A Whitehat Inbound Marketing Agency

Before we get to what makes a great Inbound Marketing agency the best partner for your marketing needs, let’s talk a little bit about inbound marketing itself.

Let’s begin with an important factor, what inbound marketing isn’t.

Inbound marketing isn’t about buying email lists, cold-calling or sending out vague, non-specific emails and flyers to people who you don’t know or are unfamiliar with your business.

That is an old-fashioned paradigm and doesn’t work in this technology-driven, digital world.  A world where consumers, like you and I, are much more discerning and no longer want to be bothered by irrelevant information and disruptions.

That outdated, outmoded approach is the exact opposite of what inbound marketing is.

Inbound marketing is focused towards attracting customers to your site through great, unique content which creates a virtual environment that people like to be in. This authority content is what will convert your visitors into leads and ultimately leads into customers.

When your customers start singing the praises of your brand, you know you’re onto a winner and that’s exactly what we’re hoping for with our digital marketing strategy.  We no longer trust brands and salespeople but rely on other people's experiences and opinions. Word-of-mouth has become the key to success, therefore delighting and pleasing your customers, even after they have purchased your product or service, is imperative to maximise your company's success.

By combining the power of the traditionally disjointed aspects of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), blogs, your website, social media and, where appropriate, paid advertising, a strong digital marketing platform will bring them all together to form one, cohesive powerhouse that we (as your trusted online marketing agency) can manage on your behalf.

When putting together a list of marketing agencies, some of the marketing services they should provide should include:

• Social media marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)
• Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Website design and build

Recent reports state that inbound campaigns achieve a higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional ‘outbound’ campaigns. This happens regardless of the company’s size or budget.

Consumers no longer want to be interrupted and disturbed by "traditional" outbound marketing methods and tools, they want to be able to decide when, where and how they interact with a brand. Inbound marketing means being there for the consumer when they need you and providing them with contextual and helpful information and services when they want and need it.

This approach creates exponential growth in demand for inbound marketing services across the core areas of search, social, content, PR, email, analytics, web, digital advertising, mobile, and more.

The future belongs to top marketing agencies with more efficient management systems, integrated services, versatile talent, a love for data, and a commitment to producing results that can be tracked in real-time and correlated directly to sales.

The Power of  

Digital Agency

The digital agency you choose should be a member of HubSpot’s Certified Partner Agency scheme. This means that they should work closely with the people at HubSpot and have been trained and validated on the standard inbound marketing methodologies.

In terms of skill sets, your agency should have multiple talents. It should be an advertising agency, a digital agency, an SEO company, and a social media marketing agency - all in one!

When it comes to comprehensive Inbound Marketing software, no one does it better than HubSpot. This is exactly why an Inbound firm needs to be part of their scheme.

HubSpot's approach has helped revolutionise the way marketing is done in this digital age.

An agency's consultants and copywriters should be completely on board with inbound. Of course, if you’ve heard of HubSpot, you’ll know that already.

You should also know, and understand, why it is crucial to partner with an inbound marketing agency that can guide you through the inbound marketing maze and ensure you’re always heading in the right direction.

Your inbound company will work with you to harness the unrivalled power of the HubSpot platform, to make marketing finally work for you. 

For all the power that HubSpot’s platform can provide, it doesn’t create an autonomous entity that relies on algorithms and works by magic. It needs a human element to do the work. The platform allows a marketer to manage and influence all the various marketing activities directly within the marketing software platform.

The built-in reports, analysis and measures that are part and parcel of the software, allow a top digital marketing firm to monitor every aspect of your campaign, from social media interactions to conversion rates, and how these traditional separate factors are now coalescing together seamlessly. All the data drawn in through the HubSpot platform will give you and your marketing team a better understanding of your inbound marketing campaigns and how you are performing. With Hubspot, all of that information is available at your fingertips.

With the help of an experienced agency and the Hubspot software, details and data, that were historically difficult to find and understand, can become a strong source of knowledge and understanding. You can use it to understand your customers better and to optimise and adjust your campaigns to draw even more people to your business and your services.

Analysing your results through Hubspot makes it easier and more manageable to understand how your campaign and your website are doing and to act accordingly to please your customers and make their experience with your company and your website even more enjoyable.

Hubspot helps you create buyer personas to understand your target audience better and to attract them in a relevant and helpful way.

After having created your buyer personas, you can use HubSpot's CRM to segment your contacts into relevant groups. By segmenting your contacts, you can provide a very personalised experience for every single one of your contacts, because you can provide them with the right information at the right time, depending on what they need help with and where they are in the buyer's journey. Hubspot helps you create meaningful relationships with the people in your CRM.

HubSpot's software also allows you to create workflows, to help your prospects progress in their buyer's journey, through CTAs, forms and relevant content (that they CHOOSE to receive by taking specific actions).

Hubspot also allows you to manage all your social media accounts and interactions as well as analyse these, with their software.

Of course, you can. But it's not the right question to ask. It’s not a case of ‘could’ you do it yourself, but ‘should’ you?

In these difficult economic times, marketing, like any budget, is being squeezed more than ever, so you need to be confident that any investment you make leads to actual results, improves your revenue and brings more people to your company and product.

Do you have the time, or the money, to advertise for staff, hire new people, train them and certify them? Probably not. Then let a team of professionals, at a digital marketing agency you trust, do the marketing heavy lifting for you, it’s what they do.

The whole point of marketing is to generate sales-qualified leads. But that is easy to say and often difficult to do. But great digital agencies know marketing. They understand it and by working with them and the power of HubSpot it can be achieved. They will be familiar with how the Inbound Methodology works, so it’s second nature to them.

That’s not to say it doesn’t take time, but the information held within your website and your sales funnel can be dissected, analysed and reported on by the agency consultants in a fraction of the time it would take for you to do it.

Note: Don’t be distracted or misled by an agency's enthusiasm for HubSpot. Yes, they should be a HubSpot-certified partner, but make sure that they are not offering you anything that they wouldn’t use themselves. In fact, they should use HubSpot as a platform for their campaigns. You want to know that they are committed to the platform and the inbound methodology and not just re-selling it as a profitable side-line.