While inbound marketing is a multi-faceted and multi-layered approach that embraces the full spectrum of marketing activities – from buyer persona development to campaign tracking to analytics – at the core lies what is truly its most defining element: the buyer’s journey.

An Adobe Systems and ResearchNow survey of digital marketers found that 76% of businesses believe that measuring marketing ROI is a critically important objective. That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that only 29% – or about 3 in 10 – feel that they’re doing this effectively and consistently.

Like plenty of other businesses – including some of your biggest competitors – you wisely decided to launch an Inbound Marketing program to generate more leads, sales, revenues and profits. Good move! 

It’s not uncommon for businesses to juggle what it would consider a “crazy number of tools” to manage their marketing analytics. 

Business owners and marketing executives are constantly searching for ways to maximize their marketing ROI – especially now that competition is fiercer than ever, and customers can instantly exit the sales funnel simply by hitting the back arrow on their browser or the “unsubscribe” link in their email.

If cash is the proverbial lifeblood of a business – particularly small and mid-sized businesses – then leads are the fuel that drives more customers, more revenues and more profits. Every organization wants to drive traffic to their website, but more importantly, they want to produce qualified leads as a result of that traffic.

As you explore your inbound marketing options, a name you’ve likely come across more often than any other is HubSpot. And there’s a simple reason for this: HubSpot INVENTED the term "Inbound Marketing"! 

A frequent question our clients ask us at Leap Clixx is: “Can I utilize HubSpot without hosting my website on HubSpot?”

A website is your business’s flagship digital asset, and leads are the fuel that makes it function. Indeed, you can have a brilliant website loaded with features and worthy of awards, but without leads it’s not an asset, it’s an albatross. 

At this point, you've encountered Google Plus (a.k.a. Google+) pages, and you may even have one associated with your personal Gmail or YouTube account with it. (Okay, let's face it: Google has thrust it upon you and typically, it's their way or the highway...)