HubSpot Marketing/CRM Starter

The HubSpot platform provides a world-class CRM and entry-level marketing platform. It has been fully integrated with the Digitol website and the eCommerce store. Leveraging the latest technology to provide multi-channel communications, and consolidating all customer and contact information into a central and shared knowledge library, means smaller businesses now have similar levels of customer information at their fingertips as the multi-billion dollar behemoths. This places smaller businesses on an equal footing and eliminates a significant competitive disadvantage.

The overriding mantra for digital era marketing is to send the right material, to the right person, at the right time.

Prerequisites for achieving this are:

• Contact accuracy
• Contact segmentation
• Permission to send marketing material via opt-in

Inbound digital marketing has been proven to work, but for smaller businesses, the problem is scale. The inbound concept converts website traffic into leads through on-site "conversions." An on-site conversion is when a visitor fills out a form and provides an email address in exchange for information.

Typically a contact database decays at the rate of 20% per year. 10,000 known email contacts at the beginning of the year will decay to 8,000 by the end of the year.

When using best-in-class inbound marketing, website traffic may convert at 2%. So, for example, 10,000 website visits may lead to 200 new contacts and, typically, 50% of these contacts will never become sales-qualified leads (SQLs) with a realistic prospect of ever becoming a customer. So, while 10,000 website visits may convert to 100 new SQLs, to replace 2,000 contacts lost due to organic decay, in addition to the ongoing requirement for practicing best-in-class inbound marketing tactics, it will require 200,000 website visits.

Marketing tactics:

Sending a single email blast to 10,000 contacts is unlikely to conform to the mantra of sending the right material, to the right person, at the right time. Instead, sending emails with targeted messages according to known interests in batches (for example) of 500 contacts is likely to be far more effective.

Most smaller businesses are unlikely to have well-segmented contact databases, and most do not practice inbound marketing or have sufficient web traffic to replace the contacts lost due to organic decay.

What does Digitol offer for email marketing?

• Scrub and validate your entire contact database
• Provide blog-style content to support the awareness campaign
• Setup a structured email campaign with the specific objective of raising awareness
• Configure the HubSpot CRM to align contacts with "owners" (the Sales Team)
• Provide a library of landing pages to support the second (consideration) stage of the campaign
• Send consideration-style material to contacts who have engaged with the awareness campaign

The Role of Social Media

Social Media presents its raft of issues for smaller businesses. In theory, the social audience should be a valuable asset in terms of additional contacts that supplement the email contact list. In practice, however, most smaller businesses face significant issues developing value from social activity.

• Multiple social accounts dilute the effectiveness
• Small audiences
• Disengaged audiences
• Weak content
• No strategy

What does Digitol offer for social media marketing?

• To standardize the branding across LinkedIn and Facebook
• Provide bi-weekly posts to both social platforms
• Strategic posts aligned with the email campaigns