After spending a week at HubSpot’s 2019 INBOUND conference we learned A LOT. An event held annually to bring thousands of marketing and sales professionals from around the world together, to sharpen their skills in digital tactics and knowledge. After a fun but intense four days of learning, we wanted to share our top takeaways from this years’ conference that help us market and grow better:

What is Marketing Technology?

Marketing Technology, or MarTech for short, is defined as the tools and technologies marketers use to make their jobs—and lives— simpler. MarTech can help any kind of business run better by improving the marketing team’s effectiveness, strategies and activities. MarTech does this through automation, e-commerce and connectivity, to name a few. Marketing tools have developed alongside the changes in today’s technology to help businesses of all sizes market their products and services better.

Asking for more budget dollars is about as popular as asking for a raise; nobody wants to be the messenger, but everyone wants to be the recipient. Regardless, when you need that budget increase, you’re going to have to ask. The key lies in doing your homework and presenting your argument well. Here are five steps to guide you in building your case for a digital marketing budget increase.

A HubSpot User Group (HUG) is a local community of business friends and acquaintances who share a desire to organize and escalate their marketing efforts using HubSpot. If you’re a HubSpot user, joining a HUG will expose you to new HubSpot resources and how to put them to work for you. For newbies, spending time with more experienced HubSpot users is an invaluable tool for getting tips, lessons learned and more from those already in the trenches. If you aren’t sure whether a HUG might be worthwhile, consider these reasons to join in!

You have been in the marketing world long enough to know about the concept of personas. These semi-fictional portraits of your best customer you are marketing to can help you write more inspired messaging as well as present this information in a way your ideal audience likes to see it. However, personas are only as good as the work that goes into creating them. An imagined persona with loose demographic information doesn’t give you the information you need to make a targeted marketing strategy. Instead, thorough research, detailed interviews and careful analysis of real data about your existing customers are essential to creating a persona that works for your business.

Wouldn’t it be great if all your customers were your best customers? No matter what industry you’re in, you probably have those potential clients and customers that your sales team loves to sell to and others that are … much harder for your sales team to see eye-to-eye with. By creating an ideal client profile, you can identify the type of person who tends to buy and be satisfied with your product.

HubSpot’s Marketing Starter Hub is opening new doors for businesses with small budgets eager to get started gaining leads with inbound marketing. HubSpot is a marketing software company that provides contact relationship management (CRM), marketing, sales, and customer service software to companies of a range of sizes.  They also provide training and resources on inbound marketing. The inbound approach is a marketing that aims to help potential customers find your business in the places they are searching by creating helpful and human content rather than interrupting their day with invasive ads and cold calls. HubSpot’s all in one solutions make it easy to keep your entire marketing and sales operation going without redundant busywork or anything slipping through the cracks. These solutions are also scalable and are designed to grow with your business.

Whether your business is a handful of people or hundreds, you have company data that is in a constant state of being updated, changed, or deleted in different computer systems, spreadsheets, and software packages. No wonder discrepancies occur and mistakes are made when information you thought was correct isn’t.

It’s never been so important to harness all company data or “digital knowledge,” clean it up, and maintain that cleanliness. It’s a big, important job, especially when it comes to sharing company information online. And incorrect information that’s already posted online also needs to be dealt with if your company wants to improve SEO rankings and keep up with the competition. If digital knowledge management isn’t on your radar, it should be. Here are five compelling reasons why: