Inbound Marketing Training

How do you educate your team to drive growth marketing success?

In the last post about Centralised vs Decentralised marketing stacks, I ended with a series of questions to ask yourself about which type of marketing stack might be best for you and if it is worth considering to make changes to your marketing growth stack. But regardless of what stack you choose, one of the most important things is that the people in your organisation are aware of why they use the processes and tools, what they are trying to achieve by their actions and how it will impact them.

You can have the right intention, the right goals, the right tools and even the right procedures, but if the people using them don't understand the context and reasons for doing what they do, most of your efforts will end up wasted. This often leads to frustrations, lack of productivity and/or a lot of hard work that ends up not driving any results. Educating your team through different forms of learning is your only way to address this. In the following paragraph, we will have a look at how identify your training needs and create appropriate workshops to address them. 

So, you are thinking about running an inbound marketing workshop. This means that you likely feel that your team is not getting the most out of your Inbound tools and processes. There might be several challenges to address. If you find a good training and strategy consultant, they should be able to help you define your need further and find the training solution that is the best fit for your business. At About Inbound, we always ask you to consider a number of questions (listed below) to help you flesh out your training and consulting needs. This will make sure you end up with the best advise so you can get the most value out of your investment of time and resources. In the interest of transparency and to help you define your need whomever you may choose, we listed out some of our qualification steps for your benefit. We address these during our free scoping consultancy calls. Read on to get started!

We just don’t buy like we used to. Instead of reaching out to sales people or going into stores early on in our journey, we begin with research on Google, seeking out recommendations from our network on Facebook or LinkedIn and consuming content online. By the time we speak to sales, our mind is just about made up about the purchase. So why is it that we still market like it’s 2005 and treat our potential buyers as if they want to be sold at? Technology has facilitated the shift in buying for years. This has changed consumer attitudes in B2B and B2C which dictates us to change our marketing tactics. Increased regulations like GDPR and PECR also mean that as marketers we have to change our behavior.

Managing a business's social media content is a real challenge for most of us. In this article we'll be providing a good content publishing workflow to get you started using social media publishing in Hubspot. We'll look at how to set up an efficient social publishing workflow and execute it in a few easy steps with some inbound pro tips mixed in. This should get you up and running and pumping out decent content using social media publishing in Hubspot.

One of the hardest parts of working in marketing is keeping your skills up to date. I have made this slightly easier for you by listing several recomended learning resources in this post. This is reflected in the latest State of Inbound Report where 19% said training was the company's top challenge. Most of us spend time implementing, planning and executing campaigns. Leaving little room to brush up or expand your skill set. However, this is a dangerous tactic if you want to grow your career and become a successful T Shaped marketer (see Buffer's or Moz's diagram below).

Inbound is an increasingly popular approach that organisations are using to attract customers. For some on the outside looking in, it can be difficult to know where to start with Inbound marketing. Content offers, blogging, personas, social, email? The list goes on.  You might have seen companies being successful with Inbound but you often don't see the whole journey from the begining. Success doesn't magically happen with Inbound. You need substantial effort, the right tools, resources and process in place to really be sucessful.

I delivered a workshop in Sweden recently where the team were spread across multiple time zones, in different continents, operating in different languages and markets. The company had found themselves with a whole new marketing team due to exponential growth. The challenge was to get all the new hires trained up and the entire global team working cohesively and productively.

After I left hubspot in February 2017, I set up my business, my own business bank account, my logo, secured my first clients and delivered my first 2 day onsite within a very short space of time. It's funny, I had delivered dozens and dozens of onsite workshops in the last few years. I trained upto 160 people in my last year at hubspot alone. However, this workshop felt very different and special. It was my own business that I was representing this time.

These learnings are based on an Inbound Marketing training workshop in Dublin I ran for a group of 10 individuals from a multinational organisation in mid 2016. Only a few people in the room had any previous marketing knowledge. Most didn’t understand what Inbound Marketing was and how it could impact their day-to-day or their organisations goals. By the end of the day there was a clear transformation. They were excited by the possibilities. They understood how to use Hubspot tools to build Inbound Marketing Campaigns and had clear next steps in place.