M & A Rainmaker

You know that Golf advert – ” sounds just like a Golf ” well the other day I am having a conversation with someone and they are telling me that ” they have something that sounds just like a HubSpot ” . I’m saying to myself – well I don’t want something that sounds just like a HubSpot – I want a HubSpot.

Look – I don’t work for HubSpot, I ain’t getting paid by HubSpot and if you cut my head open you won’t find ” HubSpot ” written inside – it’s just that I can’t stand all this stuff that looks and sounds like HubSpot but isn’t HubSpot.

This web developer sort of guy is saying to me ” Yeah, well I can pull this app. to do analytics and this app. to do this bit and this app. to that bit and .. ” and I’m thinking right, so YOU are going to pull all these apps. together to tell ME what I want to know about my website and my Internet Marketing and so forth.

ok so that’s cool but I can go to HubSpot’s Marketing Grader and get a full analysis of any website at any time.

I can put my website onto the HubSpot platform ( which has an Alexa ranking of 702 in the world – I DO NOT have time to explain the value of platforms to you ) and get information about the performance and effectiveness of my website in a way that I can understand – as a business owner – easily OR I can let you pull together all these apps. and then try to explain to me what they are saying – because I will never be able to understand them myself.

Look – if I want something like a HubSpot I will look you up – in the meantime I will have  HubSpot please. 😉

Lichfield in Staffordshire has a very Internet aware local government ( e.g. Lichfield District Council uses Twitter for Planning Applications ) and local business population. I thought it would be interesting to use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader software to grade the Internet Marketing Performance of a random selection of Lichfield based businesses.

I chose my random selection not so randomly, mainly from HubSpot’s Twitter Grader for Lichfield on the basis that if people were on Twitter then they were likely to be pretty Internet savvy and social media aware. Hence my selection was ( in order of best performing ) Lichfield Live  , Lichfield District Council , Executives on the Web ( our ” web ” company ) , InterVallum ( Paul Hooper-Keeley has the most Twitter followers in the area ) Hellmann ( Logistics ) and finally Framework Gallery ( who I spoke about in an earlier blog and who performed well in a local search on ” oil paintings “.

http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/staritems

I wanted to get a bit of a ” spread ” of results i.e. from high end results like Lichfield Live ( who you would sort of expect to have a comprehensive Internet presence ) , through Lichfield D.C. ( who probably have a team of website specialists and as mentioned before are very pro. social media and the Internet ) to Executives on the Web ( who again, as a web based business, you would expect to be pretty high ranking )  to Hellmann’s ( who arguably don’t need a particularly strong web presence ? ) to Framework Gallery who, as I say performed well in some earlier searches.

I don’t propose to go into any detail on each of the reports ( they are all listed below if you want to take a look at them ) but you probably need to understand that these grades are relative to thousands of other websites around the world i.e. 78/100 means that the Lichfield Live website in conjunction with it’s associated blog and social media memberships  has a better internet marketing performance than 78% of the web presences reviewed by HubSpot. That’s pretty good !!

You also need to understand that HubSpot takes a pretty ” salesy ” view of life. Terms like Top of the Funnel and Middle of the Funnel may not mean much to some business people but they will be familiar to most salespeople. HubSpot’s mantra is ” Get Found ( on the Internet ), Convert ( Visitors to leads ) and Analyse ( how you did it and how you could do it better ).

To achieve this HubSpot recommends the establishment of what I call an ” Internet Ecosystem ” i.e. a combination of a website, a blogsite and various social media memberships and other sites that essentially drive visitors back to your website. ”

Marketing Grader Reports

http://marketing.grader.com/site/lichfieldlive.co.uk  – 78/100

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.lichfielddc.gov.uk – 68/100

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.executivesontheweb.com – 60/100

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.hellmann.net – 39/100

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.intervallum.co.uk  – 31/100

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.framework-gallery.co.uk – 12/100

I have recently been using Hubspot’s Marketing Grader to assess how well some of my clients Internet Marketing efforts are working. It is a fantastic tool and looks at not only a company’s website effectiveness but also the supporting Internet ecosystem.

A tool like HubSpot Marketing Grader is vital when trying to work out how easily a person or companies website is being found on the major search engines for relevant search terms and also how well visitors to that website are being converted into prospects and customers.

HubSpot has always looked at Internet Marketing in simple terms: How well are you found ? How effectively do you convert ? What are the statistics that support that process and how can they be improved ?

What I find so often is that people don’t understand what a website is there for. It is there as part of your overall marketing efforts to create leads and convert them to orders.

As a salesperson I completely identify with this view of the world and I say to people ” Treat your website like another salesperson or sales team ” and look at it’s effectiveness in the same way that you would look at the effectiveness of your sales team.

If, as I have done, you were running a salesforce ( in a fairly advanced way ) you would measure things like Activity, Skill and Knowledge and collect information like “How many prospects they have ? ”  “How many proposals they have written ? ” and other data that would give you some indication of the effectiveness of your investment into a salesperson or salesforce.

It is somewhat interesting that HubSpot eschews some of the “old ways ” of prospecting and selling ( broadly lumped into Push Selling or Marketing or Outbound Selling/Marketing e.g. telemarketing, mailshotting etc etc ) whilst utilising many of the same methods of analysing the effectiveness of the ” Pull ” or ” Inbound Marketing ” approach.

Internet Marketing is not just about an effective website it is also about traffic being driven to that website from blogsites and social media and about the effectiveness of e.g. your Facebook campaigns and presence in their own right.

HubSpot’s Marketing Grader gives you a comprehensive checklist to work through but you do have to understand the overall strategy.

Get your Internet Marketing Grade here:

http://marketing.grader.com/

If you need help understanding what to do please contact me.

Here are a couple of links to videos about Marketing Grader

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj80vTmJp4Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlAA18xjKE0