"We tried digital marketing and it didn't work", heard it from too many small businesses, and almost always the same six mistakes are in play. Ignoring Facebook, contributing to the wrong blogs, joining networks without a plan, assuming the persona, trying to reach everyone, no campaigns at all. Here are the mistakes and how to avoid each one before they cost you another year of "it doesn't work".
When someone gives you a zero on NPS, they aren't just rating you, they're sending a message. The data backs it up: response rate and comment rate curves spike at zero across multiple companies in a remarkably consistent shape. Here's the analysis, why it matters for service recovery design, and the case for treating zeros as a separate workflow.
![[Case Study] Iron Mountain Doubles NPSⓇ Survey Response Rates](/_astro/iron-mountain-history.TOPuUCNx.jpg)
Two small changes to Iron Mountain's NPS survey invite doubled their response rate, change the "from" name to a real person, and embed the first question in the invite itself. That's it. Here's the full case study, why each change worked, and the knock-on effect on internal engagement when the data became hard to argue with.
There's no direct LinkedIn-to-HubSpot integration, which sounds like a problem until you discover linkedhub, a free Chrome extension that bridges them well enough for daily lead-prospecting work. Here's how we use it to enhance lead data, save data-entry time, and turn LinkedIn into a HubSpot input channel in about five minutes of setup.
Most blog readers will never fill in a form, and most inbound marketers leave that traffic to evaporate. HubSpot's Prospects tool quietly shows you which company domains are visiting, even when nobody downloads anything. Here's the exact process for turning that raw "interest" signal into named leads, including filters, alerts, content scoring and the LinkedIn lookup that closes the loop.
A B2B sale takes 3 to 12 months, costs serious sales time, and might involve hundreds of hours just on the proposal. That's why qualification matters more than nurture: every wasted hour on a low-probability lead is an hour stolen from a real opportunity. Here's how to qualify probabilistically without being rude about it, including the MQL-to-SQL handover that most teams fudge.