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 a world of 6 Billion people, who do you want to find and how will they find you? 

Looking to re-engage with prospects who have gone cold? Here are 3 tried-and-true steps which can reignite your prospect's interest and give a quick boost to your 2018 sales pipeline.

More and more organizations embrace the inbound marketing methodology which, if done effectively, means more and higher quality leads for sales organizations to follow-up on. 

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. 

An effective website will allow you to attract new customers from internet search engines, social media, and referral sites. Email promotion is the easiest way to get website traffic, but this requires you to know - and have permission to use - email marketing. At least 30% of your total website traffic should be organic, and we have below provided you with a cheatsheet for getting more website traffic from search engines.

Working all my business life in the area of document technology I have been a wanderer between the Office World (MFP, Printers) and the ECM area. So I have been exposed to both worlds and cultures: the Office equipment world dominated by a direct sales approach (wouldn’t call it hard selling, but it is close to it) and a more consultative, solution selling approach in the ECM space. Where in the past ECM sales reps always had a big challenge to do cold calling (only few companies really enforced it) it was daily routine for the office sales reps.