5 Reasons Marketers Are Becoming Certified

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May 8, 2015

There’s a trend in inbound marketing that you’d better not miss. More and more marketers are realizing the value of becoming certified through HubSpot and they’re making it a priority for their staff.

We’re a HubSpot Gold Partner (ed: we made Platinum status in October 2015) and we’ve been certified since 2012. Every employee in our agency is required to have at least one certification through HubSpot.

What’s the big deal about certification? Here are the top 5 reasons we get recertified every year.

1) It’s a win for our clients

If you’ve ever remodeled your kitchen, you know how important it is to hire a professional electrician. You need someone you trust to do the job right—and do it safely. When your cousin Joe says he’s happy to do your wiring for a case of beer, tell him he can have the beer in exchange for the name of a licensed electrician.

Likewise, there are many inbound marketers who aren’t certified. But just because they practice inbound marketing, that doesn’t mean they’re equipped to produce the results their clients are counting on.

One of the biggest reasons we’ve chosen to get certified is because our clients get a huge win from it. They can trust that we know what we’re doing because we’ve been properly trained and accredited. Our work meets the standard required for certification, so our clients can rest assured that they’ve partnered with an agency that can help them reach their goals.

With a certified inbound marketer, you know what you’re getting.

2) Certification sharpens our axes

Ever visit a dentist who hadn’t kept up his training once he got his degree? Unskilled marketing may not be as painful as bad dentistry, but your business will still feel it!

No matter what your profession, you’ve got to keep learning to stay at the top of your game. Your field is constantly evolving as new technologies and discoveries are developed. Like sailing with no fixed reference, it’s unbelievably easy to drift away from best practices over time without even realizing it.

Getting certified and maintaining certification is how our team keeps our axes sharp. Renewing our certification helps reinforce things we’ve known for years and introduces us to new and better ways of helping our clients get better results.

3) It’s the bedrock for our process

Every once in a while a new client tells us how impressed they are with our process. Their previous marketing agency valued creativity to the detriment of process, and campaigns never ran as smoothly as they should have.

We’re big on process. Without a process, you’re cutting yourself off at the knees and you never see the full benefits of your efforts.

Inbound certification helps create an infrastructure to support our process. No matter what the project is and no matter which strategist is leading it, our whole team is on the same page. Certification gives us a common language, common goals and assumptions, and agreement about how to do inbound marketing.

So when our strategist advises a new client on content strategy, it’s the same message they heard from Sales, and the same message they’ll hear when they meet with our content specialist.

4) We get world-class marketers

Certified marketers are the cream of the crop. They’re in the know. Major players in the game of inbound. Best of the—well, you get the picture.

Getting certified makes a marketer highly prized in the world of inbound and it gives them a boost professionally. Whenever we’re hiring, the inbound-certified candidates immediately rise to the top of the short list. We know we’re getting the best talent and most knowledgeable people when we hire inbound-certified staff.

Certified marketers can also make a case for salary increases. And certification provides skills that open the door for new roles within a marketing agency.

5) We’re consistently in our sweet spot

There’s nothing like hitting your sweet spot. All the parts move in harmony with each other and come together at just the right time and in just the right way to create the kinds of results you’re aiming for. It’s a beautiful, satisfying thing.

Certified marketers are equipped to get the best results from inbound marketing tools and strategies. They know how to optimize content, what to measure, how to evaluate results and how to target the right prospects at the right time. Certified marketers are also experts at using HubSpot’s terrific suite of marketing tools.

That means that we’re consistently working “in the zone.” We’re not trying to figure out best practices or cobbling together bits and pieces of inbound methodology. We don’t make do with inferior tools or second-best processes.

Of course, we’re still constantly learning, and nothing ever goes perfectly. But certified marketers aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel.

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