As a partner in an agency that adopted HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology early on, I was excited to learn about the new Inbound Sales Certification Training that is now available for sales and marketing professionals. Below you’ll find a link to learn more about this new model and training opportunity as well as more of my favorite posts from the week including information on crafting persuasive content, Google’s RankBrain, a tool to help you create Facebook videos, and a guide to local content marketing. 

Approximately twice a month, a local number appears on my caller I.D. It’s a number from a company that I don't recognize and it interrupts my work. I rarely answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize, so I just let it ring and ring. I probably should answer the phone and end this sales-cycle roller coaster. No more than a minute later, I will have a new email with the subject line “Voicemail" arrive in my inbox. By now I know the script of this particular salesperson and can tell you that they provide IT services for businesses that use Microsoft.

If you’re looking to boost your email subscribers, learn more about LinkedIn advertising strategies, discover design tips for non-designers and more, this week’s posts are for you. Also, if you are in the process of creating or refining a presentation, be sure to check out my favorite post on dumb slides you should delete immediately and what to say instead. Here are five great marketing and sales posts that stood out to me this past week:

As everyone knows, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  Apparently the same can’t be said for Wolves.  Wolf Paving, an asphalt paving contractor and manufacturer serving Milwaukee and Madison, WI, is celebrating 75 years in business in 2016.  Some companies that have been around that long can easily get complacent with their marketing and rely on the status quo to grow their business the ‘old fashioned’ way.  Wolf Paving isn’t one of those companies.

Did you know that Leadpages offers a fantastic feature to create simple text campaigns to grow your email list? This can be an incredible tool for people that use traditional advertising methods like print campaigns and radio spots and I’ve heard that podcasters use it as well. Once you create this simple text campaign, you have the ability to pass the email through to a HubSpot list which can then trigger a lead nurturing campaign. That’s what we are going to walk through in this video.

I’m excited to share this week’s list of posts because a couple hit close to home. The first listed on Facebook ad strategy is a great audio post by my consultant, Rick Mulready, who provides great insight about the many recent changes marketers need to know. Other posts touch on a new way to view the sales funnel, an awesome LinkedIn cheat sheet and Google’s top 3 search ranking factors. Lastly, I want to share our agency’s list of top Midwest conferences for 2016 – including our own, Experience Inbound taking place this May.

Content marketing can show great ROI for both B2B and B2C companies, so why do so many companies, even those with dedicated marketing departments, struggle with getting it done effectively and frequently? Content marketing is complex and always changing, and hiring the amount of skilled staff that you would need to do everything from writing to editing, to promoting and social-sharing, is time consuming and costly to keep all functions of content production and promotion in-house. Additionally, implementation of a strong content marketing plan can be overwhelming for many small businesses. 

Each year, our team at Stream Creative is proud to issue our picks for the top Midwest marketing and advertising conferences. With budget and short-distance travel in mind, we’ve lined up a great list for 2016!

This week’s list of posts is all about social with a little bit of content and lead generation thrown in. From LinkedIn best practices for individuals and businesses, social advertising to re-thinking how we position calls-to-action and Google+, the social platform we love to hate - the best articles I read from the past week touch on the ever-changing world of social promotion for business and the importance of testing and analyzing how readers are engaging with your content.

Are you currently using LeadPages to create landing pages and convert leads? This video will show you how to make sure your LeadPages forms are connecting to your HubSpot contacts database. You’ll first want to make sure you have your HubSpot Integration set up at the account level. HubSpot integration is available with a LeadPages Advanced plan. Now that you have your integration set up, you will want to build out your first landing page using a LeadPages template. Next,  you can connect the LeadPages form to your HubSpot forms so the data will pass through. Below are the steps that you will need to take to accomplish this task.