If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you’ll know I’m a pretty big fan of Infusionsoft and love the marketing automation superpowers it provides. I also love that I can easily connect HubSpot to Infusionsoft so they work seamlessly together.

Which is why you might be surprised to learn that I’m using HubSpot to run my marketing agency, Groove Digital Marketing. However, as has become readily apparent to me, the two platforms for the most part do drastically different things, so I have not given up Infusionsoft for HubSpot. So why use HubSpot? In this podcast episode, I explain exactly why I’ve made that choice for my agency. If you’d like to hear more, download the episode or listen now (below).

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Resources Mentioned

• GrabTrent’sBonus.com
• Groove Digital Marketing
• contentmarketersblueprint.com

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business. It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Hi I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. And this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business. If you are an entrepreneur and you’re looking for proven tactics and strategies things that you can used to increase your traffic, increase your conversions and increase your profits this is the podcast for you. In this episode I’m going to talk to you about the decision that I made recently to start using HubSpot’s marketing software for my marketing agency crew digital marketing.

Now long time listeners know that I’m a pretty big Infusionsoft fan and I’m continuing to use Infusionsoft by the way. So why on Earth am I using HubSpot is well some people to think that they are actually competing competitors. And they kind of are they kind of aren’t and having now used both of them for a little while, think I been to a unique position to describe why I think you can actually make a case defending about the business that you are in for using both of them.

So in this episode, which is not going to be a long one, this is why you want to listen if you run a marketing agency and you want to be able to sell services on retainer. So you get nice predictable cash flow and you really build the value of your organization so that you can sell it one day. You don’t want to miss this one. Now if you don’t want to run the agency but you do want to understand and benefit from content marketing in your business so that you can attract and convert more costumers. Well you listen to this episode as well.

So we are going to dive into it,just a second, but before we do just a quick reminder if you want to see the tools that I used in my business and read my reviews. And if you’d like to use any of my affiliate links so support the show. I want to support you as well and here’s how I do this if you go to grabtrentsbonus.com you will see a list of all the resources that I used to run my business and if you choose to use the affiliate link to purchase any those and thank you in advance for doing so. There will also be a list of bonuses that I would give you products that I’ve created and then that I normally sell and I would give you a choice of which one of those you would like to get for free.

Alright, so with that said lets jump into this why did I pick HubSpot for my marketing agency. Well you might remember back in episode #117 I interviewed a guy of the name Robb Bailey who is a co-founder and CEO of an agency in the town that I used to live in San Diego it’s called Page ladder who can find them in Pageladder.com. And I was referred to Roband, my goodness, I can’t even remember now who referred me, so if you are listening and I’m not giving you credit and terribly sorry I should wrote that down before it there were record button but at last I did not. In any case I was referred for Robb told me about it. And I can’t remember now I did talk to somebody inmaking this podcast.

Anyway, I learned about this thing called the content marketers blueprint and you can get to at contentmarketersblueprint.com. And there is a guy by the named Max Trayler who’s running this thing. Or he is a part of it, I don’t know if he is running it, but his is definitely a big part of it. And it is a methodology for content marketing it’s probably the most succinctplan that I have ever seen and it was designed in such a way so that in agency could better than they do really good job of selling content marketing services to prospective clients. They have this document that they put together for each client done in acustomized bases. And it has a funnel in it, it’s very visual, it is super, super helpful in getting the point across of why someone needs to do content marketing and more importantly how to effectively do content marketing. So for example up to this point time with bright ideas I could produce a lot of content, podcasts, video blog posting and so forth. I predominately have had one lead magnet at the top of my funnel.

Now it works fairly well, I got a list of about 10,000 people by taking that approach. However it is not worked nearly as well as I could have in terms of attracting consulting clients if I had followed more the structure of the content marketing blueprint which basically says you need to have 3 things with your content, you need to have top of funnel content and offers.

And that is the point where people there it’s called awareness. They are looking for a solution to their problem but they don’t yet care about you or your company or any of that. So if you are trying to sell all your stuff at the top of the funnel, your going to kind of repel people.

So once they got through the top of the funnel and that’s generally your providing content it’s asking questions that people are asking. So if you have a particular buyer persona that wants to know all about the best strategies in upgrading their website and to their marketing or serverin making their website become the foundation of their marketing obviously you had create a whole lot of content that speaks to that. And if want to create some premium content probably an e-book or special report of some kind. And they can op in and download it, so a lot of us do that and I’ve done that many, many, many, times.

But here’s where the content marketing blueprint brought my attention to the fact to that some things that I wasn’t doing right cause simply I didn’t put the effort in to. You also need to have some mid funnel content, so when someone downloads that first report they’re going to get a sequence of emails that nurtures them along. And then eventually asks some so take another step and download something else that is a little bit more associated with your brand because now you’re starting to build a relationship with them. And they’re starting to thank you. Well, maybe, maybe this guy’s giving me all these free blog posts maybe they’re the ones that I might like to buy from as well.

And so when you make the offer, something like a case study would be an example of mid funnel content and more people download that they are essentially raising their hands and they’re saying “hey I’m still interested in this stuff” so then you want to nurture them on a little bit more then you want to offer them some bottled bottom of funnel content where then as not even necessarily contented for that’s bottom of funnel offers. Things like, maybe you would want to have called you to have a free marketing assessment or maybe you would like to have them come and purchase a content marketing blueprint for their own organization.

By the time people are at this point in the funnel they already realized that you are knowledgeable, incredible and could actually provide them with a solution to the problem that they were looking for a solution for way back at the beginning, when they first run over the Google and text something in to the search engine. So, how does HubSpot tied all these stuff? So, the content marketing blueprint was designed to fit very nicely on top of HubSpot. If you think about your blog post is fuel HubSpot and the way that you structure it using the methodology describe in the content marketing blueprint is really the engine. So when you pour fuel into an engine when you get is power and that power is what going to drive your business ahead.

So HubSpot makes this very, very easy to do and because this is the exact service that I intent to focus on selling is our primary and probably our only offering at Group Digital Marketing is content marketing as a service for monthly retainer. Obviously I’ve got to used drinkmy own Kool Aid, eat my own dog food, whatever expression you would like to do but the blueprint and HubSpot all this stuff that I want people to buy I’m going to be using it in my own business as well. Alright, some of you probably listening to this thinking well do in Infusionsoft do some of this stuff. And yes in fact with respects in building marketing funnel and Infusionsoft is absolutely amazing for building a marketing funnel, I love it. What’s not so amazing is on the content marketing side, if you look at HubSpot as a company they have a very, very active blog they have a lots of writers that have 44 blogs and a ton of free reports. And they get a lot of traffic if you look at in Infusionsoft their blog is not so nearly so active doesn’t have so nearly many posts.

I suspect they are working on changing that, but as a result Infusionsoft isn’t really a content marketing company like HubSpot is. And so one of the things that HubSpot has really put a lot of effort into is making it, giving you a soft work platform that essentially makes it very easy for you to follow best practices in your content marketing. And their training library and their downloadable resources is a HubSpot partner is nothing short of amazing. Let me just give you this one really quick example, for all familiar with email marketing campaigns, something that I had never really put to paper before was a content marketing campaign or an inbound marketing campaign. So if you think about that, you have to think about what’s the problem that somebody is trying to solve? Well I want more traffic to my website, for example might be something that a potential costumer would think, they might interest in some search query into goggle or ask people for help with that. So in designing an inbound marketing campaign you actually go backwards, you start with the lead magnet. So you would want to have some type of e-book that is going to be a rich piece of content that helps people that relate to the initial query.

So then once you’ve got figure out whom your buyer persona is and what their problem is you come up with your rich piece of content your lead magnet and then you start going backwards you think will what landing pages do I need to have for that particularly lead magnet wasn’t need to say of those landing pages. Okay well if you’re going to get people to the landing page, what do you need? You need to think all the call to action. So, what are my call to actions need to say what they need to look like? And then you I need to place, I got to put my call to actions somewhere than where the blog posts come to play. So, obviously calls to action with convert better if the content of the blog post is highly related to the offer that is being made. So if you’re writing a blog post about, you know how to train a cat like hold the actions is like how to train a dog. Your conversion rights going to suck because the two are very, very dissimilar. Where is if you are writing a blog post how to train a cat in a content or the rather a premium offer is five ways to train your cat to do acts in under 30 days chances of the conversion rate being higher or obviously much, much, much higher because the conversion or the offer for premium content relates highly to the blog posts.

So how does all this tie into a campaign? Well as I mentioned earlier you got the campaign which is hey I’m going to do everything I can to promote this particular e-book over maybe 8 or 10, 12 or 16 over blog posts over some finite period of time. And then I am going to measure all of the results that I got on that campaign. How much traffic to those if I wrote 12 post to 8 posts for that particular campaign, how much traffic that all of those posts get? Which of those posts converted to the best? What was the conversion rate of the lead or the Opt in page? And then the nurturing emails that went out, what was the performance of those emails how many were delivered how many were opened, how many were clicked on, how many people progress to the next page in my funnel?

Infusionsoft does not make it dead simple to do all of that stuff. Whereas is HubSpot does make it dead simple to do it all, how much have you learned to run the software of course, when there is no lack of training material how to do that. But it gives you a framework to make success much, much, much more likely to use the tool that been design use, it simply does, it has features and functionality that Infusionsoft does not have. Now in Infusionsoft defense Infusionsoft has plenty of features and functionality that HubSpot does not have so you really need to look at your business and figure out which one is more important to you and you’ve really, really focused on content marketing. Then and you don’t sell anything online and you don’t need you know like online shopping cart. Then HubSpot might be the way for you to go, on the other hand if you have a business where you want to be able to process credit card transaction plus you need a CRM system and you want email marketing and you want it tied into a one thing.

But if you’re willing to give up some of the analytics in reporting that is such a strong point of HubSpot then maybe you want to use Infusionsoft. Or like me you can tie them together and get the best of both worlds and that’s exactly what I’m doing in my own business. Alright, so that is it for this episode and I hope that you’ve enjoyed it if want to get to the show note’s for this episode just go to brightideas.co/123 if you found this valuable. By the way if you have questions just make sure you leave my comments there on that particular post and I will answer you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please give me a quick favor and help me spread the word of bright ideas podcast all you need to do just go to brightideas.co/love there will be pre populated tweet you can just click the button as simple as that you don’t even have to type anything so that’s it for this episode, I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid thank you so much for tuning in I look forward to have you back for another one. Take care.

Additional Resources

• How I Am Using HubSpot AND Infusionsoft to Run Groove Digital Marketing
• How to Pivot Your Agency from SEO to Content Marketing with Robb Bailey
• The Groove Digital Marketing Agency Project