Should Your Staff Have A HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification?

Today, many companies are re-evaluating their marketing efforts and looking for new marketing techniques to replace the ones that are no longer working with new tactics that will generate leads and help them grow their business.

If this describes your business, you have probably discovered inbound marketing and are considering whether this is the right approach for your company. 

You may have even come across training programs, like HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification, which teaches marketing teams inbound tools to develop a growth strategy and sales teams ways to nurture and convert leads. 

If you have a marketing person or staff, you may wonder if you should have them complete the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification. 

Below we’ll explore what the certification offers, as well as what the certification may mean for your long-term marketing planning. But before we do that, it is important for you to determine whether inbound marketing is right for your company. Otherwise, the time and money it takes to get certified will be wasted. 

Is Inbound Marketing Right For Your Company?

Many companies have turned to inbound marketing to help them achieve their sales goals. 

What is inbound marketing?

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. This long-term strategy aims to create connections that potential customers are looking for by solving problems they have. 

For a more thorough overview of inbound marketing, visit Everything You Need To Know About Inbound Marketing. This article covers a lot more topics and how you should use them in your business.

In today’s digital age, outbound marketing (such as mailers or cold calling) isn’t nearly as effective and focuses on delivering content potential customers don’t always want. This leads to a waste of time and resources on your end, with nothing or very little to show for it.

But how do you know if an inbound marketing strategy is right for your business? Here are a few good indicators:

• The average revenue per sale or average revenue per customer per year is at least $500.
• There is some level of education or research required for a customer to buy.
• Your business is focused on building a long-term strategy, not a short-term fix.

What Does The HubSpot Certification Offer?

A HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification offers anyone involved in the sales and marketing of your business the opportunity to learn about inbound marketing techniques and to develop a better understanding of core tactics used in this type of digital marketing. 

The HubSpot certification course, which is free and is a globally recognized certification, advances the skills of your team members who help create and manage your marketing plan. Currently, the course curriculum that is part of the HubSpot Academy covers topics such as:

• Inbound marketing fundamentals
• Understanding social media promotion
• Developing a conversational growth strategy
• Understanding conversion strategy
• Understanding lead nurturing
• Aligning your marketing with sales
• Applying a customer marketing approach

The course typically takes a little over four hours to complete and includes videos and quizzes. At the end, anyone who takes the course and passes the final test will receive a certificate that is good for approximately two years.

HubSpot offers several other certification areas as well, including content marketing, SEO training, business blogging and inbound sales.

Why Would You Need This Certification?

You may be asking yourself, “Do we really need this certification?” The answer...Only if you are planning on implementing an inbound strategy.

Inbound marketing creates a comprehensive plan tailored to your business and the type of customer you want to attract. As part of inbound marketing, you create a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data about customer demographics, online behavior and speculation about their motivations and concerns.

You then develop quality content and use lead generating techniques to target your audience and help them find you. These techniques include:

• SEO optimization
• A website with high-quality content
• Blogs
• eBooks
• Videos
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Call-to-actions
• Guest blogging

As you can see, inbound marketing includes several components that work together. It is important to have a full understanding of it. Trying to implement it piecemeal won’t give you the same results. 

That’s why taking an inbound marketing certification course through Hubspot can help you better understand the role these different tools play in this effective form of marketing so that you can continue to develop and implement a growth strategy for your business.

Should You Do It Yourself Or Hire An Agency?

An effective marketing strategy requires a lot of time, energy and money, and that can feel overwhelming. You want to expand your services and grow your business. But you don’t have time to learn everything there is to know about inbound marketing, and you can’t afford to make any mistakes. 

The truth is, even after you or your staff earn the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification, your work is just beginning. 

The good news is there’s help out there. Inbound marketing agencies are skilled at implementing an inbound strategy that pulls people toward your company’s products or services. This will allow the consumer to become acquainted with your company on their terms, and allow you to focus on running the day-to-day operations of your business. 

Inbound marketing has a lot of moving parts that must be managed so that they all work together toward the same goal. This can get quite expensive for businesses who want to bring everything in-house and hire a team of designers, copywriters and a marketing manager to implement a successful marketing plan. 

Many business owners typically use a base salary versus an hourly rate for a marketing agency to compare your options. It’s easy to conclude that since the hourly rate for a marketing agency is higher, it must be the more expensive option. 

However, many owners fail to take into account the true costs associated with hiring and retaining an employee. Keep in mind for every employee you hire, you must also add in expenses such as payroll taxes, health insurance contributions, retirement plan matches, vacation and sick days. The true cost of hiring an employee can be as much as 1.25 to 1.4 times the base salary.

And that’s just one employee. If you need to hire multiple team members, each experienced in his or her own skillset, expenses can escalate quickly … not to mention the cost of recruiting and training all of these employees. 

Our article, Why Should I Hire A Marketing Agency For My Small Business?, breaks down in a comprehensive cost comparison infographic which is the more cost-effective approach for marketing your business...Hiring a marketing firm or hiring internal staff to cover all the necessary components of an inbound marketing plan. 

Most Companies Need Help

If inbound marketing is right for you, a HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification can help you better understand the different components of this long-term strategy. 

However, in our experience, it can take  a year or more to get a full understanding of how to implement an inbound marketing strategy, not to mention numerous skills. That’s why many companies find that the most effective act they can take to generate more leads and grow their business is to find an agency that knows how to implement an inbound strategy … and deliver results. This saves both time and money!

Need more tips on what to look for in an inbound marketing partner? Our article, How To Pick An Inbound Marketing Company, provides important questions to ask when determining whether an inbound marketing partner is worth the investment of time and money.