This month marks the second anniversary as HubSpot Inbound Marketing customers and the following is a review of what we have achieved and learned in our second year.
We signed up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing platform halfway through the product demonstration, when we realized that it exactly fulfilled our lead generation requirements and perhaps more importantly had the potential to fulfill the lead generation needs of most of our clients.
If you are interested in our first year experience please visit HubSpot-Inbound-Marketing-Performance-Review-Year-1
Prior to HubSpot we had a second generation “presence” Website of about thirty pages for our consulting and training business, but we did not receive any inbound leads from the Website, although we were creating content monthly for magazine placement and did see a small traffic spike with every article we published.
We updated our sales and marketing methodology by replacing our old outbound lead generation methods with HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing Methodology and our lead generation process is dependent on it today.
Since we started with HubSpot we have generated over 220 leads (a lead is defined as a visitor who exchanges their contact details in return for viewing a joint AMC-HubSpot Webinar, downloading our WhiteboardSelling whitepaper or signing up for a free Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation.)
Our Website is hosted on the HubSpot Content Management System and the statistics are gathered from the numerous HubSpot analytic reports.
Inbound Marketing Performance Highlights
- Generated in excess of 220 leads, averaging 15 leads per month since September 2009, when we posted our Guide to Better Sales Performance whitepaper.
- Organic search visitors have increased 2000+% and we receive over 1000 visitors per month for our ranked keywords.
- Direct visitors have increased 500+%
- We have over 140 Keywords ranking in Google Top 10 and more than 250 ranked in Top 100. Our traffic producing keywords are saving us $247.00 per month over what we would have had to pay for Google Ad words to produce the same traffic….this nearly pays for the HubSpot small business license fee of $250 per month.
- Our Inbound links increased nearly 700% this year.
- Our top ranked blog post entitled, A Guide to Creating Engaging PowerPoint Presentations received 1200+ visits in the past year.
Lessons Learned using HubSpot
- Inbound Marketing is a journey, not a destination and requires commitment. The months where we had dips in inbound traffic correspond to the times we either had client commitments that consumed all available time or other distractions including moving house, relocating countries, moving in and did not post a weekly blog.
- If you want to rank higher for a particular keyword, create a blog or Web page and feature the keywords in the title and post in as many forums where your readers could potentially find it.
- You get out of social media what you put into it….I don’t put a lot of time into Twitter, but when I do focus on it, I invariably learn something useful or valuable for my business or my life. LinkedIn is by far the most important social media forum for our ideas and the source of most of our inbound leads.
- HubSpot’s API has made it a lot easier to integrate with 3rd party applications including Salesforce.com and Shopify.
- HubSpot has incorporated an email engine and much stronger lead nurturing capabilities into the product in the past year and we have now discontinued our subscription to our old email provider, although we did experience several teething problems as early adopters of the service.
- You could do all of this stuff using discrete tools and some of them are free or almost free. What makes HubSpot so valuable is that in a couple of clicks we can create all the content we need, send a campaign, create a landing page, optimize keywords, links and on-page SEO, and view all of the relevant metrics for how our inbound marketing efforts are working…bottom line is marketing productivity.
- There is a learning curve in using the product, but anyone can do this if they are prepared to invest the time and are prepared to blog-on a weekly basis as a minimum. Don’t have the time? …there is a rapidly growing army of certified HubSpot partners who form a services marketplace for HubSpot Services who will “Do Inbound Marketing For You”.
