This guide will give you all the information you need to know about Inbound marketing, Hubspot, project handling and reporting, communication, problem solving and solutions, before starting your work in our company. Make sure to read through this to maximize your knowledge and results. Lets dive in!
We use 2 communication platforms here at Incredo: Trello and Skype.
We use Skype for daily communication (chat) between our team and clients to discuss any matters that arise in between our work on a project and calls/meetings with our clients to discuss any major campaigns, changes, challenges, strategies, etc.
Trello is an online communication platform that consists of boards, lists and cards. Each board refers to a specific project where we discuss and perform all tasks concerning that project.
Lists are made to better organize the ongoing project topics and split the work between the team members. Topics are made around whatever needs to be done, that will include short term all long term groups of tasks. Examples of lists” Ongoing tasks, Completed tasks, Review tasks and so on.
Cards are created inside the lists and have a specific task assigned to one or more group members and usually include a deadline of competition. The deadlines may vary depending on specific tasks, their volume, etc.
When communicating via Trello, team members make constant updates on the task status, so that everyone knows in what stage it is in, unless it’s a very small one and doesn’t need updating. When updating or asking a question to somebody, team members tag the specific person they want to refer to in their comment, and that person will receive a notification on any update on that specific card.
Every 2 weeks on Mondays we organize team meetings where we all gather in one room to discuss our success, opportunities, challenges, suggestions for improvement and practically anything that is bothering us.
Team meetings usually last one hour. Project reports also happen during the team meeting, when each person responsible talks about the problems, suggestions and success they had with anything concerning their project.
Everything here at Incredo is transparent, so everybody is aware what the other teams are doing for their own project, and can offer suggestions, solutions to problems or help with anything that might be needed.
At the end of every month, we organize a team activity somewhere to relax and have fun together. Might go drinking, eating, playing different games, etc. We choose diversity in those activities and always try something new!
You already know the best practices of Inbound Marketing through the Hubspot Academy training videos, but I will give some more information regarding each of those topics. Let’s start from the very bottom and go gradually.
Inbound Marketing is based on 2 key principles: Buyer Personas and Buyers Journey. All the content we create, every post, every article and offer revolves around those 2 key principles. Each Inbound marketer has to have a complete and clear understanding of this 2 aspects, in order to be successful in his work.
Buyer personas are semi fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are created based on market research and real data about your current consumers. Every inbound marketer has to understand their buyer personas for every specific industry and project, because each industry is different and therefore, customer needs, demands and pain points vary. All the content we create is targeted towards our buyer personas and used to address their issues, solve their problems and relieve their pain points.
After we have learned everything about our Buyer personas, we have to start mapping out their Buyer’s Journey. Buyer’s journey is the continuous navigation route of a visitor who first came to your site and eventually has to become a customer. Buyer’s journey consists of 3 stages: Awareness stage, where people start to understand that they have a problem which needs to be addressed and turn to the web for help, Consideration stage, where people already have some kind of information about their issue and are now considering several options, and Decision stage, when buyers have 1 or 2 solutions they think are the best for them and now need to make a decision on which one to use.
Mapping out the buyer’s journey correctly is crucial for generating leads and customers for any business. If potential consumers cannot find the logical continuation on your website easily, they will just leave and turn to someone else for help.
A landing page is the key instrument for you to acquire leads. Landing Pages are mostly plain, easy to understand pages outside of your website that exist for that sole purpose of generating leads. All kinds of navigation has to be removed from a landing page, in order to not distract potential leads.
A Landing page consists of an offer (usually free), minimal, yet informative and important content, a relevant image and a form. It’s very simple, you offer your target audience something useful and free, in exchange for some information about them and they will agree to those terms, if you created your buyer personas correctly and they are in the corresponding stage of the buyer’s journey.
The further your offer is according to the buyer’s journey, the more information you can get from your potential leads. Learn more about Landing Pages.
Thank you pages are the next step of landing pages, where you thank your newly acquired lead for downloading your offer. A thank you page may be used for encouragement to continue their buyer’s journey or just show an inline thank you message and a promise to deliver your offer exactly as you said in the landing page before. You have to always keep your promise in the exact way you said you would, otherwise you are going to lose the trust of your potential leads and they will leave your page.
Call to actions or CTAs, are eye catchy, visually appealing, clickable images that marketers use to attract visitors to landing pages. They are usually placed at the end/side/top of blog posts or articles on your website, your homepage or anywhere else where they can be appropriate. The message on the CTA has to match the content that your potential lead was consuming at that moment, otherwise it will seem irrelevant.
As we learned, leads are considered to be those visitors that complete the landing page form and download your offer. However, not all leads are equally important for your business, in fact there may be visitors who don’t want to have any business with you or your company whatsoever, they just needed the offer. These leads are called unqualified or bad leads. There are also active leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads and leads that need to be nurtured.
Active leads turn into marketing qualified leads, making them ideal to make more and more offers (not the direct product or service yet, but something that is not absolutely free anymore), get more information about them and strengthen the bond between them and your company.
Marketing qualified leads then turn into sales qualified leads and are considered ready to purchase your product or service. They are usually being handled by the sales team of the company.
There are lots of different uses for emails when it comes to Inbound marketing. There are follow-up emails, no reply emails, informative emails, invitational emails and so on.
SEO or search engine optimization is done to help your website and content appear in the search engines. SEO is very important, because we might actually have the best content ever, but its useless if nobody can find it.
SEO can and should be done for all the max visited pages, like homepage, offer pages, blog, contact information, etc. There are a few different factors that should be taken into account when considering SEO: On page SEO, specific keywords, Meta descriptions, visual images, image alt text, referrals, URLs, etc.
More about SEO
Keywords are very specific, short words or phrases that are searched by people frequently via the search engines and are most relevant to your business. If you want to rank up on search engines and come to the front page, you have to utilize keywords a lot.
Although keywords are not the most essential part of your content (great, educating, valuable content IS!) they are still very important to make your content easier to find and consume.
Social Media Marketing is one of the most important tools for every business. Here some hey points you should know about it.
The main social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn should be utilized by all businesses. The rest can be useful as well, if you are a social media heavy industry like fitness for example. YouTube, Google+ and Pinterest, etc. are also great channels if you are a social media focused business.
Each industry has a channel that is more important for them compared to the rest, like Instagram for fitness industry, Facebook for IT companies or LinkedIn for professional services. You should find the one that is essential to your success and focus heavily on that one with deeper research, however the rest should not be neglected.
Hubspot is the online marketing platform we use for all Inbound marketing activities. It’s actually a huge platform with lots of important things to know, but we will go over the basics and some key points.
After logging in you can choose the account you want to work with from the little “arrow” button near your picture in the top right side of the page.
After you select your desired account, you land on the Marketing Dashboard. Here is a list of your buyer personas, marketing performance, email, landing page and blog performance.
We usually create buyer personas with Hubspot. for a reference you, you might already be familiar with our Buyer Persona Templates.
Campaigns are made around a specific topic and contain and track everything related to them. They include blog posts, social media messages, articles, emails, landing pages etc. Campaigns make it easier to track information and see if your content is actually working as intended.
Everything concerning social media can be found in this section.
Contacts home
Contacts are your leads and customers that have filled out any of your landing page forms. You can see them all here, information about each of them, their contact history and so on.
Here you can analyze your marketing efforts and see how far you have come.
This manual is the starting point of your journey and you need to be familiar with all of the aspects of Inbound marketing and Hubspot listed here to be able to show good results in your work. Of course, there is much more to learn as you go along the way, and it cannot all be listed in a single guide, but these are the fundamentals that you need to know to have a great start.
I hope you learned a lot from this guide and memorized it. You can refer to this guide if any questions arise, or if the problem persists, ask one of your fellow co-workers for help. I am sure they will do whatever they can to help you resolve your issue.
P.S. If you read all of this until the very end, you deserve a cookie. Claim it when you come on your first day!