Hubspot 7 Steps to Delighting Customers

Many businesses spend more time money and time on acquiring new customers than focusing on existing customers. As a result, the existing customers feel left out and you risk losing their loyalty. Did you know that it is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire new customers than retain the existing customers? After hearing this  you would think it is more reasonable to spend more time on existing customers, but many businesses fail to delight their customers. Only 7% of consumers say that their customer service experience exceed their expectations. So, if your business provides proper customer delight, you will have a competitive advantage. As long as you have trust with your customers, you will have lasting relationships. There are 7 customer delight guidelines that you should follow if you want to create an Inbound Experience.

1. Delight Employees: Simon Sinek said, "Customers will never love a company until the employees

love it first." If you have happy employees you will have happy customers, which are a company's greatest assets. Hiring methodology is a key feature in creating happy employees. Before you hire employees, you should test their skills, culture, beliefs, experiences, and ideas. If the employee doesn't fit well in the company's culture they will not be able to properly delight customers.

2. Educate Employees: In previous blog posts I have talked about buyer personas. EVERY employee should be able to identity the buyer persona. They need to know who they are trying to delight, so that they can best meet their needs. Small interactions with customers make a major difference in the overall experience. Employees should be able to make a customers experience the best it can be. To do this, they should attend on-going training, share experiences, and learn by doing, NOT lecturing.

3. Empower Employees: People see employees as the face of a business. So, they should be able to solve problems, provide recommendations, and be enthusiastic and fun. Most  importantly, their personalities should be able to shine. After all, you did hire them for a reason, so if you let their personalities be apparent to the customer, it will help build trust and loyalty.

4. Listen: Listening is crucial. When customers say something, repeat what they say so that you better understand what they are saying. Silence is key. Let the customers talk and you can listen to solve their problem. Collecting data also helps with this step. You can tell a lot from social media websites, so it is important to monitor them and know why the results are the way they are.

5. Ask Questions: Exploring with a customer helps to better know what you need to do to meet their needs. A way to start is by asking questions such as: how, what, where, why, when, and who. Paying attention to non-verbal cues are also important. You can tell a lot from a person from just their body language and facial expressions.

6. Help and Educate: An effective way to help and educate is by creating content just for the customer. It's not what you say, but how you deliver and make them feel about their overall experience. For instance, a customer representative might promise to have someone give the customer a call back within the hour. The customer will be expecting a call within the hour, and if they do not receive the call, they will not be delighted.

7. Follow-Up: It is important to make sure that you ALWAYS resolve the customers problem. A tip to remember is to solve for the customer, not the number. If you solve their problem, there is a higher chance that they will stay a loyal customer. As I mentioned above, being on time is important. You can promise them a number of things they want to hear, but you must deliver those promises on time.

Tip: Trust is key to lasting relationships. Promoters will help attract more strangers to your business, so you should spend more time on trying to delight existing customers.

Hubspot Tips on Perfecting the Conversion Process

The conversion process is a critical process if  you want to succeed. Why you ask? The answer is simple. This step turns an anonymous visitor into a real lead. A lead can turn to a potential customer, which only helps your business or organization. So, creating a successful conversion path is important. In order to do this there are three steps that you should follow.

Call to Action:  You may be asking what exactly a Call to Action is. Well, it is simply a button or image placed on pages. The  purpose is to drive visitors to your landing page. CTA's are important because they help get the potential leads' attention. Although their main purpose is to grab attention, they must be relevant to your content. Once a visitor clicks on the CTA, they will be taken to the landing page.

Tips: 

Use clear and concise words that encourage customers to click. 

Make the CTA's easy to notice. Do not place them below the fold!

Experiment with new elements. Do not stick with just one. 

Landing Page: The landing page will provide the specific information that the customer is searching for. Remember, the landing page is different than the homepage because it is not an overview of the entire company or product. It should be specific and meet the customers needs. Once a customer fills out a form on the landing page, they will be taken to the thank you page. 

Thank You Page: At this point, the content that was introduced by the call-to-action and landing page is delivered to the visitor. After they submit a form, they turn from an anonymous customer to a real lead. 

Tips: 

Make sure it is easy to receive the offer that you promised.

Take them further through the buyer's journey. You can use a new CTA to encourage them to go to the next stage. 

Include other social networking options. This helps your content reach additional people. 

Hubspot Smarketing Basics

Smarketing is important because companies that have strong marketing and sales alignment get 20% annual revenue growth. No, smarketing is not a typo, it's a real thing. It's just like it sounds. Basically, smarketing is sales and marketing put together. If you want to integrate smarketing into your organization, there are 5 steps that you should follow.

Speak the Same Language:  Sales is completely number driven. so the language of smarketing comes down to revenue. People on the team should pick a number and work to achieve it. While trying to reach that number, you must think of the buyer's journey and life-cycle stages. This includes having a sales ready lead that is a great fit with a high level of interest. 

Set-Up Closed Loop Reporting: This completes the loop between sales and marketing. From this, you are able to pass along information and gain more feedback. On the marketing side, benefits include getting up to date information, learning which programs are working, and increasing Marketing ROI. Benefits on the sales side include prioritizing leads, making warmer calls, and increasing Sales ROI. Analyzing what content helps to close customers is an important part of this step because you can surface that on your website and nurture. 

Implement A Service Level Agreement(SLA): An SLA determines what each team is set to accomplish in order to support the other. It sets the alignment around the goals. To calculate SLA you can set specific quotas, on both sides, and see if they are being met. An example of a SLA is: Marketers will deliver 150 leads per sales representatives per month.  

Maintain Open Communication: One way to accomplish open communication is to have a meeting where both marketing and sales attend and are on the same page and up to date. Monthly management meetings can also help to resolve any issue that there might be. You can also try campaign communication which involves marketing your campaigns to your sales team. Sharing updates about products is also extremely important to be successful. 

Rely on Data: To do this, you can create and share a dashboard that shows the daily reports aligned with the team goals. You can measure the volume of leads against the quality or even track leads by type of source. Analyzing campaign leads can be helpful in determining which efforts successfully drive traffic, leads, and customers. Monthly reports can also help to measure progress and from there, you can see what changes need to be made. 

Hubspot and The Content Process

 Content marketing is commonly used by business to business marketers, but how many of the are actually have effective content? According to the Hubspot video, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 42% of those say that they use it effectively. It can be hard to know how to create valuable and effective content, but here are some steps that should help you get on the right track.



Plan: It is important to know what you are trying to create and why. One way to help determine this is by your buyer personas, buyer journey, and overall business goals. The ultimate goal is solve buyer persona problems and answer question and the only way to do that is by being providing educational content that matters. Keyword searches, forums, popular news, and persona challenges are some ways to identify what the content is that matters the most to your audience.


Produce: When you are creating your own content, it helps to follow a plan that makes the most sense to you. A production strategy of who and when the content will be created is also needed. This is the step where you transform your content into real. It may be hard to hear, but buyers do not really care about your brand. Instead of giving information about your brand, give content that provides solutions to buyers problems.



Distribute: You can have the best content in the world, but if no one knows about your content, it is useless. In order to properly distribute you must deliver relevant content at a consistent rate. Your posts should be published at a regular rate so people  can find the information they need when they need it.


Analyze: After planning, producing, and distributing your content, you want to analyze you results. You should make sure that your efforts in content marketing are working. Not only should you check if it is effective, but you should know why or why not your analysis is the way it is.


 Repeat: It is important to continuously follow these steps!!!


Tip: Always follow the golden rule. Talk about the benefits, NOT the features.

Hubspot Best Practices

Having a social media presence is key for amplifying your content. Many people may be overwhelmed and not know where to begin, so here are some of the best practices.

Optimize profiles: It is important to use keywords and links so that your company can easily be found. Your social media profile is like a mini version of your website that people need to be able to find. Visuals also help to attract and optimize.

Know Personas: By thoroughly knowing your buyer personas you can get content to them at the right place and right time. The networks that they are on and content they are reading or sharing helps to better know buyer personas. Once you know where your buyer personas are and what they want to hear, you must stop and listen. This includes reading comments and content sharing/posting.

Building Reach: After you know your personas, you can build reach by following, friending and connecting with prospects or customers. Instead of talking about yourself, ask questions and share content from others. A helpful rule to remember is the 80/20 rule. 80% of content should be interesting and helpful, while the other 20% can be promotional. You should also have unique content so that you can make something new, interesting and appealing.


Customize your Reach to Each Platform: It is important to position your content in the right context for the social media site that you are using. For example, Twitter is used to create conversation with other. Your tweets should be 115-120 characters long and using #'s help to connect with followers. Facebook lets you show your personality and posts should be kept under 250 characters. On here, you can ask questions that are more fun/personal. LinkedIn allows you to show your professional side. You can post to pages or groups and your posts should be published before 8am and after 6pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Analyze and Refine: After you go through all of these steps it is important to evaluate how you are doing and change accordingly.

4 Steps to Promote Your Business Blog

Knowing how to create a blog, and what content the blog should have are extremely important, but how do you get people to know about your blog? You could have valuable information that people are missing out on because you do not know how to start promoting your blog. There a few steps to take to ensure that your blog, and all of its useful content, is seen.

Leverage a Website is one approach to take in promoting your blog. This means adding links to your main website navigation. You can also add blog links to your homepage or link internally to other articles that are relevant to your blog post.

Using your social media presence is another option.  Most of you probably have a Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram account that you can use to add a link for your blog. The more followers or friends you have on those social media sites will lead to more potential viewers, and maybe even customers. It is also useful to engage in meaningful conversations with others. So, it is important to have people comment and take those comments into consideration.

Including you blog in email marketing can help you to better promote your blog. First, you need to use your buyer personas to segment leads, and then send out relevant blog posts. When an email newsletter is sent out you can include relevant articles from you blog posts in those emails. It is also important to create a weekly or monthly blog email to effectively promote your blog.

Connecting with networks can be a valuable tool in getting the word out about your blog.  One way to do this is to publish a press release. You can also add your blog articles to a relevant resource center or add a link to business cards that you hand out.

After you take these steps to promote your posts your can analyze trends by looking at the number of views to see how effective your promotions efforts were and make changes accordingly.