By jfuchs@hubspot.com (Jay Fuchs)

The inbound methodology is really important here at HubSpot. I think you could go so far as to say that it’s more or less our “main thing” — like almost everything we push, preach, and practice as a brand hinges upon it.

In the interest of keeping this post focused and practical, I won’t go into a holistic, thorough, “pay attention because I’m going to quiz you on this later” exploration of inbound marketing. I’ll just cover where blogging stands in the process.

Successful inbound marketing starts with attracting prospects — a step where you put out thoughtful content that provides value for your audience — and a blog is one of the better, more traditional vehicles for that.

As you can probably tell, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “provides value for your audience.” That’s why I made it bold and put it in italics, so you know I mean business.

This article is going to cover how The HubSpot Sales Blog team leveraged data to determine what “value for our audience” means, the strides we took to capitalize on that understanding, and the stellar results we saw.

Let’s dive in! Yeah!

“Boy oh boy! This sure sounds like it’s going to be interesting! But before you ‘dive in’ … who are you?”

Good question, make-believe reader who‘s going to ask about all of the things I need to address throughout this post! My name is Jay Fuchs, and I’ve been the editor of and principal content strategist for The HubSpot Sales Blog since July 2021.

Now that introductions are out of the way, let’s get to it.

“It’s so great to meet you, Jay! Your credentials are so impressive! You mentioned that the process was data-driven. Where did that data come from?”

Another great question, reader who exists solely for the purpose of giving this article some kind of rhythm! This process was rooted in hard data. Let me get into how we sourced it.

I’ll start by taking this as an opportunity to shout out the good people at Glimpse. It’s an AI-driven research platform that enabled us to gather the kind of insight we needed. It lets you survey virtually every kind of audience and turns around results in a couple of days. We leaned on it to source our data.

We also really lucked out because “sales professionals” is one of the bases the platform can put you in touch with — so with a resource that allowed us to pull data directly from our target audience at our disposal, we started what would ultimately become our value definition exercise.

“That’s so cool! But what is a ‘value definition exercise’? Is that actually a thing, or did you make that up?”

I’m honestly not sure if value definition exercise was a term I heard professionally, a phrase I made up on the fly, or something that came to me in a dream. Regardless, it was the best way to describe …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron