Education as a Service: How HubSpot Academy Thinks About the Evolution of Marketing

Originally published on Upwork Hiring Headquarters

As marketers, we have to match the way we market and sell to the way humans shop and buy. That’s a whole lot easier said than done. In fact, staying current in marketing depends entirely on our ability to continuously self-educate. As HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan puts it, marketing isn’t a field for know-it-alls, it’s a field for learn-it-alls. Just look at how much consumer behavior has evolved in the past few decades.

• In 1990, people found product and service recommendations through word-of-mouth referrals. If you were in the know, you were rewarded, and that information was disseminated largely through relationships. Event marketing, therefore, had its heyday.
• In 2000, message boards and search engines became our default mode of discovery. Content marketing and search engine optimization became a business imperative. If you were an SEO expert in 2003, you were a wizard.
• By 2010, social networks had married the benefits of one-to-one relationship with the vast distribution capabilities of the web, humanizing brands in a way that marketers had never experienced. Once again, early adopters like Starbucks built empires on these marketing channels.

In 2017, we are seeing yet another evolution in communication channels and another opportunity for marketers to capitalize on. If you’re a digital marketer today, you likely have a website with content that attracts visitors through search engines, and website forms that convert them into leads. With the information gathered via that form, a salesperson can follow up with that lead and sell them your product.

This strategy works, in part, because marketers are forced to build enough trust with a visitor through that initial content experience in order for the prospect to be willing to submit their information. The salesperson can see which form and why the prospected filled it out, and expand on that trust to determine whether they are a fit or not. This scaled nicely, because one piece of relevant content could continuously generate leads for sales.

This strategy is a key component of inbound marketing, wherein marketers attract a target buyer persona through valuable content, building trust and readying them for further qualification by sales. The fundamental concept of building trust and adding value before you start “selling” something is here to stay. It’s a very natural way of doing business. What isn’t here to stay, are website forms and sales follow-up emails.

The problem with this strategy is that leads entering the marketing funnel need to be segmented, qualified, and scored in order for salespeople to prioritize which ones to work first. The more time between a qualified prospect submits a form, and a salesperson follows up, the less likely that lead is to turn into a sales opportunity. Timeliness is key.

Enter chatbots: a conversion mechanism that is very appealing to prospects, marketers, and salespeople alike. Rather than waiting to hear back from a salesperson days later, an interested prospect can have their questions answered automatically through pre-programmed logic, or be routed to a human salesperson immediately. Trust is still built through free content and knowledge-sharing, but that all-important conversion point when a prospect is ‘ready to talk’ comes around – so are you.

This is one example of the evolution of digital marketing. With chatbots, comes a whole new set of skills (copywriting for conversational user interface and building logic-based interaction flows, to name a few) that marketers have to learn. Keeping up with these trends takes curiosity and diligence in self-education. Just like there was no “Facebook for Business 101” class when I went to business school, by the time universities are teaching conversational user interface, the early adopters will have taken advantage of the opportunity.

So how do we as marketers stay up-to-date on the latest acquisition tactics? At HubSpot Academy, we think about courseware the same way HubSpot thinks about software. Our course content needs to evolve with consumer behavior, and it’s up to our professors and their networks of industry experts to keep our digital marketing training ahead of the curve. For this reason, our certifications expire, requiring users to learn new concepts and prove their knowledge and application of those concepts, in order to stay actively certified.