Blog

2020 has arrived... a new decade has begun. As a marketing and sales professional planning future projects, campaigns or strategies, you likely have spent time in the past days and weeks in  evaluating what worked well, what didn’t and what to improve as you map your priorities for the year ahead.

To help you find new ideas, learn the latest insights and spark inspiration to help with your marketing and sales strategies and programs, we'd like to share six of our favorite marketing and sales blogs from HubSpot. Happy reading! 

Have you ever worked hours creating a fantastic blog with great insight...but then after you post it, you end up with only 3 likes on Facebook or LinkedIn? How do you capture the attention of your target audience and motivate them to actually read your post? And equally important: how can you increase visibility for your blog on search engines and social platforms?

Before you begin to write your blog, here are 4 important elements to keep in mind:

1. Goal: What is the goal of the blog?

2. Structure: How will your blog look like? 

3. Style: Who are you writing for? 

4. Strategy: What are you trying to achieve?   

...and don't forget SEO - you need to optimize your blog to improve ranking on Google! 

Now let's look at each of these 4 points in detail....

Content Marketing Trends for 2019 show that many marketing tactics no longer work. We produce so much content nowadays that it becomes increasingly difficult to create a message which stands out and is findable on Google and other search engines. You could argue that content marketing seems to be undermining its own success. You have to ask yourself which approach works? How to deal with the decreased organic reach of social media and Google?

Based on feedback from Dutch marketing thought leaders, the following are some of the top trends for 2019: decreasing reach of social media and organic search, personalization (e.g. "people do business with people"), targeted, reader-specific content, and the rise of video and podcast.

In 2017, MIT Sloan MBA students completed a research study on the ROI of HubSpot Marketing Automation. Here is the average findings:

What is the ROI of Marketing Automation solutions like HubSpot, Marketo or Act-On? This makes it easier to increase website traffic, turn website visitors into leads, and nurture leads to become customers. The below chart shows the average customer ROI after using HubSpot Marketing Automation for 1 year.

Research shows that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for getting organic traffic is still the most best way to get website traffic. 

We all know that sales staff waste a lot of time on tasks that can be automated. 

Our first client of 2017 experienced a 300% growth in revenues in 1 month due to marketing automation. Another client got their first hot lead only 15 minutes after we launched their first GDPR marketing campaign. Below are 7+6 helpful resources for improving demand generation.

Effective Inbound Marketing is 80% about the content, 15% about the processes, and 5% about the technology. Content is king, and you need to focus on providing high-value content for your target personas.

The association AIIM just published a new research report about the fight against paper. The report is based on research among 204 organizations and is available from here.