My business group had a speaker yesterday that spoke to me and 14 other CEOs in NYC and he was going over marketing inbound strategies. His firm is a registered Hubspot partner and he was talking about how we all should be tracking our inbound AND offline marketing activities in Hubspot (or any other marketing automation software…) and I raised my hand and complained about the fact that Hubspot after 10 years still refuses to accept the fact that anything exists in the marketing world outside of digital inbound techniques, like trade shows, print ads with custom landing page URLs, etc.
He said you can do it and I argued that you can’t. (we agreed to disagree…)
Unless i’m missing something we are all still trying to accomplish a simple marketing task: tying marketing spend in offline campaigns to deal conversions.
I need to know if my trade shows or print ads are paying off.
(YES we also do other digital inbound marketing techniques also…this isn’t EITHER/OR marketing strategy.)
My biggest bone to pick with Hubspot is that there seems to be this massive ignorance of the real world and how it operates. We’re not all digital software companies marketing only on the web. We have to do offline marketing techniques like direct mailers, trade shows and print.
Hubspot, i know you find those words dirty and disgusting, but yes people still do mail things with stamps. printers print. we do trade shows. Yes they are petri dishes of disease spread, but they actually work. I know they do, but i just don’t know how much. Should i do more trade shows? less trade shows? I need your software to tell me that campaign effectiveness.
I’m spending marketing budget and i need to know if it working or not.
you’ve all heard the adage: I know 50% of my advertising is working.
I just don’t know which 50% is actually working!
HUBSPOT: please wake up. The world is not 100% digital.
SOLUTION: let me assign a lead/contact to a campaign manually so you can tell me if that lead came in via a trade show and then converted to a paying customer.
I gave this up foolishly when we ditched Salesforce (good riddance!) and now are regretting it ONLY for this fact.
BTW, Hubspot, if you’re listening, I’m the person that told your product managers years ago that i didn’t care how many leads i converted to contacts and how many contacts converted to deal…the thing that really matter is how much $$$ are we making! So knowing if our marketing spend is working or effective actually is really important. After a few years you came out with reports and dashboards that now tell me this, but it is just missing 50% of my marketing activities.
Just think we all need to continue hammering this home until the powers that be wake up.
All…please chime in and reiterate if you are unhappy about the current state of affairs.
Hubspot: everyone on this thread would be ideal candidates to put on a beta list to review any kind of works in progress before it launches (if it ever launches).
Yours longingly and lovingly…
Jeremy