Losing control, disparate systems and a lack of team-wide direction — these are just three things that hold a business back from reaching its potential. Halting your growth, causing you frustration and driving your customers away. The solution? HubSpot.
HubSpot currently has over 120,000 customers, all of whom love the powerful and easy-to-use tools so they can attract, engage and delight their customers. HubSpot’s CRM is designed to help you grow better. It has all the integrations and tools you’d possibly need, ranging from marketing and sales to customer service and content marketing.
If you regularly publish engaging content, you gain organic leads steadily and you want to scale up, chances are your organization needs to focus on marketing automation. Having a marketing automation strategy in place will help you nurture your leads into paying customers. While automation doesn’t do the marketing for you, it’ll help you scale your efforts.
Marketing automation revolves around using software to automate your marketing activities. Whether it’s your emails, ad campaigns and anything in between, you can become more efficient and personalize experiences through automation. That’s where HubSpot comes in, as it has the technology to make automating tasks even easier.
HubSpot is a great option to go with for your automation needs as it considers your leads’ evolving needs, their interactions and their behaviors in how they interact with you across your marketing channels. The insights you receive are unbeatable — from viewing pricing pages to consuming content, you can see exactly what works and what your leads’ challenges are. Then, you can continue tweaking your marketing automation strategy to ensure it works right every time.
The second must have for organizations using HubSpot is all about establishing standard operating procedures for your entire team to follow. What tends to happen is businesses new to inbound marketing dive in without having methodological processes in place to attract leads. Then they realize personas are a thing, how important the buyer’s journey is, what segmentation means and why matching content to each stage of the buyer’s journey is essential.
Trying to fast-track the process and cutting corners isn’t the answer. It’s also why many organizations give up before reaching their potential with HubSpot. It’s mainly due to problems such as:
This is where standard operating procedures (SOP) are a must. A solid HubSpot SOP will help the long-term success of your organization as it’s the overarching guide outlining what you’re trying to accomplish with the platform, who’s responsible and how you’ll do it. It’ll also save you time training new employees as you can share the SOP with them.
Here’s a basic rundown of what’s involved:
To make the most out of your HubSpot SOP, you can use HubSpot workflows to make the SOP visual.
Another HubSpot must have is naming conventions so you can avoid the chaos that comes when conventions aren’t standardized. If you don’t establish naming conventions, team members can start naming files however they want. Some prefer detail while others just want letters. Combine them and it’s a mess for you to decipher.
First, whittle your list down to your most-used assets to avoid missing anything. An example could include:
Next, decide how the naming conventions will look. This means deciding whether they’ll be long, short, capitalized, version dates and more. Whatever you do, keep it consistent throughout. A word of advice: Try to be as concise as possible so it’s easier to identify. Here are a couple of examples you can test out:
Be sure to utilize folders in HubSpot based on things like campaigns and assets. Once you’ve done this, make sure to get feedback and tweak naming conventions until it’s something the entire team is happy with and how it’ll benefit them. Don’t be afraid to revisit them every few months either.
This could make or break HubSpot in your organization, especially if it’s coming from top-down. A major must have is alignment from the team, from marketing to customer service. Switching from one CRM to another isn’t the easiest of tasks, and it can leave teams unsettled as they’re comfortable using a platform they’ve known forever.
You need to build a business case to explain to executives why it’s a good move. Their reservations will revolve around financials, so explain how it’s cost-effective when you use HubSpot to its potential. It’s also a good idea to show real-life examples of organizations that have successfully implemented HubSpot.
For the rest of the team, show them the benefits and how it’ll make life easier for them. Offer training and refresher courses so they can see the value of shifting to HubSpot without risking dissent later down the line.
You’ll never get the best out of HubSpot or expect your organization to without having in-depth knowledge. It’s the best way to learn the ins-and-outs of HubSpot, what it can do for you, what each feature involves and more.
The best way to do this is to either explore the HubSpot Academy — which is full of video walkthroughs to help you get started — check out the community or read through the knowledge base articles.
You need the knowledge before deciding whether HubSpot is for you and creating a business case for the organization to invest in. It’s also a must have because you don’t want to waste money on features you don’t need...
HubSpot offers more than just the basics. There are multiple tiers across the five hubs for you to choose from, meaning you only ever need to pay for what you’ll actually use. A must have is knowing which plan you need for your team. For example, Marketing Hub might be a necessity whereas you could waste money on the Operations Hub if RevOps isn’t your focus right now.
But that’s the Hub. Next, you need to research the tier you’ll need. It ranges from starter up to enterprise, each offering an extra layer of powerful features and increased limits depending on what you need.
Don’t rush and hit checkout. First, note down your requirements, read through all the plans and choose the one best suited to your needs.
Finally, arguably the biggest HubSpot must have is knowing how the HubSpot Flywheel works. Introduced around three years ago, it essentially killed off the old marketing funnel instead of placing customers at the center of any organization rather than an outcome.
The Flywheel is all about delivering remarkable customer experiences. Your marketing and communications with customers shouldn’t end as soon as they’ve hit checkout. The Flywheel allows you to keep customers at the center to continue delivering content, support and service to keep the Flywheel spinning.
The Flywheel should switch your mindset entirely. You never know; customers who loved your marketing efforts might come back as you continue to delight them.