Data-Driven HubSpot Features
In this post, you'll learn:- The importance of combining Marketing & Sales Tools
- Our favorite HubSpot marketing tools
- Our favorite HubSpot sales (CRM) tools
- Getting additional HubSpot support
Did you know that 64% of marketers today say they experienced benefits from a marketing automation platform within the first six months? (Regalix, 2015)
Maybe you're one of those people, and HubSpot has produced some results and you want to leverage it even more. Or, maybe you've bought it, but are struggling with what features to concentrate on, and you're quickly getting overwhelmed. Either way, we think these tools might be the help you need. Read on to find out how you can leverage some of our favorite data-driven tools that help your business grow more strategically.
HubSpot Marketing Features
Digital marketing today is loud, crowded, and getting more and more competitive each day. Because of this, it can take a lot to get your voice (and the product and service you're selling) recognized. You are seemingly always on the hunt to be as productive as possible so you're not wasting any time marketing to the wrong person at the wrong time. The good news is, you recognize the power of how HubSpot can reduce these time-wasting problems, and that's the first powerful step towards maximizing your productivity and marketing effectiveness for your business. Now, you just need to learn how to use all the features for optimum results!
At ManoByte, we help companies take their HubSpot efforts further to enhance marketing and sales productivity with both ends of the HubSpot platform. We know HubSpot is a marketing automation software with many resources to help execute marketing and sales strategies, but it can be a lot to manage. Because we know and understand the tool so well, we want to share the tools that can help you unlock more leads and enhance your marketing and sales processes.
So, let's dive into those products we love to use! But before we get to that, you have to understand one important thing first: There are two “sides” of the tool that work together to grow your business - the marketing side (marketing automation) and the sales side (Sales tools and the HubSpot CRM)
In order to use any of the following features, you must utilize the marketing tool and the sales/CRM tools together. Utilizing one without the other is much like driving an ice cream truck down the street in the suburbs while blasting all kinds of kid-friendly music, but without ice cream in your freezers. In the end, you might have a lot of children interested and coming to your truck, but a massive piece of the overall ice cream truck experience is missing - frustrating your potential customers.
1. Campaign Tool
We use HubSpot to track all marketing and sales effectiveness, so the campaign tool is a MUST for calculating, analyzing, and adjusting campaign effectiveness. It works by tying all marketing efforts you're executing (emails, workflows, blogs, social media posts and ads, and much more) and provides data on how your efforts are working collectively. This can help you to see exactly which areas need changing or adjustments. The marketing campaign tool is located under the “Productivity” tab in the Marketing Dashboard.
Here's an example of one of our campaigns:
As you can see in the screen capture here, the campaign we ran for a "video marketing" keyword was executed on with the development of 10 landing pages, with four different call-to-actions and a blog post.
The efforts yielded over 614 site visits, 14 new contacts (these are leads we worked) and a new customer. This provides a more comprehensive view of how your efforts are working
Sidenote: When people ask what makes marketing efforts like ours different, this is one of the key elements: data you can see and use to make adjustments. For example, when you look at this report, we know this campaign was effective, but our blog
2. The Workflow Tool
Here's what the workflow tool looks like:
Let's say you want to create an email workflow that's based on the specific needs of your target persona. We would then use HubSpot’s workflow tool to develop automated emails that are based on specific user activities and interests. For example, let's say you are targeting medical offices, and a physician downloads one of your eBook content offers. They can then be automatically enrolled in an email workflow with content that's written specifically for those physicians. Or, let's say your other persona is a hospital executive, and they download your free webinar. They are put into a series of different email workflows that are catered specifically for their interests. Then, the reports begin populating with interested leads who are engaging with the content created for their unique needs. This makes things easier when striking up a sales discussion. (Imagine your sales reps being able to customize their conversations: "I see you downloaded our eBook about maximizing efficiency at your hospital, I have a solution that can help you with that.") The Workflow tool can be found in the “Contacts” section of the Marketing Dashboard.
Want a guide to help craft perfect workflows? We've got step-by-step directions right here.
3. The Content Strategy Tool
Merely going after a few select keywords are going to be a thing of the past in the coming years. As voice search and Google searches become more advanced, it’s going to become more about the precise terms being searched and the quality of the content that matters most. The HubSpot Content Strategy tool provides assistance that helps us to build out content around more advanced search terms, linking them all together to establish value so they perform more effectively in search results for SEO. It all starts with what's known as "pillar content" at the center of the strategy. That pillar content sits on one of your web pages and leverages a set of terms you want to rank on search engines for, you then build out supplemental content (HubSpot calls this "cluster content") around it with elements like blog posts that support the topic in the pillar. Doing these things establishes the pillar content as an authority, which helps it to rank higher on search engines like Google. Keep in mind, all of this content in your content strategy should be high-quality, informational elements people want to read.
Here's a hint: the content you are reading now is serving as pillar content for us, and throughout the
Here's what content strategy looks like in HubSpot:
4. Reporting Tools
Effective marketing strategies in today's digital landscape require that data-driven decisions are at the forefront of your efforts. From things like website traffic to content and keyword strategies to lead creation processes and email performance, the "Reports" section should be one of your most visited areas of the marketing platform. For quick reference, the Dashboard area also provides a glimpse into the most important data, and it can be customized to your needs with whatever information is most important.
HubSpot's Sales Features
5. Messaging
Currently, HubSpot can be configured to put a small chat box window that will appear when people visit certain (or all) pages on a website. Doing so provides a quick and easy-to-use channel for someone to get a quick answer to
Here's what the messaging window looks like:
6. Email Tracking
Wouldn’t it be a nice convenience to know exactly when that key contact or important decision-maker
And if you're away from your desk, it's not a problem. All data is captured on the contact record, so you can log in and find out exactly when the email was opened and if the user clicked on anything. If you connect your inbox with HubSpot, you can also add the log and tracking features so all information is stored in the CRM for future reference. (We'll show an example of what this looks in your inbox soon.)
7. Sales Email Templates
We don't want you wasting any more time drafting individual emails to each of your sales contacts. But we don't want you sending out templated emails that look super automated, either. So, to combat this issue, we use the HubSpot sales side to help automate the sales follow-up process with the Templates tool. We create the copy inside the tool with some of the most common sales follow-up emails you typically use, we then use automated personalization tokens, and finally, we label them for easy selection and follow-up for the sales reps. After we've connected your individual email inbox to HubSpot, the templates can be selected right from the preferred email composer you use. (We'll show you what that looks like in your email composer in a moment as well. Read on.)
8. Scheduling Tools
The HubSpot tools integrate with the majority of the main players in email and calendar platforms, which makes it easy for a prospect to schedule a meeting with you. We can implement the convenience of a quick link to your calendar in all chat and email connections, (see my chat image above to see what we mean) so whatever communication you utilize, we are providing a way for a prospect to block off meeting time and send you a notification that a new meeting is now on your calendar. Going back to the topic of email workflows for a moment, when we create automated emails, you might not even know a contact has read an email from your business. But, if it includes a HubSpot scheduling link, the scheduling tool creates a nice surprise when a prospects "randomly" books a time to meet with you about your company's product or service.
For an example of this, here's a screenshot that was taken right from my email composer. As you can see, I have options to use templates, email tracking, and a convenient scheduling link all in my inbox. These integrations just make sales communications easy and convenient - just as they should be.
In Conclusion
While these are our more commonly used features we use to leverage inbound marketing and HubSpot for our valued clients, this is just a small sampling of the tools we use to leverage inbound marketing strategies for companies. If you want to learn more about how you can utilize the various features of HubSpot, we have more available on our website right here and of course over on our blog right here.
