Marketing Strategies Defined & How to Put Each in Action with HubSpot

Marketing can get complicated fast, especially when you’re a multichannel, multiple audience kind of company. But sometimes it's best to take a step back and reassess your entry point into the marketing mayhem. There may be a better way around your latest strategy speedbumps, or perhaps there’s a faster path to your top-priority goals.  

Let’s revisit and redefine the main marketing terms and tactics that so often get tangled up together when we’ve been in the trenches for too long. As a bonus, we’ll show you how HubSpot can help keep them straight - and streamline any areas of overlap.

Digital Marketing

This may be one of the broadest terms we define. Digital marketing describes every bit of marketing you’re doing online. It encompasses your social media, email marketing, blog, and anything else you distribute to your audience in a digital format.

Choosing Your Digital Marketing Channels

As you can imagine, the scope of digital marketing is massive since it includes nearly every form of modern communication under the sun. The secret to a successful digital marketing strategy lies in channel identification.

• Are your customers spending a lot of time on Instagram, or do they mine their email inboxes for sales and incentives?
• Are they spending hours watching YouTube tutorials, or would they rather read a blog-style product review?
• Are they opting into SMS communications to learn about your latest feature updates, or attending demonstration webinars?

Once you narrow down the laundry list of digital channels to only include the ones most relevant to your core customer, you’ll be in better shape for a high ROI digital marketing sprint.

How HubSpot Helps

Pinning down where your existing customers are hanging out online can be tough when you’re relying solely on platform-specific analytics. Through HubSpot, you can link your social accounts, ad accounts, and customer data into a singular CRM -  a single source of truth that enables smarter global analytics. You’ll be able to track which content is gaining traction and where, illuminating the high points of your existing digital strategy.

From there, you can:

• Expand your reach by creating a lookalike audience for advertising
• Focus your content creation on topics that interest your audience
• Dedicate resources to developing a richer content strategy for your top channels

Performance Marketing

A branch of digital marketing, performance marketing zooms in on how your content is performing based on data points and ROI. We often hear about this marketing perspective from digital advertisers because there are clear metrics they can use to measure performance in ad campaigns like cost-per-click, conversions, and so on.

Keep Your Eye on the Bullseye

Consistently and reliably measuring your performance requires a clear rubric, so start with strategy. Set your goal and work backwards from there to develop content that’s hyper-focused on funneling customers to that final destination.

What are you hoping to achieve? Think in terms of:

• Newsletter signups
• Purchases
• Contact form fills
• Demo bookings
• Downloads

How HubSpot Helps

Not only can HubSpot show you which actions your audience has already taken, but it can help you anticipate their next moves. Build your performance marketing campaigns around realistic goals informed by historical data and forecasting tools in HubSpot. From there, HubSpot enables you to dive deeper into what customers want. Leverage that information to:

• Develop new, data-backed ad campaigns and optimize existing ones around specific, measurable goals
• Curate smart content to lead customers and prospects to the next logical step in their exploration of your assets
• Design strategic upsells and cross-sells according to customer behavior

Growth Marketing

When your marketing budget expands or you’re on the hunt for ways to optimize your existing marketing efforts, this strategy is for you. Growth marketing revolves around designing experiments and sniffing out opportunities to scale.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3…

The champion strategy of growth marketing relies on trial and error, seeing what works, and scrapping what doesn’t. Your first step will be figuring out where you want to test, who you want to test, and what you want to test. Some examples:

• A/B testing email subject lines with recent purchasers to see which voice most incentivizes them to spend again
• Deploying personalized communications based on buyer personas to see which pain points and empathy items strike the strongest chord.
• Diversifying your tactics to include new sales, incentives, viewpoints, tones, or design elements to see where you may have been missing your audience’s attention.

How HubSpot Helps

Custom or out-of-the-box properties offer you a chance to store a wealth of knowledge about all of your contacts and actually use it to create a better experience. Don’t let those details go to waste! They are the perfect place to start when it comes to designing and implementing valuable marketing experiments.

• Create workflows based on customer attributes featuring personalized content that feels like it was made especially for each individual.
• Implement dynamic mobile content like variable CTAs to test conversion probability in-situ.
• Deploy different imaginings of your content - including your website’s features and functions - to put UX design power in the hands of your customers.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is often square one for new businesses, and it’s an ongoing process that sticks with you throughout the life stages of your company. This strategy aims to acquire more qualified contacts that sales teams can convert.

Becoming a Collector

Potential customers are not incredibly inclined to hand over their contact information unless there is a valuable tradeoff taking place. If your goal is to expand your list with new contacts and customers, consider the needs of your target audience and develop an offer that immediately satisfies them. Be careful, though: you don’t want to gate every piece of value you provide. That will surely frustrate new contacts.

How HubSpot Helps

HubSpot makes it extremely simple to collect and track data, especially first-party customer data. They have examples of tests that utilize four or more variants even, to test users. Using HubSpot’s many dynamic features, you can:

• Integrate native forms that funnel fills into categories, notify key team members, and initiate a new contact’s delightful ongoing experience with your brand.
• Split test CTAs, landing pages, and more to determine how prospects react to prompts.
• Develop gated content based on your best existing customers’ top interests to target lookalikes and expand your audience.

Inbound Marketing

Often seen as a next step to lead generation, inbound marketing also focuses on bringing in new customers but it adds a nurturing layer to the mix. The goal here is to move prospects deeper into the funnel so we can more confidently label them as MQLs and SQLs.

Make the Journey Worth It

When a new lead enters your funnel, the true challenge of inbound marketing begins. You’ll need to coax those prospects into further, more committed actions with your marketing materials. A single-touch campaign won’t work here. Instead, consider:

• Mapping time-delayed communications with customers that continue building value over a few days or weeks.
• Automating campaigns that respond to prospect behavior on your site like abandoned cart flows or content recommendations.
• Allowing space for contacts to connect with you when they have questions using a chatbot, contact form, or setting an appointment.

How HubSpot Helps

HubSpot is made for creating and deploying personalized, high-value interaction opportunities automatically. Your team can actually create more thoroughly nurturing campaigns with a single setup and less work if they put HubSpot into play. Try these ideas for your inbound marketing:

• Design, write, send, and track an email series for new signups that uses if/then branches to tailor your next message based on what the prospect opened or clicked in the last one.
• Set up workflows that unleash your sales team once a new lead has interacted with a certain number of pieces in a content category, or has returned to a particular page more than once.
• Use the lead’s entry point (a downloadable, newsletter signup, webinar attendance) as the first step in a customer education journey, whether it be video, landing pages, and smart content - all with the goal to deepen their involvement with a relevant topic.

Demand Generation

Demand generation is the high-octane older brother of inbound marketing. Though it has more of a sales-based bent than the other approaches on this list, we’re still looking at getting a message out to high-intent prospects.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Since demand gen campaigns are focused on finding people who are hunting for solutions and products, you need to meet them in intent channels. But don’t arrive unprepared. Content is key to demand generation. What you create and how you disseminate it will make a world of difference.

• Draft content that both resonates with your ideal customer and educates them.
• Advertise the content through paid search and paid social where intent is often higher.
• Use diverse content mediums like podcasts, webinars, and whitepapers to continue building awareness.

How HubSpot Helps

HubSpot has a track record of helping huge power players thrive in their demand gen strategies. You can tap into what they do for your business too:

• Use intent data to segment your audience and target your content.
• Manage your ads and see analytics across multiple ad platforms in one place to develop an optimization strategy.
• Analyze your attribution data to determine which content is responsible for your high-value deals.

Account-Based Marketing

Known as ABM, this strategy flips the script on inbound marketing. Instead of targeting a large audience, account-based marketing narrows its scope to connect with strategically identified decision-makers within organizations that fit into your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Like They are the Only One in the Room

ABM works because of how well researched and personalized it is. The crucial components of your ABM strategy start with and depend on your ideal customer profile. Essentially, you’re setting a realistic buyer of your product or service as the sun in your marketing solar system; every marketing move you make orbits around them.

• Carefully shape an in-depth ICP based on technographic and firmographic data like company size, current tech stack, operational needs, etc.
• Identify the buyers within organizations that match your ICP and start slowly interacting with them organically.
• Begin reaching out to your target contacts with content catered to their unique perspectives and positions.

How HubSpot Helps

Knowing your customer is always important in successful marketing, but the profoundly detailed profiles you need for ABM success take the cake. You can use HubSpot’s ABM features to take the guesswork out of your ICP creation.

• Empower clear communication between your marketing & sales teams with centralized data about all major accounts and decision-makers.
• Integrate your LinkedIn Ad account with HubSpot to directly target companies based on status or tier, or focus on specific people within an organization.
• Lean on tracking tools to monitor your most conversion-encouraging content, turn successful communications into outreach templates, and modify your ICP.

Ready to Refocus Your Marketing?

The same strategy won’t work forever. As your goals change, it’s time to rethink your approach and the tech you use to enable it.

HubSpot has the tools to take your marketing to the next level, no matter which strategy suits you. And we have the team that can help you use those tools to their full potential. Whether you’re a HubSpot hopeful who needs an onboarding partner to aid your launch, or you’re a seasoned pro looking to spice up your Hubs with help from in-the-trenches enthusiasts, Digital Reach is your one-stop-shop.

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