On the second of our Dublin trip, our M3 class had the honour to visit the Hubspot office in Dublin. Hubspot is a leading inbound marketing, sales and services CRM company. They are helping millions of customers to grow better. They were originally designed to help small and medium-sized businesses compete in the marketplace, and they found that outbound techniques, which were more interruptive (billboards, cold-calling), were not working so much. Therefore, they decided to focus on inbound and how to attract customers to your website through the power of SEO, social media, and inbound marketing. So far, they have helped over 52.000 customers in over 90 countries globally.

The first takeaway is that there are four inbound marketing areas. Firstly, permission-based marketeers ask you for your contact details in order to contact you concerning their services. Secondly, content creation is about displaying relevant content to your customers in order to solve their questions/needs. Thirdly, lifecycle marketing is about identifying someone based on what you know about them and then sending out targeted content. Finally, you need to be wherever your leads are, which is called multi-channel presence.

The second take-away consists of the attract-engage-delight methodology on which Hubspot’s inbound marketing is built. The attraction phase is used to push content that is valuable to customer X and allows X to be found (video, ads or social media). In the engagement phase, the focus is on getting the prospect’s email address, from which we can receive a call-to-action. Once Hubspot gets the contact information, they can start nurturing to eventually turn a lead into a customer. Eventually, the goal is to delight the customer because they are the asset that keeps your business running. Therefore, we need to keep providing customers with valuable content and tailor this content to the customer’s specific needs. In this way, customers will become more loyal and willing to promote your brand.

The last take-away covers the fundamentals that you need in order to succeed in inbound marketing. Firstly, it is important to always use a buyer persona based on data because this will help you to stay aligned. Secondly, you should take into account the buyer’s journey consisting of awareness, consideration and decision. Lastly, it is key to create remarkable content which is perfectly tailored towards the customer’s preferences and goals.

At Hubspot, we’ve learned how to use inbound marketing as a new way of advertising. During this visit, we did not only learn more about the teamspirit and the company atmosphere, but we were taught that there are four inbound marketing areas: permission-based marketeers that ask for your contact details, content creation, lifecycle marketing and multi-channel presence. Additionally, we got introduced to the attract-engage-delight methodology. Last but not least, we learned how to succeed in inbound marketing with the use of personas.