7 Inbound Marketing Tips I Learned Renewing my HubSpot Certification

I just completed my third round of HubSpot certification. When I took the exam for the first time the information in these certifications was pretty earth-shattering to me as a young marketing professional just two years out of college. I was doing a lot of the pieces of inbound marketing but had no idea the inbound methodology could connect the dots and I was wowed (and still am) that a software like HubSpot makes executing inbound marketing so purposeful and measurable.

Every time I get re-certified I like to make note of the information, stats, tips, and facts I learn about Inbound Marketing and about HubSpot along the way. Many of the items on this list are things I know or learned at one point and serve as a reminder, and some are nuggets I picked up this time around. And since I document them all anyway, here’s a summary so you can have these marketing tips in your back pocket, too.

1. Buyer Personas: Focus on the Motive Behind Behavior

When building a buyer persona, it’s crucial to ask a lot of questions. What’s even more crucial to a strong, insightful persona is focusing on the motives behind certain behaviors; don’t just ask what someone is doing, but ask why they are doing it and collect insight from there. This will be extremely helpful in predicting the buying cycles and actions of your personas.

2. Maximize Content Shelf Life

Lindsay Thibeault, professor for HubSpot Academy notes that marketers should “spend as much time on content promotion as creating a piece of content.” One of the most impactful parts of the inbound marketing methodology is getting the right content, to the right people, at the right time, in the right place. Don’t forget to look for any and all opportunities to share content: landing pages, site pages, blogs, social media, email, etc.

3. 80 Percent of Internet users own a Smart Phone

Are you where that 80 percent is? Making sure your website and emails are optimized for mobile ensures visitors can consume your content when and how they want.

4. Find Your Leads on Social Media

HubSpot reported that 80 percent of marketers and 60 percent of sales professionals found qualified leads on social media sites. And of the marketers using social media, 66 percent of them saw an increase in leads from social after spending just six hours a week on social channels. Social media can be a great placeto target and find leads, continue to nurture them, and then delight them after they’ve converted to a customer.

5. Know Your CTA #Goals

As an inbound marketer, I’m constantly looking at analytics and looking for areas we’re excelling, where there is room for improvement, and keeping up with recommended goals and metrics. HubSpot recommends shooting for a 1-2 percent click-through rate on CTAs and a 10 percent click-to-submission rate. Knowing these benchmarks is helpful for testing and analyzing the success and conversion of CTAs.

6. When it Comes to Forms, Think Like Your Leads

In the certification training, HubSpot encourages a simple, but significant exercise: thinking like your leads. “Would you be willing to answer all of the questions you’ve posed on the form? A form that’s too long may turn away some visitors.” Just because you want to know and collect the information, doesn’t mean your visitors and prospects will be willing to share this information, or they may not see it as an even trade-off for what they’re getting from you. W.W.L.D: what would leads do?

7. Let Smart Lists Make You Smarter

74 percent of all online consumers get frustrated with a website when the content they’re consuming appears to have nothing to do with their interests. Using smart lists when sending emails can help you segment your contacts so they’re you’re giving the right information to the right people at the right time to help nurture them in their buying journey.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of what I learned and was reminded of during my HubSpot certification, but certainly the few tips that stood out. Knowledge is power in my opinion, and after passing my exam I feel like I have so much more inbound power!