INTRODUCTION

At HubSpot for Startups we help young companies grow using inbound marketing sales, and service, but it became clear that to do this there was something missing - a guide to how inbound can be specifically leveraged for startups.

Your company’s path to scale is unique. With this playbook, you can create a marketing plan custom to your company and ensure your business is on the road to success. Full of tools, templates, guides, and much more, the Startup Growth Playbook is an interactive guide that will allow you to approach your marketing at full speed.

Planning

At the core of planning an effective marketing, sales, and service approach is embracing a set of guideposts to lead your strategy. We recommend the inbound methodology for startups. Broken into three main segments - attract, engage, and delight - inbound marketing has proven to be effective for startups who need fast growth on a limited budget.

Embracing Inbound

What Makes Inbound Different?

Go to Market Strategy Blueprint

Beginning Your Journey Towards Marketing Success

Planning your go to market strategy is a critical step in ensuring your future marketing successes. Going to market might feel a little bit like you against the world; there are dozens of different channels you can target: from social media, to organic, to referral, but how do you know which one is best for your company?

Attract

As a young company, nothing is more important than driving traffic to your website. The easiest way to attract traffic to your website begins with understanding your target audience then producing content they love.

Persona Development

Defining Your Audience

You can't market a product or service without knowing who you are selling to. Thus, the first step in attracting visitors is creating a buyer persona for your ideal customer:

 Create yours today using the "Make My Persona Generator" below.

Customer Journey

Establish the Path

At the core of any marketing campaign should be a thorough analysis of your customer’s journey. While you can’t understand every possible route a prospect might take towards becoming a customer, it is critical that you do have an idea of the major ones.

Website Evaluation

Is Your Site up to Snuff?

You’ve spent many long days getting your website live online and your efforts have paid off: it looks great, it’s easy to use, but you’re not quite done. You need a website that not only functions well but one that drives traffic. Use to the tools below to ensure that your website performs well across all devices and search engines.

SEO and Keyword Planning

Fine-Tune Your Website

A great SEO strategy begins with your buyer personas. 

They have a problem, you have the solution, but what steps will lead them to becoming a customer? The journey all begins with the first query they type into their search engine.

Figuring out what exactly that first search looks like is the key to developing an SEO strategy - these searches will end up forming the basis for your keyword strategy. How do you come up with these keywords and how do you ensure they are the right ones? Check out the tools below:

Blogging

Reeling in Visitors

You’ve perfected your persona and kicked butt with your keywords, now it’s time to start generating some killer content. At first, blogging might seem like a distraction from your company's true goals, however, there are three important reasons why you shouldn't dismiss content marketing just yet:

Clearly, blogging plays a key role in the inbound methodology but maintaining a quality blog isn't a walk in the park. Doing so requires producing valuable and excellent content at regular intervals.

 Use the tools below to get started creating your own creative, helpful, and beautiful blog:

Engage

Now that you’ve attracted website visitors, you need to engage them with your content and turn them into repeat visitors. As you provide more value to your prospects you will begin to build trust.

Content Offer Creation

Educate Prospects and Earn Trust 

Now that you've attracted prospects through your blog and social media posts, it's time to use more advanced content to convert them into leads. Every blog post should be followed by a call-to-action - a noticeable, clickable button - linking to a content offer that prospects receive in exchange for their contact information.

What type of content you offer depends on the stage of the buyer's journey. The resources below will help guide you through this decision process. 

Engagement and Analytics

Optimizing Your Funnel 

No startup can afford to lose any time or money - quickly figuring out which marketing channels are working and which aren't is critical. Once you've identified these channels, it's time to double down on the successes and re-evaluate or cut the failures loose. 

Check out the resources below to get your reporting and analytics skills up to par: 

Sales

Inbound Marketing Requires Inbound Sales

At the end of every interaction with a well-crafted inbound marketing team needs to be a sales team ready to receive leads and close deals. To truly make the most of your leads, it’s critical for your sales team to embrace the inbound sales methodology.

New to the concept of Inbound Sales? No problem! Use the free Inbound Sales Certification course and HubSpot's free CRM to get up to speed in no time.

Delight

The cost of acquiring a new customer is dramatically higher than the cost of retaining an existing customer. Creating the final step of the inbound methodology, delighting customers should be treated with the same care and attention as all the other steps of the methodology.

Captivating Customers

Aim to Please

 It's easy to move straight on to the next prospect after closing a customer, but happy and loyal customers can be a game-changer for a new business: they can become repeat purchasers, promoters of your brand, or even play a role in creating your next product.

Check out the posts below to get your startup's delight game in to full gear:

Continuing Education

Grow Your Knowledge

Marketing is becoming harder and harder everyday: it requires more analytics, more thought, more creativity. However, if done well it can also be less expensive, more efficient, and more beneficial to the customer.

The world is going inbound and so are the most successful companies. If you want to truly master the ins and outs of inbound marketing, there is no better way than to get Inbound Certified through HubSpot Academy.

WHAT IS HUBSPOT FOR STARTUPS?

 

HubSpot for Startups is designed to help startups grow. If eligible, your startup will receive up to a 75% discount for HubSpot's complete software in the first year.

We understand that startups have limited budgets for sales and marketing software. That's why we created HubSpot for Startups. If eligible, you're granted anywhere from 30-75% off HubSpot's customer platform in the first year. 

HubSpot helps you easily build beautifully responsive landing pages, emails, blog content, and more. It also plugs into apps for startups, so you can integrate all your tools. The Startup Onboarding gives you technical assistance in setting up your portal, up to one training session per quarter with a marketing and sales coach, 24/7 access to HubSpot's best-in-class support team, and HubSpot's training academy to teach you best practices for Inbound Marketing and Sales.