Pro Tips for Growing Your Business Online: A Q&A With HubSpot

Digital activity has exploded in response to the social and economic impacts of Covid-19, and as brick-and-mortar shops remain shuttered, more and more business continues to move online. 

While some organizations were well-positioned for a pivot to this type of larger digital footprint, others have needed more time to make the shift. Indeed, in today’s fast-moving digital marketplace, it’s more important than ever to have the right tools and strategies in place, and finding them can often prove challenging. 

In an effort to track down some of the best information out there, we spoke to Gregory Karelitz, Global Head of WordPress Partnerships at leading growth platform provider, HubSpot, and asked him for some simple ways businesses of all sizes could grow their digital strategies effectively.   

As more people work from home and new online businesses spring up, what sort of digital marketing approaches remain tried and true? 

The digital marketing approaches that work have remained mostly the same. What’s changed is that people are hungrier for education now than they ever have been before. This coincides with the fact that more and more businesses are either moving their activity online or just amplifying their online presence. 

As a business, we have the opportunity to provide that information for our target audience. That’s why at HubSpot, we’re putting a lot of resources into creating Academy courses that can be helpful for people just getting started with their online business

What, if any, new trends or strategies are you seeing unfold successfully? What are some things people who might be growing their digital footprint need to look out for?  

Brands that succeed have a strong online presence. They are easily found when their potential customers are looking for products or services like the ones they sell. Even more importantly, they have positive customer reviews and trusted sources recommend them. So, beyond any marketing activity, they are focused on delighting their customers and providing them with a memorable experience. 

Where does HubSpot come in? How might HubSpot play a role in helping online businesses attract more customers while retaining those they already have?

HubSpot enables businesses to add live chat to their website to easily engage with website visitors. Any forms tool also seamlessly integrates with HubSpot so any new lead generated on your website will automatically sync into your HubSpot account. You can personalize marketing emails as well as automate email sends so you can engage with new leads as well as customers very differently. 

The whole goal of HubSpot is to make your customers’ experience as seamless as possible by integrating all your marketing, sales, and customer service behaviors together to benefit the end-user.

Why is WordPress a strong choice for businesses looking to build out their digital footprint, or maybe expand into eCommerce, or another purely digital business model?

WordPress is a strong choice for businesses looking to build their online presence for three main reasons:

1. It’s free to use 
2. It has a massive community so you can find solutions for almost any situation
3. There are over 50,000 free plugins & 3,500 free themes that add functionality and design to your website.

Any website you desire to build – a portfolio, business, e-commerce, etc –  likely has a free theme and/or plugin to make it possible without having to code.

Businesses that need to move to an online-first model can easily do so using WordPress. For example, brick-and-mortar stores can now easily sell their products, services, and/or goods using WooCommerce, a free online store builder. 

How does HubSpot work in tandem with WordPress?  

HubSpot has created a free WordPress plugin that helps businesses grow better. 

It gives businesses functionality to:

• Engage visitors with live chat and chatbots, and convert leads with forms & popups.
• Build beautiful, responsive email newsletters and nurture your leads with marketing automation campaigns.
• Manage your entire contact database with HubSpot’s free CRM, and group contacts together with the built-in list builder.
• Measure your business growth with analytic dashboards.

What about when working with a managed WordPress provider like WP Engine? How do users on our platform benefit when HubSpot is a part of the digital experience they build? 

The benefits of hosting your website with WP Engine are speed, scalability, reliability, and security. The better your infrastructure is delivering these four key aspects to your website, the better experience your website visitors will have.

HubSpot helps your website visitors engage with your website and business better. 

When you combine the infrastructure of WP Engine with the experience that HubSpot provides, your customers will love visiting your website and engaging with your business.

Why, from your POV, is the HubSpot-WP Engine partnership such a valuable one for both of our users? 

For businesses that are eager to best serve their customers with world-class experiences, having WP Engine as your infrastructure and HubSpot as added functionality into WordPress is a winning combination. 

WP Engine takes away the pain and frustration from managing your website’s infrastructure.

HubSpot takes away the pain and frustration of managing and engaging your customers. 

What are some ideal scenarios in which a business is really getting the best out of both worlds? 

For businesses that care to grow their revenue and want their customer’s experience on their website to be great, using WP Engine for your infrastructure and HubSpot as your sales, marketing, and customer service platform is a winning combination. Their websites will be fast, secure, reliable, and personalized for visitors.

Now you’ll be able to know everything about your customers and help them more easily when using WP Engine and HubSpot.

Visit HubSpot to learn more about its marketing, sales, and CRM software, and visit WP Engine to find out more about our partnership with HubSpot, as well as our other solutions for accelerating your digital business with WordPress!