this data, you can go back to your site and enhance the areas that lead to more conversions, and you may even eliminate pages or text that aren't leading to actions.
Ready to get some high fives from your sales team? HubSpot Enterprise helps you assign leads to the sales team through its Predictive Lead Scoring functionality. You can set up workflows and assign lead scores so sales team members will receive notifications when a lead reaches a certain score. This keeps the sales team engaged with leads who are “warm,” and saves everyone time from reaching out to leads who have not yet met a certain level of engagement or taken enough actions to qualify them.
Should you put the email headline in green type or blue? Do people prefer email headlines that start with “How to …” or “Top 3 reasons …”? When you use HubSpot Enterprise, you can start testing these theories. The Enterprise email marketing program allows you to set up A/B split testing so that you can settle once and for all those nagging headline questions. Fine-tune what works best by sending out tests on all of your campaigns; you may find, for example, that certain audiences respond better to one of the options, so you can use this data to write more compelling headlines and create designs that people will notice and engage with.
A final HubSpot Enterprise feature worth pointing out is its tool that lets you trigger actions based on behavior. So, for example, if a prospect comes to your website’s blog, you’ll be able to trace what action led them to your blog, and based on hyperlinks they click on within the blog, you can set up triggers to send them specific content. Your sales team can track what prospects view, which gives the salespeople additional insight into the type of content that people want, or the questions they may have about a product feature.
As you debate which platform to use to manage your inbound marketing strategy, we can say from personal experience that HubSpot’s Enterprise suite of features provides a more robust way to see data, create campaigns and involve your sales team. Inbound marketing is not just a “campaign”—it’s a constant nurturing of potential buyers at every stage in the sales cycle. The more you can automate this process and have actionable insights into what’s working, the more effective you’ll be in the long run.
