As we've shared in previous posts, our team recently attended Hubspot's annual conference in Boston, INBOUND. Each year, INBOUND marks a monumental time for Hubspot's product updates and announcements, and this year didn't disappoint. This year's over-arching theme at the conference was, 'Grow Better,' and these product updates will assist Hubspot users with just that: growing better and growing bigger. 

The most common mistake marketers make when designing and executing an inbound marketing strategy is attempting to do it all by themselves. Doing anything solo usually adds additional risk. Team efforts almost always prevail over one-man shows – just ask Lebron. Batman had Robin. Ben had Jerry. Lewis had Clark. And Lennon had McCartney. Heck, even when I was 12 years old, I was told to never go swimming in the lake without a “buddy.” So marketing needs to team up with sales to mitigate risk and increase the likelihood of success.

Is a blog a marketing tool or a sales tactic? The answer is yes. A blog that’s a forum for educational content that resonates with your target personas is both. Blogging has long been identified as a productive marketing tool. Blogging supports marketing’s objectives when its' content attracts new visitors to your website and helps convert those visitors to leads. However, if that’s the only function of your blog, then you’re missing out.      

Most small growing businesses know they need to continue to make strategic investments to sustain their growth. The challenge is knowing where to invest. If the obstacles to growth that you’ve identified are branding and visibility, hiring additional recruiters will not solve these problems.

When it comes to developing a strategic marketing plan or sales process, one of the first things we recommend any company to do is to get a clear and accurate understanding of their customers and prospects. What’s key here is that this profile (commonly called a Target or Buyer Persona) is based on research, not assumptions. Which means you’ll need to conduct some actual research (or hire a company like LeadG2 to do it for you). The most effective way of doing this is with a mix of online surveys and live interviews. The surveys allow for a large sampling size, while the interviews allow for a deeper dive and further understanding. You can dive a little deeper into what that target persona survey process might look like here, but for the sake of this article we’ll be focusing on what it is exactly that your Target Persona should tell you about your B2B prospects so that you can have better and smarter marketing, content, and sales conversations.