Using HubSpot Projects to Improve Your Inbound Marketing

One of the most prominent organisations in digital marketing has once again made a splash in the world of marketing education.

HubSpot, the well-known inbound marketing software company, recently launched a new section of their Academy: HubSpot Projects.

“Projects” are designed to teach HubSpot customers how to better accomplish their inbound marketing goals using HubSpot tools, by breaking down each larger project into a series of steps.

How HubSpot Projects Works

The new Projects section of the academy is a series of learning modules that allow customers to get detailed processes and tips from HubSpot about how to achieve certain goals. These goals are broken down into seven major categories:

• Attract more visitors
• Convert more leads
• Close more sales
• Delight more customers
• Build a campaign
• Create better content
• Design better pages

Each major goal category includes a couple of modules that relate to that goal in some way. The modules go into detail about how to use HubSpot’s tools, such as the COS, Social inbox tool, and email marketing software. At the beginning of each module, there’s a time estimate for how long it will take to complete the project and a short video that introduces the project and gives a bit of background.

Why Did HubSpot Launch Projects?

For several years now, HubSpot has been leading the charge in educating people about inbound marketing and providing them with the tools to meet their marketing goals. In fact, HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah are credited with inventing the term “inbound marketing” ten years ago.

The launch of HubSpot Projects appears to be a continuation of the company’s effort to influence the inbound marketing sphere. So far, they have had nothing but success. HubSpot recently revealed its Q1 earnings for 2015 at an impressive $38.3 million, a 58% year-over-year increase from 2014 and higher than analysts had forecasted.

For much of the past few years, HubSpot has enjoyed double-digit growth in revenue as well as customer acquisition. The company recently announced that it had reached 15,000 customers, quite an accomplishment considering that at the beginning of 2014 HubSpot had just over 10,000 customers. A huge part of HubSpot’s continued success is establishing itself as a leader in the inbound marketing space, and while they have plenty of competitors, a report from media company Venture Beat last year ranked HubSpot as the number one marketing company over heavy-hitters like Salesforce, IBM and Eloqua.

That’s all well and good for HubSpot, but how can Projects help your organisation and its inbound marketing efforts?

3 Ways HubSpot Projects Can Help Your Inbound Marketing

• Organisation. Even if you are already pursuing the marketing tactics that are described in the Projects section of the academy, you might not know how to group them together so that your marketing team can share resources. HubSpot Projects helps you clearly define the goals of your marketing campaigns, whether they are to close more sales or to convert more leads

• Training improvement. Have you been looking for a way to better teach new marketing hires the tenets of inbound marketing? Projects is a perfect supporting tool to help you standardise your marketing efforts so that everyone at your organisation is on the same page when it comes to techniques and best practices

• Campaign overhauls and adjustments. If you are already pursuing some of these marketing projects but your campaigns have been stagnating, Projects can help you inject some life into them by giving you information about some best practices. For example, if your goal is to attract more visitors to your website and you aren’t sure what the next step should be for your SEO campaign, you might check out the modules on link building and on-page SEO.

Of course, savvy marketers understand that one of the biggest goals of HubSpot Projects is to promote the use of its marketing automation tools. While most of these goals could be achieved with any other automation tool, HubSpot makes specific reference to its own products several times throughout its training modules.

It’s just another example of HubSpot showing companies how marketing through education and value is much more effective than the traditional, interruptive model.