What is the most effective long term strategy to find prospects and increase turnover? If you are trading or are a decision-maker in a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), we invite you to read on and discover how to grow your customer base and boost sales income, by implementing digital marketing strategies.

HubSpot is the industry-leading marketing automation platform, and we love it. As a Certified HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency, it’s fair to say we’re biased – but there’s a good reason for this. Using HubSpot has transformed the way inbound marketing works, making it more predictable, less labour intensive, and more effective at building revenue and bringing in more sales. HubSpot is a powerful tool, and over the years we’ve seen customers meet and exceed revenue targets – while using fewer resources – time and time again. It could do the same for your business, too.

As Hubspot states, contacts are at the core of your marketing and sales strategy. Once these individuals are in your system, you can utilise many opportunities to change them from prospects to fully fledged customers. Knowing a little bit about their background will give you the perfect opportunity to tailor content appropriately via email marketing and eBooks, for example. Information such as their company, their job role and the industry they work in will work in your favour.

Did you know that email marketing can help build awareness around your brand and gain new customers? That’s why many leading names such as Buzzfeed and Mumsnet are using this highly valuable tool to assist in their digital marketing efforts and are reaping the rewards.

With this being said, you might be thinking of how to get a piece of the action through sending your first email campaign via Hubspot. We share with you some straightforward steps to help you get started:

You need to keep track of your relationships with your customers, but are you doing that in the most cost-effective and resource-efficient way? Many businesses rely on basic spreadsheets, and some still rely on piles of physical business cards. Keeping everything accessible and easy to manage with these outdated approaches can be a nightmare. Fortunately, if you need to build an intuitive and accessible database, there's a great alternative FREE option: HubSpot CRM.

WordPress is the single most widely used CMS and web development platform on the Internet, responsible for over 75 million active websites worldwide – that’s 34% of the total number of websites. You don’t have to look far to discover the reasons for this success. WordPress is free to use, easy to learn, requires no coding knowledge, and is supported by a community of millions of keen developers. What’s not to like? Well, nothing – but does that make WordPress the best platform for marketing and lead generation?

Data harvested from analytics platforms is only useful if it is accurate, so it’s disconcerting when apparent discrepancies appear between different platforms over the same metric. It is common for businesses to have Google Analytics, and to also to have additional analytics from software programmes like HubSpot, Lead Forensics, or built-in website stats. When businesses have two or more forms of web stats/analytics, they often show different figures.

Zoho and HubSpot are both automation platforms offering CRM and sales features. There are plenty of areas in which the two applications overlap, and for this reason Zoho is sometimes seen as an alternative to HubSpot. Zoho is cheap, easy to use and has plenty of features, which you can scale up so you only pay for the functions you need. Moreover, an entry-level version of Zoho is available for free for up to 10 users.

A brand new HubSpot account has no contacts, and one of the first things to do is add your existing contacts into the CRM database. So how do you go about doing it?

Using new platforms and tools can be a nerve-wracking process, particularly if you're not particularly tech-savvy. However, if you're considering using HubSpot to help you with your sales, marketing and customer services activities, there's no need to feel intimidated. This well-respected platform may be packed with features, but it's also user-friendly – and, as with most types of technology, the more you use it, the easier the process becomes. So, what makes HubSpot such a convenient option? Let's take a look at some of its advantages.