How HubSpot helped me renew my enthusiasm for and faith in marketing

Over the years, we at Justis Publishing saw our marketing efforts, which were focused on outbound emailing, become increasingly ineffective. We slowly came to realise that advances in the internet had changed buyers' habits for the good. They were responding less and less well to being prospected and approached out of the blue, as they were more likely to tap into websites with good SEO to educate themselves on their options. We began to understand that the only way we could overcome this and properly align our sales and marketing efforts would be through marketing automation, focusing on better content marketing. We shopped around and liked the way HubSpot marketed to us. Their concept of "inbound marketing" resonated and we wanted to emulate it. After a trial, we decided to subscribe and we have been using it throughout 2014 to manage our new blog, landing pages (including those for AdWords), emails, social media and, soon, a new website. It's a slow and at times painful process but the analytics show that it should pay off if we persevere. The service is managed by the marketing team but is also heavily used by our developers, and we have found that using HubSpot helps these two departments work better together, something that's crucial for our line of work. We sell online information for a relatively high price, business to business and with quite long sales cycles. So inbound marketing, which allows us to become a trusted voice to our prospects and customers, serves this business model very well.