The PR 20/20 Blog

It’s that time of year again. Before we know it, it’ll be time to wrap the year’s marketing campaigns, report on performance and write the plan for what will bring next year’s successes.

It’s important that marketers constantly iterate strategies throughout the year based on performance. However, the end of the year presents the perfect opportunity to evaluate what worked and what didn’t— including which marketing mediums were successful.

While we’re on the subject of marketing mediums, have you leveraged the power of video? If not, you should.

According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool— up 18 points from 2017. In addition, the average respondent consumes 1.5 hours of video a day, and 72% would rather use video to learn about a product or service, if both video and text are available.

Unless you’re a marketer stuck in the Stone Age, you’ve likely heard of marketing automation. At its core, marketing automation is designed to automate marketing actions, reduce repetitive tasks, better nurture leads and ultimately, close more sales.

While you may have heard of it, are you actually using marketing automation? According to CMO.com, nearly half of all companies use marketing automation, and 91% of the most successful users agree that the solution is “very important.” Marketing automation:

• Improves productivity
• Automates manual workflows
• Serves as a centralized hub for activities
• Increases revenue
• Improves customer retention
• Tracks and monitors all campaigns

The best part? With best-in-breed solutions that offer a strong customer support team, it doesn’t take a tech genius to reap the benefits of marketing automation. The hardest part is recognizing your marketing needs more automation, and diving in.

HubSpotters have been busy. Over the course of the second quarter, HubSpot released significant product updates across marketing and sales—and (in case you missed it) unveiled Service Hub.

If you’re like our team, we eagerly geek out over new tools. So we decided to feature the product updates at our latest HubSpot User Group (HUG) event in June. Maggie Bomze (@Maggbomze) joined us from Boston to give our guest the inside scoop on what’s new and exciting in your portal.

Below, we’ve featured five of our favorite new features and tools. View the full SlideShare at the end of this post to catch up on everything you missed.

Inside the enterprise, driving change isn’t easy.

A true digital transformation requires a champion—one person who believes in the power of inbound marketing and is willing to take a risk on a new direction, methodology and technology. Here at PR 20/20, we call this person the enterprise change agent.

We’ve helped many change agents implement inbound marketing, and prove MROI to leadership. It doesn’t happen overnight, and every journey is unique. That said, their successes continue to inspire us. So we’ve decided to share their stories, starting with Jorge Solorio (@JorgeLubrizol), Americas Industrial Business Manager at The Lubrizol Corporation.

Jorge oversees the Americas business operations for the Corzan Industrial Systems brand at Lubrizol, and has played the pivotal role of change agent over the past few years. He began experimenting with inbound for Corzan Industrial Systems, a Lubrizol brand, in 2016. This included the creation of a simple, five-page Wordpress website and blog. In January of 2017, he partnered with PR 20/20 to continue building a case for digital transformation.

Read on to see how he used inbound to reach double-digit returns and drive international change.

The shift to inbound marketing has armed marketers with tactics to better connect with leads and customers, technology to increase efficiencies, and access to more data than ever.

Access to inbound marketing data means it’s easier than traditional methods to track performance and prove ROI.

Just think: Can you really trace the performance of a newspaper ad easier and faster (if at all) than clicks on a blog post?

However, the old adage “quality over quantity” also applies to data— it’s not enough to simply have thousands of data points. Instead, marketers need to apply both structure and meaning to these numbers because without a layer of context, it’s just noise.

But if you’re anything like me (not a data scientist or mathematician), it can be tricky to understand where to start or what data points to dig into to really make sense of it all. Even with access to data tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot’s reporting features, it’s still necessary to understand what the numbers truly mean to affect performance and implement real-time change.

At our recent Cleveland HubSpot User Group (HUG) meeting, PR 20/20’s VP of Strategic Growth and in-house data wizard, Keith Moehring (@keithmoehring), uncovered how marketers can dive into data to apply meaning.

Continue reading below as we highlight 12 actionable tips and tricks to unlock the true potential of your marketing data.

HubSpot’s Latest Product Updates Connect Marketing, Sales & Service

Looking for a one-stop-platform to build and maintain your website, do marketing automation (emails, social, workflows and more), and connect the dots with sales and service engagements? An all-encompassing customer experience—and the platform to make it happen—was the vision presented at this year’s INBOUND marketing conference by HubSpot.  

In his keynote, HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) talked about alignment. He also touched on a decision most companies weigh regarding their tech stack: Do we go with a platform that has “most of what I need,” or do we assemble a group of discrete products to get what’s known as “best-of-breed?” Sidenote that there are 5,000+ options for organizations choosing from the various marketing technologies out there … So what’s Dharmesh’s recommendation? Start with a core platform, then plug in the rest for the best of both worlds.

And in true alignment with HubSpot’s own mantra to solve for the customer (SFTC, see #3), the company introduced a platform update that now spans marketing, sales, integrations (Connect) and customer engagement—all built around the HubSpot CRM.

We’ve always believed in HubSpot’s potential to disrupt an industry. In fact, PR 20/20 became HubSpot’s first agency partner back in 2007—a decision that continues to fuel and inspire our business.

So we’re not surprised that the software company reported more than 34,000 customers and upwards of $89 million in revenue at the end of Q2.

HubSpot continues to flourish because of one solid fact: the product works. (And no, this is not a paid endorsement; we’ve just seen the results.)

The HubSpot Growth Stack aims to solve our number one setback as data-driven marketers: the “elusive, fully-integrated marketing stack.” It creates a home base for all marketing, sales, service and CRM activity, enabling performance-driven, agile marketing. From initial prospecting to closing the deal, you can use the stack to design and serve the full customer experience.