Congratulations to PLS Web Design Specialist Beth Shope for achieving HubSpot COS Design Certification! Beth completed approximately 20 hours of training, passed a comprehensive test and successfully completed a hands-on practicum in order to demonstrate her proficiency in the HubSpot COS platform and best practices.

Why is no one following up on my sales leads?

Your lead generation activities can result in hundreds of leads. Whether these leads are generated through inbound marketing, banner ads, social media promotion, or tradeshows, they are useless unless someone follows up with them. Many companies experience this problem where leads are generated then subsequently ignored.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a webpage where your visitors “land” or are directed after clicking a call-to-action (e.g. a banner ad, promotion, free download) on your website, blog, social networks, etc. Per HubSpot’s definition, a landing page allows you to capture visitor information through a lead form.

What is a CTA?

According to HubSpot, a call-to-action (CTA) is a link or image that drives traffic to a lead-generating landing page, i.e., a webpage with a form to capture visitor information. It instructs the viewer to take a specific next step with your brand, such as downloading a whitepaper or requesting a consultation.

Video: A Mighty Medium

There’s no denying that the growth of online video has become a major marketing consideration in the past few years. In December 2013, 188.2 million people in the U.S. watched 52.4 billion online content videos (comScore), and the number of online video users is expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2016 (Cisco). More than half of executives look for more information after seeing a product or service in a video (Forbes), and 57 percent of consumers say that product videos make them more confident in a purchase (MediaPost).

Growing up my parents instilled (forced) their kids into social situations to teach us how to interact with adults. I remember a lot of firm handshakes with eye contact. You could tell a lot about a person just from that brief moment.

SPIE Photonics West

Since becoming a HubSpot certified partner 18 months ago, a lot has changed. We’ve migrated our site to the HubSpot Content Management System (CMS), started a blog, and gotten a lot more serious about social media. We’ve created several content offers and downloads, implemented Calls to Action (CTA) throughout our site, built landing pages for each offer or CTA, integrated our email marketing with HubSpot, and set up lead nurturing emails (HubSpot calls them workflows because you can automate other things beyond triggering an email). We’ve also gotten used to looking at analytics more frequently and using the results to guide content development, SEO, and in many ways overall company strategy.

The Changing Landscape of Organic Search

If you’ve been paying attention to the headlines over the past year or so, businesses, marketing agencies, SEO practitioners, and other online marketing enthusiasts predict that keyword research as we know it (or knew it), is rapidly diminishing in effectiveness. Keyword research has been the SEO go-to source for website optimization.

Who is using Google+?

Marketing People LOVE--Really?

Marketing companies talk about appealing to your customers' emotions -- hit them where they live. And it's true: as logical and business-focused as people are, buying is inherently  emotional.

Content Drives Website Traffic & Generates Qualified Sales Leads 

Recently, HubSpot released their marketing benchmark report compiled from results of 7000+ HubSpot customers representing a wide range of industries - B2B and B2C. Using data collected in July and August 2012, HubSpot analyzed the relationships between key inbound marketing activities and the volume of traffic and leads that correlate with those activities. HubSpot analyzed website pages, landing pages, blogging, Twitter reach, and Facebook reach. The report provides insights by business type (B2B vs. B2C) and by company size (by number of employees).