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.

One advantage to running the inbound marketing agency that has worked with and trained more HubSpot-certified agency partners than any other is that, if it’s possible for something to happen in an inbound marketing engagement, we’ve seen it happen.

We’ve seen inbound marketers consistently produce high-quality sales leads because they have a process for testing value proposition and honing their approach with data. And we’ve seen other marketers with huge budgets and Fortune 500-level resources give up after starting and restarting campaign after campaign with little to show for their investments.

“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?

If you've used Google Analytics, you're probably familiar with the idea of "unique visits" (although these days Google has actually updated their terminology to call these "users").

Marketers often care about unique visits because they trepresent unique, individual, anonymous visitors coming to a website - a good statistic to know! But this is often a dicey metric to track - even the best tools (like Google Analytics) can only make a "best guess" estimate by trying to track users with cookies which isn't always reliable. Users can clear cookies, use browsers that block cookies, or a whole host of other things that mess with this data (for a more technical explanation of how this works, check out this great article on Cutroni, Hits, Sessions & Users: Understanding Digital Analytics Data).