Inbound Marketing and Technology Blog

Did you know WordPress has a HubSpot plugin? WordPress - the open source content management system platform used by millions of individuals and businesses, can integrate with HubSpot - the inbound marketing platform with blogging, landing page, contacts management, email and marketing automation functions. If you're sold on HubSpot but don't want to give up your existing WordPress site, you can do incredible things using the HubSpot for WordPress plugin.

The HubSpot 3 platform allows for much more control over form functions. Forms are a powerful way to understand and qualify leads and pass them along to your sales team. Here are some ways to use forms and the data collected from these forms:

Face it, even though we talk about social media being about interacting with individuals, many companies have turned it into a channel for dumping information and broadcasting their messaging. What happened to the love? What happened to the engagement? Wasn’t that what was supposed to be so great about social media in the first place—the ability for companies to connect on a personal level?

HubSpot's landing pages have long been a preferred method for marketers to create effective pages that capture and convert leads. For developers, the responsive, grid-based CSS framework the landing pages are built on makes creating new layouts a snap (the CSS is mobile friendly, too). Users get instant previews of their pages as they edit, and developers can build highly customized layouts. With powerful backend features like global modules and sitemaps, creating a microsite or full-fledged website using HubSpot3 landing pages is beautifully simple. HubSpot3 landing pages are the best option for small lead generation websites or microsites.

The Dreamforce 2012 conference wrapped last week in San Francisco. It was the largest conference put on by Salesforce in history with over 85,000 attendees. Many large announcements, keynotes, and heavy influencers spoke, attended and made this conference a must-go for us again next year.

Inbound marketers are a special bunch. We’re hard working, creative minded, data driven people who recognize the endless possibilities in Internet marketing. There’s no doubt we see the world a bit differently which means we also possess a few quirks. Not sure what I’m talking about? Well then, to help you out, allow me to share a few things you may want to consider.    

Reaching out and engaging with an audience is the difference between companies who use social media effectively to help achieve their business goals, and those who do not. In fact, the IT research company, Gartner Inc., predicted that over time, refusing to communicate via social media channels will be as harmful to companies as ignoring a phone call or email is today.  Dissatisfaction over this, the company goes on to say, can lead to a 15% rise in churn rate for existing customers.

In a competitive world where 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form (Aberdeen), no one can afford such a loss to their client base, and yet 75% of B2B companies do not measure or quantify their social media engagement (SatMetrix). This is not to say, however, that companies are not concerned about this. The savvier of these companies aptly recognize the key to success here revolves around engagement which is why, according to Forrester, 37% of brands would like to use social media in a way that allows them to reach audiences through custom-tailored marketing campaigns.

Each day, more and more people are putting their lives in the cloud. With the growing number of people using smart phones and tablets, this number will only continue to skyrocket.

We are trusting our photographs and videos of our children and families, our email, our banking information, our lives and our businesses to the cloud and its service providers.

Over the weekend, you may have heard about a horror story from Mat Honan.

Honan was hacked. And he lost everything.

I realized (once again) yesterday, as I was reviewing some advanced lead analytics for a client, what a valuable and powerful marketing automation tool HubSpot is. If you are new to HubSpot or are even considering HubSpot - here a few reasons I 'heart' HubSpot.

If you're looking for a jolt to your inbound or internet marketing efforts consider adding social sign-in to your B2B website.

For the uninitiated, social sign-in is the ability for your website visitors to register and sign-in to your site with Facebook, Twitter or other social network provider credentials. It's an effective way to increase lead capture without having new visitors fill out tedious forms specific to your own website.