It amazes me. I’ve worked through some of the biggest revolutions in marketing since the printing press… email replaced direct mail… websites replaced catalogs… social media replaced… well, pretty much everything… and in spite of all these really amazing, cool technological changes, I still see marketers committing the most basic cardinal sin… they’re really excited about where they want to go but never take the time to figure out where they’re starting from. As a result their messages don't resonate with their audience. Would-be buyers don't believe their claims. Marketing fails. The root cause? Their strategies are all about positioning but silent on position (more on that below). How can you understand how to get where you want to be if you don’t know where you are? Marketing strategy should be like a GPS for business and marketers would do well to review just how to use a GPS to get where they're going.

Want to start a conversation about your market position and positioning? Click Here.

I get this question a lot: “Does your inbound marketing agency use freelancers or is all the talent in-house?” When clients or prospective clients ask me this, I have to wonder, what’s behind it?

• Do they assume an agency that does everything in-house is better at inbound marketing?
• Do they think an agency that outsources is somehow lacking in inbound expertise?

Granted, there are plenty of horror stories out there about finding and working with freelance writers. You may have experienced a few yourself. I know I have. But I’m proud to admit (much like Mike Brown at nDash Marketing did a few months ago) my agency does use freelancers — and we, and our clients, are stronger for it.

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.

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?

Before we get too far into 2016, we thought it would be interesting to look back one more time at 2015, a year of evolution for the inbound marketing world as a whole and for our agency, Innovative Marketing Resources, in particular.

In 2015, we published 73 articles for B2B marketers and business owners on our Innovative Marketer’s Blog. We’ve tallied up the stats. Here are the 10 articles you were most interested in reading in 2015.