If you are new to Hubspot, it can sometimes be a real challenge to understand how the platform works and making maximum use of its features. Since Hubspot is an all in one platform and offers all the services in a single place, it’s easy to lose a lot of time while exploring the tool. The same can also be said if you are a small company, and you simply lack the resources to invest in exploration or have a limited amount of time to explore the tool thoroughly.
Even if you aren’t facing any of these reasons, keep reading since today we are going to guide you through your Hubspot portal and show you 8 ways to make your Hubspot management more effective.
1. Get Everything Organized
This is the place where you want to start. From the very first day you need to call a meeting with your account/project/department managers and organize all the work together. Have each department manager familiarize with his own section first, before proceeding to the others. This way they will get to know Hubspot bit by bit, and share the experience with their team, while causing minimal work disruptions. For example: Your content manager should take a look at the content tab, see what it offers, what can be done, what statistics can be tracked, etc. Social media manager likewise takes a look at the social tab, getting to know the publishing, monitoring and calendar tools. This will help all department managers get a clear idea of how are they going to distribute the work between their teams. If you do not have department managers, I strongly recommend you to hire them ASAP. The more time you spend without them, the higher is your cost of inaction (COI) going to be.
2. Use Partners to Your Advantage
If you are a new Hubspot user, you might be very price sensitive concerning the different packages. This is especially true about startups. To maximize the ROI of using Hubspot, you need to have a dedicated person/team who will make use of all the features given for the price. If you do not have such a person/team, you can always consider your Hubspot partners. Ask them any questions you might have, request free evaluation and let the more experienced comrades guide you through your first month(s).
3. Your Hubspot Plan Features
Depending on the Hubspot plan you purchased, you are going to have an access to some general features that come with the basic plan, and also have a chance to access some of the more advanced ones with professional or enterprise packages as you move on. Its important to know exactly what are the strengths of the plan you are currently using and utilize everything to maximize benefits and ROI. What our experience has shown us is that there are often some important features that are mostly underutilized by very many users. For the basic package (which is probably what you are using if you are new) the most underutilized features are the distinction between MQLs and SQLs. People generally don’t use this feature and after some time end up with lots of leads on their hands, but cannot really say which of the leads is in what stage of the lead lifecycle. Every good company should know the importance of differentiating MQLs and SQLs, especially if they use sales and marketing integration. For professional packages, there are more underutilized features including mobile optimization and progressive profiling. Mobile internet usage surpassed desktop usage at the end of 2014. This means that optimizing your website and content for mobile is a really high priority and cannot be ignored. Make sure to familiarize yourself with all the features and use them all to your advantage. There are no useless features: you just need to understand what they are useful for.
4. Integration and Correlation
When shifting to Hubspot, some users already have a platform they operate with, and some start everything from scratch. If you have been using another platform to operate before, like WordPress or Magento, it’s important to take into account integration and correlation. For example, you could be using WordPress to manage your website pages, and use Hubspot for blogging and landing pages, or vice versa. In any of these cases, you should correlate your operations to make maximum use of the data available and not lose any information in the work process. If you are using Hubspot for your website pages, but leave your blog on WordPress, we strongly recommend shifting it to Hubspot as well. Use your web developers and designers for this purpose. Hubspot blog offers more features and better user experience for your team in terms of blogging so it’s much more convenient to use and analyze conversions, number of views, CTA clicks, etc.
5. Measuring Your Performance
Being able to measure performance is going to be your key success factor regardless of the platform you use. When making the Hubspot shift, gather together with your team and set up all the reports with your preferences. Include social reports, sources, landing page, CTA, emails, campaigns, etc. All the reporting tools should be put up and customized in advance and we also recommend you to have 1 buffer week for discussing the reports, making the necessary tweaks and finalizing your customization. There seems to be a problem with social reporting section that keeps coming up for the majority of users. The problem is the vast amount of direct traffic showing up in the reports. To make things clear for you and see what numbers are actually true, use google analytics and webmasters tools to compare the numbers and come up with some sort of solution and understanding regarding this issue.
6. Content Tools
One of the great advantages of Hubspot is the campaign tool under the content tab. Campaigns let you organize your content in different sections depending on your chosen strategy and action plan. You can assign every landing page, blog article, CTA, social media message and email to a specific campaign and later analyze the effectiveness more efficiently. When you have a lot of content, it’s very easy to get lost in the analytics and time consuming to try and actually decipher everything manually. Make sure you create enough templates for landing pages, site pages, etc. to be able to perform A/B testing or use different templates for different content formats. For the blogging section you have the option to create multiple blogs. This is very useful if you need the same content to be available in different languages. They will just use separate domains. Having all the necessary templates set up from the beginning is going to save you a lot of time afterwards. Use your designers or hire some in case you don’t have them to create the different templates.
7. Contacts and Lists
Lists are an effective way to segment your leads and contacts. Create various types of lists consisting of different lead categories to have them organized prior to working. Use the criteria that suits your business needs most for this purpose. For example you can make a list of MQLs to send them nurturing emails and not go through the trouble of adding every lead manually, which is especially going to be a pain as the number of your contacts grows.
8. Connect Your Social Media Accounts
Since Hubspot is offering all-in-one social media management, it’s a good idea to connect all of your social media platforms to Hubspot and publish/schedule posts all from the same place. You might think this is something minor, but when you do it, you will actually see how much easier your life will get with that. You also have the option to connect Hubspot with your bit.ly account if you like, to track the interactions of your links, although Hubspot offers the same service, which comes with the package automatically. It’s up to you to decide which one you want to go with. The auto publishing tool allows you to publish messages automatically from the social media tab. This is especially useful if you have little time that you can dedicate to social media processes. You can use personal or company Twitter and Facebook accounts with this tool. Another useful step to take would be making use of the social media calendar. Have your social media manager instruct his/her team to fill out the social media calendar with posts for a few weeks/month(s) forward so that all the team will have access to it, should they need to subtract/add any information. This is also useful to mark the important holidays of your industry and not miss any of them, in case you plan any special offers/events for those days.
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9. Competitors
Competitors tool can be of good use. You can add all the information about your competitors into Hubspot and the software will track their activities. You can later analyze your position compared to the competition based on a few criteria like website rank, MOZ rank, etc.
10. Be Open for Help
Lastly don’t be shy to ask for help if you are new. Your more experienced partners will love to answer your questions and help you with your struggles. You can tweet to Incredo anytime, should you have any questions, request a free assessment and so on. Don’t take all the weight on your shoulders, split it instead. Everything is very user friendly and easy to use: figure out which tools you need most and focus on those. If you make maximum use of all the features available, you will have enough data to work with and actually achieve your marketing goals.
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