4 MORE Secrets of the Perfect HubSpot Partner Agency

Last week, we looked at four key criteria to consider when choosing a marketing agency to help you maximize your inbound marketing results when using HubSpot’s comprehensive content management and marketing automation software. (4 Secrets of the Perfect HubSpot Partner Agency)

Working with a certified partner agency has the potential to increase your performance, while providing access to a wealth of knowledge, talent and experience you may not have available in-house when first signing up with HubSpot or other marketing automation solutions.

That is why more than 50 percent of B2B companies who use marketing technology turn to outsourcing for at least a portion of their marketing automation implementation. (Source: Dun & Bradstreet, Optimize Your Marketing Automation)

We have identified eight qualifications a marketing agency should have to be able to guide you to success with inbound marketing and HubSpot. The first 4 were reviewed in our July 13 post. We’ll detail the second half of the list today.

1. The right services.
2. The tools, processes, staff and systems to give you a quick start.
3. A goal-oriented approach with a clearly-defined delivery process.
4. The necessary volume of high quality content.
5. Effective content promotion.
6. An emphasis on lead conversion and nurturing.
7. Data analysis to help you continually improve marketing tactics and document ROI.
8. Reporting based on established goals and objectives.

Starting halfway through our list …

5. The perfect HubSpot partner agency will understand effective content promotion.

Content, in and of itself, can only do so much. Yes, simply adding more blog posts and pages to your website can increase your chances of being found online, but your content will go much farther and have a much greater ROI if it is effectively promoted.

Your HubSpot agency partner should be able to show you how they will promote your content through:

SEO: Promotion of content begins with making it findable. That means writing content that uses the keywords and long tail keyword phrases your customers are most likely to search. It also involves using effective on-page SEO strategies such as headers, image names and URLs that include those same keywords.

Social media (paid and organic): According to Global Web Index, today’s internet users now spend an average of more than 2 hours a day on social media platforms. Which is what makes social media a must for promoting content online. By combining “organic” posts with targeted paid posts you can reach both those who have already chosen to engage with your accounts and those who are potential fans. Your agency partner should know how to promote your blog posts, videos, and downloadable offers in ways that bring visitors to your website where they can be converted into leads. (Check out our Social Media Scheduling Template and Digital Echo Goals & Reporting Template for more ways of planning your content promotion.)

Email: While unsolicited outbound emails (aka spam) are not only ineffective, but potentially harmful to your brand, there are still many ways email can be used to effectively promote your content and generate leads. Your agency partner should be able to help you weigh the benefits of strategies such as email newsletters, promotional emails to your opt-in contact list, direct use of emails by sales and marketing staffers to share pertinent content with leads nearing the bottom of the sales funnel, and, of course, automated lead nurturing emails meant to move new leads through the funnel toward a sale. 

Other marketing channels: A great agency will also find additional ways to repurpose and promote your content that go above and beyond. Think about using SlideShares developed for your blog as presentations for industry events. Or turning detailed reports into a series of contributed articles for industry publications. (Watch for a series of blog posts and new resources to hit our website in August 2017 focused specifically on using this traditional PR tool within an inbound marketing strategy. Subscribe to the Inbound Accelerator today so you won’t miss a single post.)

Effective promotion of your marketing content means that the time spent creating each piece leads to a greater reach than if you were to simply post and coast.

6. The perfect HubSpot partner agency will emphasize lead conversion and nurturing.

HubSpot’s inbound marketing philosophy revolves around using automation and content to capture and nurture leads online, warming them up and qualifying them before sending a lead on to sales. The processes used to do just that should be second nature to a HubSpot-certified partner agency.

This includes:

Developing targeted lead nurturing workflows with additional content.

Lead nurturing workflows start by planning complete campaigns that provide a continuum of content from introductory to that used by leads in making a purchase decisions. Then, the workflow is completed with the series of automated emails offering the content you have created, including determining the timing between emails and what actions a lead takes that would indicate the lead is ready to transition to sales.

Using information gained through nurturing to enable sales. Lead intelligence is the information gathered through the lead nurturing process, which includes what offers and topics the lead accessed or showed interest in, as well as information given on progressive forms that are part of landing pages. All of this can be passed along to sales to provide background on what a lead’s needs are and improve the rapport established when making personal contact with a potential customer.

7. The perfect HubSpot partner agency will use data analysis to help you continually improve marketing tactics and document ROI.

One of the key advantage of using HubSpot to automate your inbound marketing and lead nurturing is the rich repository of metrics the software provides to help you gauge performance, improve your marketing tactics, and prove ROI. The advantage of working with a HubSpot-certified partner agency is having an expert who knows how to access and analyze all of those metrics.

Among the answers your agency should be able to find for you within the data are:

• Most effective channels in driving leads.
• Most effective channels in developing closed sales.
• Keywords or topics that drive the most traffic, leads or sales.
• Where gaps in your content or nurturing process are impacting conversion rates.

Routine reviews of your HubSpot metrics, complemented by more in-depth media, messaging and marketing audits, will give you a complete picture of your performance and how to improve.

Learn more about how JONES approaches analysis of HubSpot’s metrics here—The Data You Need to Know: JONES & HubSpot Analysis Solutions.

8. The perfect HubSpot partner agency provides reporting based on your established goals and objectives.

Your launch into inbound marketing and HubSpot should start with doing the math to determine goals and establish the strategies you will use to achieve those goals. Then, the data that is gathered through HubSpot’s exhaustive list of metrics can be interpreted, benchmarked against those goals (and past performance, as you become more experienced) and returned to you in meaningful reports.

Reports that highlight your lead conversion rates, sales conversion rates, and ultimately, ROI for inbound marketing efforts, should by shared by your agency with marketing management, sales management and the executive suite.

There you go—the second half of our list of 8 secrets of successful HubSpot partner marketing agencies. It seems like a tall order, but you can find agencies that meet all of these criteria.

A cheat sheet listing all 8 criteria, plus the benefits of working with a HubSpot-certified partner agency, can be found in our Inbound Marketing Learning Library here: Choosing a HubSpot Agency Partner Checklist.