At Huble Digital, we like nothing better than celebrating a team win with a social drink or two over zoom! But while most of us lean towards a cold pint as our staple, we definitely share a taste for the finest wines the world has to offer — we have an office in Cape Town, South Africa, after all! One evening, we got musing about the overlaps between HubSpot, Inbound Marketing and fine wine.
Here are the surprising similarities we noticed:
HubSpot, Inbound Marketing and winemaking are a marriage of art and science
Back in the day, ‘marketing’ was synonymous with ‘advertising’. And as we’ve all learned from Mad Men, advertising is a strictly creative endeavour. There’s little hard data that goes into, or comes out of, advertising. With HubSpot and Inbound Marketing things are different — there’s art and science, creativity and logic. Data informs how the platform is built or improved, how content is created, and how performance is measured and understood.
The same goes for wine-making. Biology makes grapes possible. Chemistry makes the fermentation of grapes possible. Art and the vision of the winemaker are the magic that brings these facets of science together to create the ambrosia we get in wine bottles. A winemaker, rather like a digital strategist, will refer to data during the whole winemaking process to make sure their vision is realised.
Crafting a killer digital marketing strategy, like making wine, requires patience
Making wine takes time. First, you have to plant vines. Then you have to wait several years before harvesting grapes. Then you have to make wine and wait for it to mature. This all requires patience and tenacity — and is actually quite similar to crafting an inbound marketing strategy. You get to know a client, their industry and their customers. You create a digital strategy and content calendar for them. You execute said strategy and create content. You share content via social media. Then you wait.
Inbound Marketing is all about letting your stellar content draw the customers to you. You nurture these potential leads until they are ready to buy from you — not until you want them to buy from you. It takes time, tenacity and patience. Just like making wine.
Wine and content are made with the consumer in mind
Inbound Marketing is customer-centric, not marketer-centric. And HubSpot is designed to make it easier for marketers to be customer-centric. Those advertising campaigns so deftly whipped up by star advertising man, Don Draper, were made to sell products, with little thought given to the people who’d be looking at them. Inbound is different. Content — eBooks, blogs, videos, podcasts — is created for specific target customers to inform them, entertain them, or both. HubSpot, in turn, makes it possible to work with this content, and manage the client relationships it creates and strengthens, efficiently.
Wine is also customer-centric. True, a wine-maker might be driven by nothing but a love of wine (rather than a need to educate people), but the end product is meant for enjoyment and to answer someone's existing needs. Wine doesn’t exist to control people — though its inebriating qualities might do so unwittingly — but to delight them. Quality content made through inbound marketing should do the same.
Not all wines, strategies or platforms are created equal
Every wine is unique. True, mass-produced wines are made to have a consistent taste and body across vintages, but high quality, boutique wines will vary from year to year. Climate, weather and all manner of external factors will have an impact on the wine’s final taste, as will winemaking and maturation techniques. Each wine is a product of its environment and what the winemaker wants to achieve with it.
The same can be said for Inbound Marketing strategies, and how you use the HubSpot platform. Each strategy needs to be tailored to the client, their customers, their marketing goals and budget — and HubSpot configured accordingly. A strategy that stays the same year on year, is one that fast becomes stale and isn’t responding to user data.
A lot of hard work goes into wine-making and Inbound Marketing - warranting liquid rewards
Harvest time involves a lot of sweat and toil. Grapes are picked, sorted and carted off to be turned into wine. It’s hard work that involves a lot of beer to keep the vineyard workers, viticulturists, cellar managers and winemakers hydrated and high-spirited.
The same goes for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy. While not as physically demanding as the grape harvest, formulating, executing, monitoring and tweaking a digital marketing strategy requires hard work. And there are no holidays! Google never sleeps, which means your social media accounts and blogs need to be kept ticking over. That deserves beer, and plenty of it! And while we can’t speak for the HubSpot team, it wouldn’t be surprising if more than a few discussions and brainstorms were fuelled by a pint or two!
While a glass of wine can go down a treat at the end of a successful day, we’re driven by the time we spend crafting digital content, backed by cutting edge strategies and rolled out with the help of the HubSpot platform.
Without our passion to help you transform your business, we wouldn’t enjoy that end-of-day cheers. To learn how we can help you grow your business, contact a Huble Digital consultant today.
