One of the most popular uses of online surveys is for businesses to conduct research. By sharing surveys, companies have the opportunity to perform valuable market research that will aid in buyer persona development, journey mapping, lead nurturing, and to obtain valuable feedback. Additionally, Survey Monkey notes, “Surveying your customers to test branding and naming concepts will help you understand the attitudes motivations, and preferences of your customers, especially in relation to your competitors.” Regardless of your motivation for incorporating surveys into your inbound marketing strategies, utilizing the Survey Monkey Integration in HubSpot allows you to take your data and turn it into something actionable.

People make buying decisions much differently today than they did 15…10… even 5 years ago. Gone are the days where a cold call is an acceptable form of capturing the attention of new prospects and customers. In fact, most people don’t even like answering a phone call from a friend, much less have a conversation with someone they have not met. This is just one example of the drastic change businesses have experienced in recent years with generating leads and mapping their buyer’s journey.

Building buyer personas is one of the critical first steps to developing and implementing a lead generating marketing campaign for your business or client. Identifying your ideal customer and interviewing key individuals or groups of individuals who align with the characteristics of that ideal customer, is the spot-on way to gather information needed to create the most detailed persona outline. Individuals or groups may include current customers, prospective customers, and third party networks. Information collected that will provide valuable insight for your persona development may include both demographic and psychographic information, needs, interests, goals, challenges,pain points, social networks used, areas where the prospect interacts with others or does research online, and more.

In a recent post announcing HubSpot’s launch of their new inbound experience and content optimization system, we gave a brief overview of a tool called Social Inbox.  It’s a resource we’ve been testing out with some of our clients and have found that it has an incredible ability to allow sales and marketing representatives to make social initiatives what they always intended to be – a way to personally connect with and address prospects and customers’ needs. While weeding through the clutter can be a challenge, social media and email marketing are highly recognized by company executives, marketing and sales leads as a way to grow business.  Social inbox incorporates functionality that allows for social conversations to be organized and prioritized in a way that better examines marketing analytics and represents ROI.

We discuss quality content with our customer partners on a daily basis and most know that it is an essential component to marketing success. As our ability to target messages with dynamic content expands, so does the need to create content that provides an educational, exciting and inspiring experience for web visitors and email recipients. The best way to ensure content is relevant to both current customers and prospects is not necessarily about changing your message, but customizing it with dynamic content. In order to do this effectively, you need to know something about the preferences of those you are targeting.  You’ll be hearing a lot more about dynamic content in the future but for now, here’s an introduction and what you need to know:

This week, 5,000+ marketers from around the world have come together in Boston, MA for Inbound 2013 – a four-day event hosted by HubSpot featuring more than 100 keynote sessions, product demonstrations and entertainment.  The Stream Creative team is onsite and not only are we learning from colleagues representing other parts of the country and sharing a bit of our own expertise, we are hearing all about the incredible new product offerings being launched this week by HubSpot.  One of the biggest announcements happened today with the unveiling of The Content Optimization System, Social Inbox and Signals. Here’s the latest on what HubSpot platform users have to look forward to with many more details to come…