Your B2B company’s ecommerce site — and the customers who use it — could be an untapped trove of marketing opportunities.

In B2B, online shoppers are looking for more than prices and specs. They’re looking for answers. Every time someone visits one of your catalog pages, it’s an opportunity to provide those answers. It’s a chance to steer them towards helpful content — and in the process, capture their information for your marketing database.

But for too many B2B companies, the gap between ecommerce and marketing is a yawning chasm. Their ecommerce and online marketing platforms (like HubSpot) are black boxes, neither revealing their valuable secrets.

But shouldn’t you be able to market to the people who are already shopping for your products? Aren’t the people who already know your brand the ones most likely to become new or upsold customers?

One company, Boiler Supplies, thought so. Here is how they, with the help of our agency and the HubSpot APIs, spanned the divide between ecommerce and marketing.

Too often, businesses embark on an inbound marketing campaign with the full power of the HubSpot platform but no idea where to focus that power.

They flit from tactic to tactic — blogging, creating landing pages and calls-to-action, building social media campaigns, tracking keywords — hoping to gain traction by chance.

Or they put on their blinders, narrowly zeroing in on an arbitrary tactic with no plan to pivot away if it doesn’t work.

The results rarely make a convincing case to re-up that costly HubSpot subscription. But as the five case studies here show, inbound marketing can be worth it. It can generate quality sales leads and new customers. But you can’t get there with either the tunnel vision or shotgun approach.

As a provider of hypnotherapy training for mental health professionals, the Wellness Institute competes in a field saturated with “kooky,” low-quality websites. Wellness’ leadership team hoped a well-branded, high-quality website would stand out, establishing the institute’s credibility among an audience of experienced therapists with advanced degrees.

When you first access your HubSpot portal, there are so many things to do: You can start by importing contacts, placing tracking code on your website, inviting your team (and each team member needs certain permissions, too), and the list goes on.

With so much to do, it’s easy to forget the important tasks.

Here’s a list of eight things you don’t want to forget to do in your brand new HubSpot portal.

“Where do you find your writers?”

I brace myself for this question any time I’m called into a meeting with prospective clients of my inbound marketing agency. It’s what anyone who has tried inbound marketing for any significant length of time wants to know.

Social media and inbound marketing go together like beer and pizza. Sure, you could have one without the other, but dang it, it just doesn’t seem right.

If you’re lucky, your company is big enough (and wise enough) to hire a specialist to fill each role. For many marketing departments, that’s more a dream than a reality. So what’s a time-strapped marketer to do?

For the answer, I went to Chelsea Hunersen, social media and community growth manager at HubSpot.

In the Northeast following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, most people were left with catastrophe and businesses were forced to shut down for weeks due to damage, no electricity, phone lines, or heat.

It was a devastating time for the area, no matter how much you may have personally been hit by the storm.

When you work for other businesses, like marketing agencies do, your cashflow disappears really quick in this scenario. And that’s what happened to me at the time, as a one-person company trying to grow.

With this forced downtime, there was a silver lining.

Who says there’s no free lunch? They’re actually right; there isn’t. But if you’re getting started in marketing automation or if you’re already a user of marketing platforms like HubSpot or Marketo, there are some free tools that you can use to improve your effectiveness and make marketing magic.

But you already knew that, right? The reality is that a lot of the free tools out there are just junk. Buggy, bloated, or of questionable value. So the question isn’t whether or not there are free tools online. The million dollar question is which free tools will make you more productive and efficient and which tools will make you more of a digital marketing rock star with every minute of your precious time that you invest?