Inbound and
Digital Marketing Insights

In developing a company website, the key to success is identifying essential functionalities acquiring them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Usability, performance, and other technical factors are fundamental, but for business purposes, your site should also have workflow automation, social media integration, and similar functions.

Most people would be quick to tell you to keep your personal life separate from your professional life. The same advice mostly holds in social media: the farthest most brands take “personal” is posting supposedly candid shots to highlight company culture or show that they’re, so to speak, human.

These people would argue that compartmentalisation is the key to keeping work and the rest of life in balance. But if that were so, why are most of the social media sites for business just personal social networks that corporations choose to set up shop in? In fact, beyond LinkedIn, it’s difficult to name a network that seems more business than personal.

“Traditional web design is broken.”

You’ll see this a lot on websites promoting what’s often called “growth-driven design” or GDD, an apparently new take on web development pioneered by Luke Summerfield and evangelized by HubSpot.

If this looks suspicious at first glance, well, your misgivings aren’t misplaced. After all, it’s pretty convenient for a marketer or agency to claim something’s broken right when they have the solution for it.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever undertaken the (re)design of a website, you’d probably agree with much of their critique: traditional methods take long, rarely stay within budget, and rely too much on guesswork.

There’s been growing interest in content decentralisation in recent years, with brands scrambling for attention on old, increasingly saturated channels. With each year, there come new platforms, which marketers can bend to their ends, or new ideas on taking old platforms and drumming up interest on them. What remains the same is the question: which digital marketing platforms are poised to rule the year?

It’s been almost a month since StraightArrow’s trip to HubSpot Inbound 2016. The rush of the event may be over but the learning and practice of inbound never stop. As a business development and client relationship manager for StraightArrow’s HubSpot clients, I went to Inbound this year with the goal of immersing myself in inbound sales, extending my knowledge of the HubSpot software, and also getting a chance to meet my clients. I would say that I definitely covered all of that. Bringing home these new experiences gave me the motivation to become a more effective sales rep.