HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification Questions & Answers

Essentials of an Effective Inbound Strategy

1. When creating a buyer persona, you should ONLY interview your ideal customers.

TRUE

FALSE

2. Which Buyer's Journey stage does someone fall into if they are experiencing and expressing a problem?

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

3. Inbound marketing represents a fundamental shift in the way that organizations operate because it is marketer-centric.

TRUE

FALSE

4. At a high level, what three things should you keep in mind when creating buyer personas?

Identify trends, differences, and detractors

Research, identify trends, and create persona stories

Make assumptions, identify trends, and ask sales for input

Research, make assumptions, and identify trends

Buyer personas represent the ideal customers your organization is trying to attract, convert, close, and delight. Personas are most effective in:

B2B and B2C organizations

Nonprofit, educational, and B2C organizations

B2B, business-to-government (B2G), and e-commerce organizations

All organization types

6. Each prospect who comes to your website for the first time is always in the Awareness stage of the Buyer's Journey.

TRUE

FALSE

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

7.Include your primary keyword in all of the following page elements EXCEPT:

Headers

Page title

Navigation

Body

URL

8. What are inbound links?

Links to external resources

Links pointing from one of your blog posts to another

Links that you create within your inbound content

Links coming into your website

9. True or False? Every page should have a unique meta description.

True- give a short summary of the unique content on that page

False- use the same one for your business for consistency

10. As you launch a new website, your boss tells you that she wants to get found for the keyword “teamwork”. Which is the best response to her request?

"Great! That keyword is broad enough to match the searches of all of our buyer personas."

"I'd recommend choosing a long-tail version. Long-tail keywords usually have more search volume than broad keywords."

"I'd recommend choosing a long-tail version. There will be a lot of competition for that keyword and some popular sites may already hold the top ranking spots."

"Great! That keyword is broad, so it probably gets a high volume of searches, meaning lots of new visitors for us."

11. Which is a main component for how search engines rank search results?

The number of visits to the page.

The number of social followers of the business.

The number of authoritative links to the site.

The number of keywords on the page.

Creating Content with a Purpose

12. Fill in the blank: The outlined Content Process steps are plan, create, _______, analyze, repeat.

publish

research

distribute

target

13. An adventure travel company wants to create a piece of content for their buyer persona. This persona is interested in building team trust, since they work in an industry with high employee turnover. Which would most likely be an effective Awareness Stage offer for getting this persona’s attention?

A blog post on the top 10 spots for off-site adventure travel

A case study on how the company helped another business with their off-site team building experience

A webinar that covers the adventure travel company's new travel package that helps with team bonding

An ebook on how to build trust inside a team with trust building exercises

14. Content is defined by 3 things. What are they?

Purpose, format, and topic

Who, how, and why

Audience, creator, and distributor

15. If your content is focused on different solutions to your buyer persona's problem, where would that content fit into the Buyer's Journey?

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

16. You have spent a lot of time planning and creating a great content offer. You are now done with the content process and should move on to create your next piece of content.

TRUE

FALSE

17. Which of the following is NOT a metric to consider when analyzing a content offer?

Number of leads generated

Number of social shares

Performance by format type

Open rate

The Fundamentals of Blogging

18. Which of the following would be the most appropriate call-to-action to place at the bottom of an Awareness Stage blog post?

"Download the Team Building Checklist"

"Download Our Pricing Guide"

"Request a Free Quote"

"Sign Up for a Consultation"

19. Analyzing the number of views for a blog post can tell you all of the following EXCEPT:

How much traffic each post is driving

Which blog posts are performing best

Whether you've picked the right call-to-action for your post

Which topics are resonating with your readers

20. You just wrote a blog post and published a tweet promoting it. Should you share the post on Twitter again in the future?

Yes - as long as it’s relevant, you can keep sharing it over time

No - only promote your blog posts when you first publish them

21. Your boss wants you to blog primarily about your company, its services and various corporate events. What is your response?

That’s a good idea - we want to attract the most qualified visitors with our posts, so we should help people understand our business. If we write about ourselves, they’ll be more likely to purchase sooner.

That’s not a good idea - we’re trying to attract new visitors with our posts, people who haven’t yet heard of our company. If we write about ourselves, they won’t find us in their searches.

22. You work for a travel agency and need to write your next blog post. What topic should you write about to attract families that have never heard of you and are looking to take a vacation?

Why your agency provides the best experience for families

The best family-friendly vacation destinations

The affordable pricing of your family-friendly vacation packages

The latest trip that your agency organized for a family

23. Blogging increases the volume of traffic to your website in all of the following ways, EXCEPT:

More unique pages are associated with your website

Your posts will generate more conversion assists

Outside websites will link to your posts

Your posts will get shared in social media

Amplifying Your Content with Social Media

24. Fill in the blank: __________ helps marketers establish a consistent tone on their social media networks.

A social media monitoring stream

A social benchmark report

A social media publishing schedule

A social media style guide

25. Which is NOT a best practice for publishing on social media networks?

Create a social media style guide

Always use an auto-publishing tool to save time

Customize your content for different social media channels

Share relevant industry content

26. How should industry benchmarks be used when developing a social media strategy?

To develop social media posts that will be published

To compare your results to other businesses

To generate revenue from social media

To create a social media style guide

27. All of the following are terms that you could monitor to find your prospective customers on social media, EXCEPT:

Terms that your competitors use to describe your business

Terms that your buyer personas use to describe your industry

Terms that are used in trending hashtags

Terms that you would use to describe your industry

28. True or False: Social media can be used at every stage of the inbound methodology.

True- Social media can be used to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters.

False- Social media can only be used to attract visitors and monitor leads.

Enticing Clicks with Calls-to-Action

29. A CTA should always contain:

An image

Less than 7 words

An action verb

All of the above

30. Fill in the blank: A call-to-action (CTA) is a button that promotes an offer and links to a(n) ______.

Landing page

Thank you page

Website page

31. You would like to increase the number of clicks on your current CTA. What is the suggested approach to making changes to a CTA?

Test multiple things at once to maximize the value of your experiment

Give it a totally new look

Don't change the CTA - change the page that it's on

Change one element at a time

The Anatomy of a Landing Page

32. True or False: A landing page navigation menu should be different from the rest of the site.

True. Your menu should be shorter to direct people to particular areas of your site.

False. Your menu should be the same as the rest of your site to be consistent.

True. Your menu should direct people to related content offers.

False. Your menu should not exist on a landing page.

33. Fill in the blank: Landing pages are designed to _________.

Be the page that a lead “lands” on, after filling out a form

Convert visitors into leads

Deliver a content offer to a lead

Close leads into customers

34. A form on your landing page should only ask the questions that your sales team needs to have answered.

TRUE

FALSE

35. Landing pages should contain all of the following EXCEPT:

Social sharing icons

A video

Website navigation

A headline

36. A landing page should connect to a thank you page.

TRUE

FALSE

Guiding the Next Step with Thank You Pages

37. Does this example follow best practices for thank you pages? “Thank you. We will send an email to you soon!”

Yes. The message is concise.

No. It’s not clear when the lead will hear back.

Yes. It explains that the next step for the lead is that they’ll receive an email.

No. The title of the offer is not in the message.

38. A thank you page optimized for lead engagement contains:

A link to a specific blog post related to the topic

An image

Testimonials

A link to your About Us page

39. A thank you page allows you to complete all of the following EXCEPT:

Delivering the offer to the lead

Enabling social sharing

Promoting additional offers to the lead

Emailing the offer to the lead

Sending the Right Email to the Right Person

40. What does the open rate of your email indicate?

That your email is getting to your contacts' inbox

That your email has converted leads

That people are enticed to click on the offer in the email

That your subject line is effective

41. Fill in the blank: Personalization tokens and list segmentation are both examples of using _____ in email.

lead nurturing

content

A/B testing

context

42. Your boss asks you to do some reporting on your email performance from last quarter. Which email metric can you ignore?

Industry average

Open rate

Click rate

Bounce rate

43. Fill in the blank: A ______ is an email that has been returned to the sender because the email address is invalid.

Soft bounce

Hard bounce

44. Which of these is NOT a best practice when optimizing your emails for mobile?

Use a responsive template. That way your email will conform to the device your reader is using.

Make your content comprehensive. Since people carry their phones with them everywhere, a captive audience is more willing to read a longer email.

Bigger is better. When it comes to text, images, and calls-to-action, be aware that people will be reading your email on smaller screens.

Use clear and concise messaging. People are more likely to scan emails, regardless of what device they are using.

45. At the start of the year, your company has 5,000 leads. Over the course of the year, you generate another 1,000 leads. True or false: you now have 6,000 leads in your database that you can email.

False: The average email list decays about 25% a year.

False: You cannot use email marketing to close leads into customers.

True: An effective email marketing strategy is self-sustaining and will always help to generate new business

True: Purchased lists will allow a business to continuously add leads to their funnel with no adverse effects

The Power of Smarketing

46. According to the marketing and sales funnel, prospects are defined as:

Website visitors who have signed up for a blog or an email newsletter

Anyone in the sales and marketing funnel who has requested a demo or trial

A lead that has expressed interest in purchasing your product/service

Anyone that has downloaded a content offer

47. Fill in the blank: Dashboards are key to integrating smarketing into an organization because they provide _______, _______, and _______ updates as to how marketing and sales are performing.

occasional, private, transparent

occasional, public, transparent

frequent, private, transparent

frequent, public, transparent

48. Marketing’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) to sales should always include:

It’s not important to include anything specific in a marketing SLA, just having one is what matters.

The promise to engage with each lead at least three times before identifying them as a Marketing Qualified Leads.

A list of all leads on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis that are not yet Marketing Qualified Leads.

Number of Marketing Qualified Leads provided to the sales team on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

49. Smarketing is only helpful for increasing revenue for large organizations with 100+ employees.

TRUE

FALSE

50. Fill in the blank: Marketing and sales should be aligned around the same goal. Typically this is a shared _____ goal.

Revenue

Persona

Visit

Return on investment (ROI)

Taking Your Sales Process Inbound

51. As an inbound sales rep, acting as an information gatekeeper and holding power over the entire sales process helps you win more sales.

TRUE

FALSE

52. Which of the following is the best example of why the sales process has changed?

Buying habits have changed.

Sales reps want to remain in control.

Buyers have difficulty finding the right information online.

Sales reps were bored.

53. What are the four guidelines to keep in mind when connecting with your leads over the phone?

Build rapport, know your audience, speak the prospect’s language, be helpful

Build rapport, sound happy, be helpful, schedule follow up call

Be nice, know your audience, follow your planned agenda, be helpful

Sound interested, know your audience, follow your planned agenda, schedule follow-up call

54. Your company has decided to use an inbound approach to sales. Which of the following does NOT align with your company’s new inbound sales practices?

Using a scripted sales pitch on all calls.

Leveraging the buyer’s context on calls.

Building relationships with your prospects.

Utilizing content from each stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

55. How can sales reps gain trusted advisor status in the eyes of the people they connect with?

Understand the prospects problem and identify quick wins for them

Have a lot of LinkedIn connections

Be in their industry for ten or more years

Build up their personal brand as a thought leader in their industry

The Pillars of Delight

56. Who is responsible for delighting customers?

Only the executive leadership team

Only those that hold public relations roles

Only customer-facing teams

Everyone at your organization

57. Which interactions will build or destroy trust?

Only pre-sale interactions

Only post-sale interactions

All of the interactions

None of the interactions

58. It’s recommended you create some sort of interaction that takes place after someone purchases your product or service. What’s the most efficient and scalable tool you can use to do this?

Phone call

Email workflows

Social media

Mail them a thank you note

59. When should you focus on delighting people?

After they have used your product or service

At the beginning of the sales process

From the very first moment someone interacts with your business

From the moment they become a customer to delight them into promoters

60. What are the three pillars of delight?

Invent, Communicate, Educate

Invent, Serve, Collaborate