If you’ve recently decided to embark on an inbound marketing program for your company and deciding to use HubSpot, it’s very likely you’re currently asking yourself what HubSpot license level is right for you and your business. First off, whatever level you select, you can rest easy knowing you’ve made a big push toward aligning your marketing and sales teams. The automation, content tools, SEO applications, analytical tracking, CRM, the integration of sales and marketing tools, and the various sales enablement features of HubSpot mean you are better positioned to have more success with your inbound marketing. HubSpot’s strength is in having an all-in-one inbound markeitng and sales solution. Now, it’s just a matter of selecting the HubSpot license level that best serves the needs of your business and your current marketing efforts.

What HubSpot License Level Is Right for Your Business?

An Important Note about All HubSpot License Levels

Regardless of the level you choose, no paid package will solely be a marketing or sales tool. Part of the appeal and success of HubSpot is that it works to bridge that gap between marketing and sales, effectively providing a platform that aligns those two groups and better prepares them to reach shared goals.

Even with HubSpot Basic markeitng software, it’s a powerful marketing and sales tool that provides features such as a shared database, allowing marketing and sales access to the same contact information that automatically updating relevant fields in individual connect records.

What Factors Should Influence Your HubSpot Licensing Decision?

The HubSpot level that is ideal for your business depends on a number of factors, but first and foremost, it’s important to remember that those factors are not set in stone. As your business grows and changes, you do have the ability to upgrade and easily integrate all your HubSpot portal data. 

Some of the deciding factors to consider when selecting a package include the following:

• The size of your company (number of employees).
• Current and projected monthly traffic to your site and/or blog.
• Number of email campaigns you send out on a monthly basis.
• Contact list size.
• Marketing budget.
• Do you require markeitng automation.
• Content strategy 

The HubSpot License Levels: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise

HubSpot currently offers three license levels for their software: basic, pro, and enterprise.

• Basic – Generally for small businesses or those just starting to create strategic content through inbound marketing efforts. This package includes features such as the marketing analytics dashboard, social media suite, e-mail marketing, and content creation (and optimization).

At the basic level, you can also integrate your HubSpot CRM with powerful application such as PandaDoc, a sales enablement tool that allows you to write, send, analytically track, and get legally binding e-signatures on proposals, quotes, and other documents. 

The one drawback- you don’t have markeitng automation capabilities.

• Pro – The most popular choice. It provides everything basic includes, but arguably the largest difference is pro provides marketing automation, Salesforce and other third party integration, and custom workflows. As your leads increase, this automation ability lets you more efficiently and successfully nurture potential clients through the sales funnel.

Other included features include: many more templates (for e-mails and more), sales software that facilitates integration of assets, calendar tool to more easily schedule meetings, sequence creation to create sales or marketing workflows, and more.

• Enterprise – Primarily for large, established companies. It provides everything in pro but with extra features, such as A/B testing (to determine the best conversion success among various calls to action, e-mail templates, landing pages, etc.), predictive lead scoring, enhanced reporting tools, and more.

Pricing:

Basic: $200/month ($600 required onboarding fee)

Pro: $800/month ($3,000 required onboarding fee)

Enterprise: $2,400 /month ($5,000 required onboarding fee)

Signing Up—and Paying—for Your HubSpot License Level

Once you’ve selected the level that’s relevant for your company, there are a few things to know about the payment process.

First, HubSpot operates as a yearly license. That means you must financially commit to a twelve-month requirement.

Payment for your plan can be made as a monthly charge, or you can pay for that year up front.

What If You’re Not Ready to Commit to a HubSpot License?

Depending on your business and your marketing budget, HubSpot might seem like too much of a financial burden. If that’s the case, remember two important things.

One, HubSpot is an investment. It helps you track your successes, optimize your content, and better nurture your leads though the buyer’s journey. All this ultimately works toward the goal of increased revenue, which means the underlying idea is that HubSpot will eventually pay for itself in increased clients and associated revenue. 

Two, if you’re hesitant about the value of HubSpot, you can try the marketing package for a free thirty-day trial. If you’re not convinced the software is right for your business after that month, you aren’t committed to paying anything.

There are also free features of HubSpot. That includes:

• HubSpot Leadin. A free lead capture and contact insights tool.
• Sales CRM. (The marketing CRM is part of the pay service.)
• HubSpot Sales. (This is free up to a point. Features such as tracking and unlimited templates are part of the pay service.)

At the very least, I would recommend using Leadin as  you start your inbound markeitng program. Providing you the ability to capture leads, manage leads in one place and analyze your markeitng efforts.

HubSpot Support Makes the Mark

Strong software support is vitally important to any organization. Especially with the sophistication of today’s tools and over level of functionality. This is were HubSpot really shines. The ability to quickly call or email a HubSpot support rep, and in most cases receive a thorough response quickly is invaluable. Their attention to detail and willingness to find  solution to your problem is refreshing. 

Also, they have  great deal of support documentation and videos that can quickly get you the response you need. 

HubSpot Licensing: Look before You Leap

While most people do choose the pro level, reasoning that it offers the most value for services provided, the important thing to consider is what will provide the most value for your organization and ability to scale with your marketing and sales divisions. What will benefit your marketing team, sales force, C-level executives, and everyone between?

It’s crucial to give this forethought because jumping into a package could mean you’re needlessly overpaying for services you don’t yet require, or it could mean the software isn’t as effective as possible because the package is not comprehensive enough.

Remember, though, every HubSpot license level offers content optimization tools, seo capabilities, landing pages, call-to-actions, email campaigns, social media tools,a lead management system, CRM and analytics, increase the productivity of your sales and marketing teams, and better align those teams to work toward shared goals. Choosing the right level, therefore, comes down to where you are in your web traffic, lead generation, lead nurturing and revenue generation goals. As your inbound marketing efforts expand and create more opportunities, HubSpot is able to scale with your increased success.

As any inbound marketing agency knows, a full inbound program involves a full spectrum of change within a company. When implemented to its greatest effect, though, inbound marketing facilitates both the marketing and sales teams. Therefore, one way for an agency to maximize its effectiveness is by offering sales enablement services. What are the benefits of these services, and why should you give special consideration to employing these tactics in your agency? Read on for all the benefits and positive consequences of investing in sales enablement.

Why Inbound Marketing Agencies Should Offer Sales Enablement Services

The Bottom Line: Sales Enablement Helps Inbound Marketing Agencies Increase Profits

There are lots of qualitative reasons for agencies to invest in sales enablement, but there are also quantitative reasons. After all, sales enablement is all about implementing methods and tactics that maximize the productivity of the sales team. When that happens, revenues increase, and your agency is simply more likely to retain (and increase) retainers by keeping clients longer.

Sales enablement is one of many ways to help manage leads better, and that directly relates to closing more deals and increasing profits.

How Sales Enablement Bridges the Gap between Sales and Marketing

While salespeople have traditionally thought of themselves as a somewhat separate group, inbound marketing illustrates that any lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams is a surefire way to be less effective with that inbound campaign.

Therefore, if your agency can demonstrate that they bridge this existing gap, your clients are more likely to see greater success, better results, and increased profits.

Inbound marketing—when it incorporates proper sales enablement—allows sales and marketing to work collaboratively and pull from their communal knowledge base to better address the concerns of leads, educate their potential customers, and provide value through strategically devised content.

This collaboration should permeate every aspect of the inbound campaigns, from the initial strategy that goes into identifying buyer personas to the creation of the actual content and sales collateral. The two groups should even work together to determine the parameters of their lead-qualifying system, so everyone is on the same page as to when a lead should be handed from one group to the next and successfully taken through the sales cycle.

If your agency does this consistently for your clients, you have a much greater chance of finding long-term success with those clients.

1. Sales enablement Facilitates Sales Buy-In

Inbound marketing and its collaborative techniques only work if you have total buy-in from every group involved. If marketing doesn’t believe in the power of the campaign being initiated, that campaign is put at a serious disadvantage. By the same token, sales needs to also be fully invested in all inbound efforts.

Because sales has traditionally been somewhat separate from marketing, it’s perhaps even more important to ensure you get that buy-in from the sales members. Focusing on sales enablement—that is, making it a priority to facilitate the sales team reaching its goals—is one essential way to accomplish that.

2. Align Content Strategies with Markeitng and Sales

With sales buy-in its imperative that you have them involved in the content strategy process. Especially when it comes to creating buyer personas and specific content for sales.

Sales is the front-facing side of any business and they have valuable insight into prospective customers challenges, needs, desires and roles. 

Sales input will provide you much better results when developing a content strategy, developing buyer personas for different stages of the buyers journey and creating effective sales collateral.

3. Incorporate Technology into Your Sales Enablement Efforts

Another important way to demonstrate to your clients that you give sales enablement its proper emphasis is by utilizing the technology that is best going to aid sales teams.

One essential tool is a CRM, and as an agency, it’s important to walk all your clients through how to maximize this powerful software.

Failing to harness technology for your clients can lead to inefficiencies and lessened success with the campaigns. To get the most out of you and your clients’ inbound efforts, the relevant technologies should play roles in the campaigns from the outset.

4. Provide Coaching and Training throughout the Inbound Marketing Campaign

Inbound marketing can mean a lot of changes for a company. Genuine collaboration between marketing and sales might be a somewhat foreign concept. The technologies to streamline inbound efforts might also seem unfamiliar.

Whatever aspect your client needs a helping hand with, a successful agency will be there to answer questions, provide guidance, and offer any coaching or training necessary to make inbound marketing make sense and work for that particular client.

There’s a widely held misconception regarding inbound marketing, and that’s the idea that it takes a long time to get any effective inbound marketing campaign off the ground.  While it’s true that inbound marketing is a building process that takes time to see concrete results, it is very possible to plan, strategize, and implement an effective campaign in a three-month window.

How to Launch an Inbound Marketing Campaign in Three Months

A Step-by-Step Guide to Effectively and Efficiently Starting Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

1. Create a core brand positioning strategy and message.

The first thing you want to do is create your brand positioning strategy. This statement identifies who you are, positions you within your market, and conveys your specific value within that market.

A good brand positioning statement clearly aligns your marketing and sales teams toward common goals and heavily informs your strategic, targeted content creation.

2. Determine if you’re going to outsource or tackle your inbound marketing campaign in-house.

Once you have your foundational brand positioning statement, the next step is to figure out who in your company will be doing what for the inbound marketing campaign. Some positions to consider include the following:

• Inbound marketing strategists (including SEO strategists).
• Copywriters.
• Designers.
• Web developers.
• Internal account managers.
• Paid ad specialists (to drive demand generation).

If you don’t have the right people in-house for every aspect, don’t worry. You can use a third party for none, some, or all of this process. Those third parties can be inbound marketing agencies or consultants, freelancers, or even individuals with relevant skillsets.

However you choose to divvy the work, you want to ensure you have the right people to deliver on your strategy. That means excelling at the individual task but also having a big-picture mind-set in order to ensure your work properly aligns sales and marketing and pushes the whole team toward common goals.

3. Define your projected goals and what you want your inbound marketing efforts to achieve.

If you don’t have explicitly created goals, you have no way of gauging how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been. Therefore, it’s important to understand and define both your goals and business objectives (as they relate to inbound marketing). Also remember to create short-term goals as well as long-term goals.

For the greatest chance at success, make sure to only choose SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

When you’re in the process of creating these goals, it’s imperative you have the input of both your sales and marketing teams. These goals should be shared and beneficial to everyone on the team, so you need that valuable input from all sides of the company. A service-level agreement (SLA) should be created between marketing and sales to facilitate the creation of these shared goals.

4. Define your industry verticals and your buyer personas.  

A crucial aspect of inbound strategy is identifying what industry (or industries) you will be targeting and what specific buyer personas relevant to that industry you will be creating content for.

If you are a small or even medium business, be extremely targeted with your initial inbound marketing efforts—especially if you want to be as effective as possible in that first three-month window. That means focusing on no more than three verticals with your inbound efforts, as diverting your time and resources in too many directions can dilute your results.

Once you’ve identified the vertical or verticals you want to target, identify the relevant buyer personas. (A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It can include information such as age, gender, income, geographic area, and so on.)

Your content should be created around these buyer personas and every stage they go through on the buyer’s journey. In this way, you have targeted, relevant content to answer questions, provide information, and address concerns of your buyer personas at the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.

Don’t forget, you might be dealing with different personas at different stages of the sales cycle. For example, maybe a manager will be making decisions at the middle of the sales funnel, but a C-level executive will be making the final call at the bottom of the sales funnel. If that’s the case in your vertical, your buyer persona strategy and associated content should reflect that.

5. Assess your current website and content for its alignment with your inbound marketing strategy. 

More than likely, your existing website copy and content will not perfectly align with your newly defined brand positioning statement and marketing strategy. Therefore, you’ll have to determine what content you can repurpose to target those buyer personas (at each stage of the buyer’s journey) and what pieces you’ll need to create from scratch.

6. Build your inbound marketing and inbound sales strategy.

With all the groundwork laid, it’s time to put your concrete strategy together.

Once again, for content, you want to assess what you already have and then repurpose or create from scratch content that targets your buyer personas throughout the buyers journey. (This strategy will include SEO tactics, such as keyword research.) You will want markeitng  and sales involved in the content development process. Markeitng will drive the content development process for marketing and sale collateral. Sales should be involved in input for the content creation process, with their detailed knowledge of prospects challenges, needs and desires. 

From there, you want to put together your conversion paths for both markeitng  and sales. This includes how you plan to generate leads and then nurture those leads through the sales cycle, aided by tools such as calls to action, landing pages, thank you pages, e-mails, and so on.

Once those elements are in place, you’ll then assess what technology you require to effectively and efficiently implement that strategy. This can include everything from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and marketing automation software to a shared content catalog and analytical tracking software. Integration of technology is a crucial piece because it allows you to more efficiently utilize and maximize your strategically created content.

7. Ensure you promote strong conversion through your website.

Your website is arguably one of your most powerful marketing and selling tools.

To be maximally effective, it should contain the following elements:

• Aesthetically pleasing, clean pages.
• To-the-point content and graphics.
• Easy-to-navigate structure.
• Sound SEO strategy within the pages as well as optimized content.
• Calls to action that lead to landing pages for specific pieces of content.
• An educational blog that promotes nurturing a lead through the sales cycle.

Strong conversion architecture doesn’t happen without planning and forethought. Make sure your site is consciously designed to align with and promote your inbound strategy, lead generation efforts, and lead conversion.

8. Publish optimized, strategic content at least twice a week.

Content can mean a variety of things, such as the following:

• Blog posts.
• Videos.
• Premium content, such as e-books or whitepapers.
• Case studies.
• Interactive tools, such as calculators..

Especially in this first three months, when your SEO rankings are more likely to be low, don’t forget paid advertising is one way to garner leads before you start organically earning visitors to your site.

9. Promote your published content through a variety of channels.

Your content can be as strategic and optimized as possible, but if you don’t then promote it, fewer people are going to be interacting with that content. Therefore, you should focus on the following:

• Build your social media channels in order to promote your content.
• Participate in relevant forums.
• Make a subscription option for your blog.
• Utilize the power of e-mail campaigns.
• Promote your business through paid advertising.

10 Review your site, blog, and content analytics weekly.

You want to constantly evaluate and assess how your various tools and individual pieces of content are performing. By doing this careful analysis and data examination, you can ascertain what needs to be changed versus what’s garnering success, and you can use those cues to inform your subsequent content creation.

See What Your Inbound Marketing Can Accomplish in Three Months

While a steady supply of leads and site traffic is often the result of your inbound marketing efforts over time, that doesn’t mean you can’t strategize and implement the solid foundation of your inbound marketing campaign in a much shorter window.

As long as you’re deliberate and methodical about the ten steps listed, you can be on your way to sustainable lead generation and lead conversion in a few short months.

Video marketing can be a hugely beneficial aspect to any inbound marketing campaign. Agencies that harness this power in their clients’ marketing efforts are simply going to have an advantage, and in this competitive landscape, that advantage can be the difference between getting your clients more business and allowing your clients to stall. The more success you can help your clients garner, the more likely you are to continue receiving your retainer, meaning video marketing can be the powerful tool that fuels not only your clients’ success but yours as well.

How Video Marketing Can Bolster Any Inbound Marketing Campaign

Why Is Video Marketing So Powerful—Especially Today?

It’s no surprise that people are increasingly busy, and reading articles, blog posts, web copy, and other word-based content takes time. Video, on the other hand, allows you to build credibility and trust (arguably even more so than with written content), and it allows your consumer to get that information in a shorter amount of time.

Simply put, this means the potential customer is more likely to view video content than read written content, and that video content will ultimately be more impactful, engaging, and successful than written marketing material.

Also keep in mind that you want to vary your clients’ campaigns to tailor to different learning styles and engage as many people as possible. Since many people are visual learners, video is a great opportunity to get your point across both quickly and effectively.

Video truly builds powerful connections with your buyer personas because video content is relatable and easy to understand, and it yields that always-important engagement and personalized experience for your personas.

Video Marketing Is Easier Than Ever

While video production used to be complicated, time-consuming, and technical, advances in technology have increasingly made this video production easier and more accessible to more people. As an agency, you have a distinct opportunity to take advantage of these technologies and translate them into your clients’ inbound marketing strategies.

Again, the greater success you can help your clients reach, the more successful your agency will ultimately be, and incorporating video production into your inbound marketing strategies is one key way to produce those successful results.

How to Use Video Effectively in an Inbound Marketing Campaign 

To maximize the utility of these videos, produce visual content and then use that content in a variety of ways. That is, when it makes sense, make sure to repurpose content within web pages, blogs, e-books, and more. This can be the whole video or just select parts of the video. In this way, video can be used effectively throughout the buyer’s journey.

This does not mean, however, that you should create one video and be done. Much like written content, multiple videos can be created with different parts of the buyer’s journey in mind (top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel). For maximum efficiency, you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of each video produced by repurposing where appropriate. 

Also like written content, videos still need to incorporate sound inbound marketing strategy. That means the following rules should be followed:

• Target videos to specific buyer personas.
• Address buyer persona objections and answer buyer persona questions within the content of the video.
• Add calls to action at the end of videos to funnel viewers to another video, blog, or landing page.
• Use videos to accomplish SEO goals and lead generation through social media accounts, blog posts, home pages, landing pages, and more.

Producing the Video Content: What Matters Most? 

You might be thinking that your agency specializes in inbound marketing but not video production specifically. The good news, however, is that creating high-definition video is possible now with relatively inexpensive cameras and lighting systems.

Of all production elements, remember that lighting is the key. To be effective in an inbound marketing strategy, overall production value does not need to be of a professional caliber. Even a talking head with a static background can offer all those mentioned benefits as long as the lighting and sound quality are good and the content addresses legitimate buyer persona concerns and acts as genuinely educational material.

Tools to Improve Your Clients’ Video Production Value

• Wistia -This marketing tool offers tons of benefits. It includes calls to action within the videos; it integrates with HubSpot, allowing analytical tracking of your video data; it’s competitively priced; and videos can be securely stored on the Wistia site.
• Adobe Premiere Pro – This software is ideal for video postproduction, allowing you to fix lighting or contrast issues and skyrocket the video’s final production value. After learning its initial logistics, it’s also not overly complicated.
• B&H – This is one of many places (online or onsite) you can buy cost-effective video equipment.

A quick online search will also reveal a multitude of sources with tips and tricks for improving your video production skills. Many of these services and tutorials are free, but there are also pay services for more comprehensive educational material.

Video Production Benefits Every Aspect of Inbound Marketing

Like any good piece of content created within an inbound marketing strategy, a well-done video is effective for both marketing and sales. This is not a tool that should be created or utilized exclusively by one of those teams. Just as effective content can bridge the gap between marketing and sales and help those teams achieve shared goals, so too can video content.

In this way, sales should be involved and have input during the strategy that goes into video production as well as actual video creation. Nobody knows a potential customer’s objections better than a salesperson. Utilize that knowledge to create videos that are effective at every stage of the sales cycle and drive those leads seamlessly down the sales funnel to the next stage.

Video creation can understandably feel overwhelming if it’s not your agency’s area of expertise. There are, however, two important things to remember. One, you don’t need to hold your video to a professional standard for it to be effective within a client’s inbound marketing strategy. (It just needs to be well lit and audible.) Two, if you are truly uncomfortable or feel ill-equipped to create these videos, you can hire help—whether that means a video production company to actually make the videos or a video production consultant to get you up to speed and comfortable from a production standpoint. 

A video marketing consultant will provide the following guidance:

• Video production and postproduction tips.
• Tools and assets to help you create better videos and integrate them effectively into your established inbound marketing campaign.
• Information about how to marry video and effective inbound strategies.
• Information about how video benefits marketing and sales (from a strategic standpoint).
• Identification of who within a company is best suited for different aspects of video production (who is comfortable being in front of the camera, creating the scripts, filming the videos, and so on).

Whatever assets your agency utilizes to create the best videos for your clients, if you acknowledge the power of video marketing, you are sure to give yourself a competitive edge against those agencies that strictly produce word-based content.

In an effort to provide our clients with the best in sales enablement services, Brand Fuzion is pleased to announce it’s now a certified partner of PandaDo

PandaDoc and Sales Enablement: What It Means for Our Clients

What Is PandaDoc?

PandaDoc is a template-based document automation service. This means you can create quotes, proposals, case studies, and other documents directly in PandaDoc.

What Are the Benefits of PandaDoc?

PandaDoc is an invaluable sales enablement tool that helps increase the productivity of your sales force. This increased productivity helps lead to increased results—more customers earned in less time.

How does PandaDoc do this?

Save Time with PandaDoc

Because PandaDoc works through customizable templates, it allows you to create, use, and reuse documents. Recreating proposals every time is extremely time consuming. Therefore, having the document already made and accessible online saves your sales team a great deal of time.

All documents are kept in your PandaDoc content catalogue, so everyone has access and need not waste time searching for desired documents.

It also takes less time to create high-quality documents. PandaDoc allows you to add graphics, videos, pricing tables, and more to ensure your documents are as clear, professional, and engaging as possible.

Integrate PandaDoc with Your CRM

PandaDoc integrates seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM. That means prospect information (so long as it’s in your CRM) will automatically populate in your template document. This leads to less errors from manual information entering, and it saves the time and hassle of copying and pasting. 

Track and Finalize PandaDoc Documents

PandaDoc also allows you to obtain legally binding e-signatures on all your documents. This makes it as easy as possible for your clients to sign contracts, which increases the likelihood this is done and done in a timely manner.

You can also get analytical data on these documents, meaning you can see information such as what pages have been viewed and for how long. Therefore, if you haven’t received a contract yet, PandaDoc helps you pinpoint the problem. If, for example, a client has opened the contract and reviewed it for a long time but hasn’t signed, it might indicate you need to reach out and answer additional questions or address concerns.

Putting Sales Enablement First

Brand Fuzion always strives to provide the most effective sales enablement tools for our clients, and this new partnership with PandaDoc is just another way we help you increase the productivity and efficacy of your sales team.