Before you can really understand exactly what HubSpot is and why it matters, you first need to understand the problem it was built to solve. For years, marketing in general was a very impersonal affair - old school sales tactics started with the goal of "reaching the highest volume of customers in a single move" and worked their way backwards from there.
Thanks largely to the continued advancement of technology over the last decade and the simultaneous rise of the digital era through the prominence of smartphones and tablets, these old school tactics have led to an almost insurmountable amount of noise for everyone involved. According to one recent study, for example, the average person was exposed to about 500 ads per day back in 1970. Flash forward to today and that number has increased to over 5,000.
Keep in mind that this only has to do with the actual ads themselves. The attention of your customers is being fractured in countless directions all day, every day from even more sources. They're spending more time on social media. They're reading blogs (and many are blogging themselves). The list goes on and on. So when you're already fighting for someone's attention that is becoming more and more limited all the time, you can't simply double down on the old idea of "throw as much money at someone as possible and buy their attention."
People don't have time for "traditional" marketing, especially when it's cold, calculated and impersonal by design. Consider the fact that according to HubSpot's own internal studies:
- Right now, there are over 200 million people who are on the national "Do Not Call" list.
- 44% of impersonal direct mail is literally never opened by its intended recipient.
It's no longer about going after as many customers as humanly possible. It's about going after the right customers with the right message at precisely the right time.
That, in essence, is what HubSpot was built to allow you to do.
What is HubSpot and Why It Matters
HubSpot, by design, is more than just an inbound marketing and sales tool. It was built from the ground up to help you not only address all of the modern day marketing challenges as outlined above, but to do so from one single platform that lets you focus less on selling to your customers and more on building relationships with them in the most organic and sophisticated ways possible.
As stated, HubSpot brings together all of the tools needed to execute better inbound marketing campaigns, all under one roof. You get access to things like:
- Email marketing and automation. Leverage your existing customer data to create better, more helpful, more timely and more personal email messages.
- SEO tools that allow you to not only rank highly in search engines like Google, but to also focus on the qualities that matter most like local SEO as well.
- Marketing analytics. HubSpot acts as a way to measure every aspect of your entire marketing funnel from a single place with analytics, reporting and comprehensive dashboards. So not only can you create better content and execute better campaigns from the jump - you can see the results of your efforts in real-time to fix what is broken and double down on what works as fast as you can.
- Social media marketing. HubSpot also includes tools that make it easier than ever to connect directly with the people in your audience who matter the most, allowing you to have better social interactions and save time while you do it.
HubSpot even allows you to take a more holistic approach to things like traditional web design, analyzing nearly every aspect of your site's performance against the metrics that matter most for your business. You can see both the quantity AND the quality of the traffic you're getting to see what is creating the most value so that you can always focus your attention on the things that matter most of all.
This type of true inbound marketing approach doesn't just work - it works almost impossibly well. Consider just a few of the following statistics to get a better idea of exactly what we're now dealing with:
- According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of decision makers in a business would rather get brand information from a series of helpful articles than via a traditional advertisement.
- According to Executive Board, online buyers these days go through roughly 57% of the buying cycle totally on their own - all without ever talking to a sales person.
- State of Inbound Marketing revealed that businesses who mainly rely on inbound marketing (like the kind that HubSpot makes possible) tend to save $14 or more on every newly acquired customer compared to those that don't.
And keep in mind that HubSpot is a platform that allows you to take advantage of all of these things, essentially all at the same time.
So from that perspective, HubSpot is more than any one single tool. Yes, it's about allowing you to leverage social media marketing to reach out to your customers with greater intimacy. It's about using marketing analytics to learn more about your customers than ever so that you can target them more precisely and more effectively. It's about using email marketing to get the right message to those people at exactly the right moment in their journey and it's about using marketing automation to do so automatically.
But it's also about something more important: breaking down the silos that used to exist between these techniques so that they can finally operate as the living, breathing whole they were meant to be.
It's about allowing you to take full advantage of the modern day marketing tools that are available to work smarter, not harder.
THIS is what HubSpot was intended to do and why it will continue to be a critical part of all of your marketing efforts for years to come.
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