Over the past week our development team have been fending off a significant cyber security attack on a number of websites we host, part of a worldwide hack attempt affecting over a million websites. In light of the scale and sophistication of this attack, we are no longer recommending WordPress as a website platform.

So what is this hack, why did it affect WordPress websites and what are the alternatives to WordPress?

You may or may not have already heard of buyer personas - but what are they really, when you move past the jargon? Here's the lowdown on what exactly buyer personas are, and how they can help your business generate more leads, sales and revenue.

Whether you're a new start-up or you've been in the game for a while, sales targets can cause difficulties. Often they're too ambitious, ending up as pie in the sky and causing friction as workers struggle valiantly to meet them, or they may be too low, so that they fail to motivate your team to their full productive potential. Here's how to ensure that your sales targets stay realistic to your means but ambitious enough to deliver prosperity.

Good sales performance is the lifeblood of businesses of any size. With the growing power and accessibility of marketing and sales automation platforms – HubSpot being the leading example – improving sales has become an increasingly data-driven process.

These affordably priced platforms have placed an advanced sales management toolkit at the disposal of even small businesses, enabling ambitious sales strategies without huge staff and operational expenses.

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?