HubSpot Content Marketing: 3 Critical Aspects

With ever-increasing digitization, traditional marketing techniques and frameworks are losing their effectiveness. Content marketing is a forward-thinking technique, which utilizes relevant and useful content to increase the awareness, subsequent trial probability, and retention of prospective customers. International Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines the subject as follows:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Laying the foundations on the cloud-based architecture, HubSpot is a one-stop-shop for all the business requirements, ranging from sales & marketing to operations and customer relationship management.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to HubSpot
• Introduction to Content Marketing
• Key Features of Content Marketing
• Types of HubSpot Content Marketing
  • Social Media Content Marketing
  • Paid Ads Content Marketing
  • Infographic Content Marketing
  • Podcast Content Marketing
  • Video Content Marketing
  • Blog Content Marketing
• Strategies to Improve HubSpot Content Marketing
• Conclusion

Introduction to HubSpot

HubSpot offers a lot much flexibility in a wide array of business domains, thus enabling a very smooth and value-added B2B user experience. Key offerings of HubSpot alongside associated features are summarized as follows:

1. HubSpot CRM – HubSpot’s CRM is an integrated, cloud-based, and free platform that helps enterprises to manage and organize customer relationships via intuitive and easy-to-use frameworks. Its key features include supple contact management, intuitive reports, dashboards and visualizations, to-the-point task and performance management, automatic data capturing for lead generation and automated email and meeting scheduling, etc. 
2. Marketing Hub – HubSpot’s Marketing Hub houses the frameworks for all the marketing activities of enterprises e.g., email marketing, landing pages, content management, social media integration, traffic and conversion analytics, marketing automation, and search engine optimization, blogging, adaptive testing, and account-based marketing, etc. 
3. Sales Hub – HubSpot’s Sales Hub offers the innovative solution for all the sales-related processes of enterprises e.g., deal & task management, document sharing, live chat, simple automation, rep productivity performance, custom reporting, and predictive lead scoring, etc. 
4. Service Hub – HubSpot’s Service Hub entails service-related features which are very intuitive and easy to use. They include ticketing, reporting, calling, multiple ticketing pipelines, conversation routing, customer feedback surveys, playbooks, and team management, etc. 

Introduction to Content Marketing

Being progressive in nature, content marketing can offer increased sales, enhanced customer experience, and retention, and cost savings to the business of any scale and scope. It can be implemented in every business sector owing to its adaptability and robustness.

An important consideration is to integrate content marketing in the business process and not deal with it as a separate component; content is the building block of SEO, social media engagement, PR, and inbound marketing, etc.

Content marketing is employed by multi-national organizations as well, as it can offer a significant competitive advantage to enterprises. 

Key Features of Content Marketing

Key features of content marketing are described as follows:

1. It has a targeted audience, be it be based on demographics, psychographics, or any other metrics.
2. It tells a story to stimulate customer engagement with the brand and relevant offering.
3. It delivers value, be it in the form of information, education, or entertainment. 
4. It is personalized, as it develops a dialogue-like scenario between the brand and prospective customers. It is primarily based on the “pull” strategy rather than the “push” framework.
5. It builds consumer’s trust, given the content is relevant and authentic. It certainly impacts the purchase decision afterward, thus increasing the revenues for the organizations. 

Types of HubSpot Content Marketing in HubSpot

Content marketing can be incorporated into the overall marketing strategy of the organization in different ways, depending upon the objectives to be achieved. Keeping it in mind, the following types of HubSpot Content marketing can be used.

Social Media Content Marketing 

With the rapid increase in mobile phone penetration and internet access, social networking sites have gained a lot of traction in recent years; global social media users have reached a whopping number of 3.6 billion. Enterprises have re-appropriated the marketing expense, rather investments, from traditional marketing media to the social platforms to create brand awareness and gain a competitive edge. They share the content i.e., photos, stories, videos, and live sessions on the official company handles and popular platforms inc. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc.  

HubSpot’s social media content calendar is a handy tool to organize and execute social media content marketing; it can boost productivity by simplifying campaign coordination. HubSpot Content Marketing is especially useful because there are a lot many social networking platforms and a lot of effort could go into the planning of what content to share at what time on which platform. This excel-based calendar allows the users to plan the social media campaigns well in advance while enabling them to structure the content with useful tricks. 

An example of social media content marketing is given as follows:

Paid Ads Content Marketing

Paid Ad is a useful HubSpot Content Marketing resource to engage a broader target audience on multiple social platforms. It can be targeted to a particular segment based upon demographics and few other parameters. When coupled with inbound marketing, a lot of value can be extracted via paid ads. These ads can be shared on websites, social platforms, banners, and landing pages, etc. 

HubSpot has collaborated with Google to develop a Google Ads kit for its users; it provides all the relevant records regarding lead generation, budget setting, and search campaigns, etc., coupled with a detailed checklist to execute the paid ads campaign in the best possible manner. Paid ads are essentially based on pay per click (PPC) model; HubSpot’s Google Ads Kit assists the users in outlining the factors which affect the PPC bidding.

It also helps in budget optimization for the ads campaign while utilizing the newly found keywords. There are built-in templates in the said kit to implement the campaigns and also tests the landing pages to ensure higher conversion of leads. An example of paid ads HubSpot content marketing is given as follows:

Infographic Content Marketing 

Infographics are a combination of data and graphics to be displayed in an easy to comprehend fashion, for a simple understanding of the target audience. It entails short sentences, simple words, and clear pictures to gain the audience’s attention and effectually connect with them. It is particularly useful when the objective is to get a complex message to the audience of different intellectual backgrounds. In short, it can also be termed as lay-man HubSpot Content Marketing i.e., floating the idea in its full essence in an easy-to-understand manner.

As infographics certainly increase the engagement of the target audience, designing them is one tricky task. HubSpot Content Marketing provides 15 built-in and fully customizable infographic templates in Microsoft PowerPoint and illustrator to create impressive visual content for different content marketing needs. 

An example of infographic HubSpot content marketing is given as follows:

Podcast Content Marketing 

Podcasts are primarily the audio content, which can be utilized to influence the target segment. In recent years, podcasts have gained a lot of attention owing to the flexibility they provide to the content creators in terms of episode cadence, speakers, the advertisement channels, and the duration of the actual audio clip. 

HubSpot Content Marketing offers a detailed guide namely “How to start a podcast”, which covers every aspect of this content marketing type; it entails all the minute details regarding setting up the podcast, content structure & organization, podcast production, and editing, marketing the content and finally measuring the success. Nowadays, many businesses are using this handy tool in combination with social media handles to create a greater impact as far as revenues and growth are concerned. 

Video Content Marketing

The more any content will be easy to understand, the more chances it’ll have to yield higher lead conversions. Videos are visually appealing and easily comprehensible, which certainly can build a one-on-one relationship with the audience and improve the ROI as far as marketing activities are concerned. Again, video content can be shared on a variety of platforms to engage prospective clients and generate trials, resulting in customer conversion.

HubSpot and VideoAsk by Typeform have collaborated to develop “The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack”; it helps the business in designing and implementing the right video content strategy by letting the users know about choosing the perfect video format for a given campaign, creating HD content, and optimization of the processes. This HubSpot Content Marketing campaign offers tips and tricks to the marketer for creating personalized content, to highlight the needs and wants of the target segment, coupled with the relevant product offering.

Blog Content Marketing

Blog i.e., written content, is a very effective tool of inbound marketing; it allows a lot of room for creativity as far as communicating a message to the target audience is concerned. More importantly, this HubSpot Content Marketing campaign can include the links for social media handles of a particular organization to redirect the potential client base to the relevant products and services. 

HubSpot and General Assembly have collaborated to develop a very comprehensive guide, namely “How to Start a Successful Blog”; it helps the content marketers to dissect the blog’s ultimate purpose and objectives. Not only it provides a detailed understanding of content outline and structure but also paves the directional path for setting up a blog and its subsequent promotions and monetization. Ultimately, this HubSpot Content Marketing campaign enables the readers to set up a very inclusive and wide-range content management system (CMS) of their own for the promotion of relevant product offerings. 

Strategies to Improve HubSpot Content Marketing 

HubSpot Content Marketing can help enterprises effectively design and implement content marketing strategies, thus achieving higher ROIs. However, certain key strategies can be implemented to further improve customer traction, engagement, and conversion:

1. Use of Clustered Content – One may start the content with a bird’ eye view to attract the maximum prospects and then start filtering/clustering the content onto a sub-topic while connecting them both at the end. It helps establish the authority of the content creator on the topic; multimedia can also be incorporated to support the evidence, thus catching more and more eyeballs. 
2. Think Beyond Search & Rankings – It’s not all about search rankings when the notion of content marketing comes under the discussion, rather the focus of the marketer should be to engage the audience at all levels and intrigue them to know more about the product, service, or the enterprise. Starting a conversation might be helpful in this regard as it just offers the competitive advantage of the dedicated audience to the concerned organization. To take full advantage of content marketing via HubSpot, the bottom line is to focus more on personalized, optimized, and influencer-activated content experiences. 
3. Retain Relevance in the Content – In today’s fast-paced marketing environment, creating content just for the sake of it won’t serve any real purpose unless it is fully aligned with the business offerings and customer’s true aspirations in terms of needs and wants. Only relevant content will give any organization the marketing leverage to generate leads and increase the customer base while creating a positive impact on the business. Before spending time on content creation, one might take into account the following considerations:

1. Categorize the topics which are in line with the concerned business offering or the industry sector. 
2. Gauge which topics are aligned with and relevant to the target segment 
3. Finalize the topics which have the greatest engagement and traffic potential based upon historical analysis.

Conclusion

In the 21st century, content marketing has proved to be pivotal in shaping the success and growth of any enterprise. It not only increases audience engagement but also compliments brand awareness and organic growth. Being futuristic, HubSpot content marketing has a great scale and scope to offer in terms of the types of tools which include social media paid ads, infographics, blogs, videos, and podcasts, etc.

As social networking sites grow day-by-day, content marketing has taken over traditional marketing on the scale of the impact that can be created by using relevant, authentic, engaging, and personalized content; HubSpot Content Marketing offers all the guidance and resources in this regard. All in all, the prerequisite of any business’ success today is the positioning of content marketing at the heart of the overall organizational strategy.

Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources such as HubSpot can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day!

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

Hevo Data offers a faster way to move data from 100+ data sources such as SaaS applications such as HubSpot or Databases into your Data Warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool for free. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.