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Contents

The Ultimate Do It Yourself Guide To Successful HubSpot Management

Learning The Hubspot Toolset

5 Surefire Signs You’re Wasting Money on HubSpot

Self Management vs. Hiring In-House vs. Hiring an Agency

Developing a Winning Content Strategy with HubSpot

Conclusion and Additional Resources

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The Ultimate Do It Yourself Guide To Successful HubSpot Management

Leaner business models and tough economic times have many business owners searching for ways to save a few dollars by not hiring outside assistance with business tasks. More and more, the do-it-yourself trend is becoming a mainstay for ‘trimming the fat.’ What many owners end up doing is trimming the muscle and jeopardizing their time and resources.

One example of this new trend is the HubSpot do-it-yourselfer. If you’re reading this ebook, chances are you’re familiar with HubSpot and how this tool allows users to streamline the process involved in launching and managing inbound marketing campaigns to help generate new leads and business.

This guide was created to help you lone wolves out there to:

Learn the basics of HubSpot Avoid common pitfalls of managing the tool yourself Realize money-saving strategies for business owners like you Maximize the entire suite of tools to implement a winning content

strategy Know with certainty which marketing efforts work best

Let’s get started.

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Learning The HubSpot Toolset

Deciding to take the big plunge into a new marketing strategy is a risky undertaking. Whether you’re just getting your feet wet with HubSpot, you’ve had HubSpot for a while but haven’t maxed out it’s true potential yet, or you’re trying to decide if HubSpot is the right tool for you, there are a few things you should know.

The first step to success with HubSpot is to

understand the purpose and power of the tools. The number one mistake most DIY HubSpot users make is failing to take full advantage of what they’re paying for. HubSpot’s a great marketing software, but it’s up to you to create and execute a successful lead generation campaign. If you’re committed to absorbing the methodology and techniques, it is perfectly possible to effectively operate HubSpot’s tools on your own.

Now, let’s dive into the purpose and power of the toolset.

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Tools for Generating Traffic

Increasing the size and quality of web traffic is a surefire way to make money through your website. That’s the good news. The bad is that increasing web traffic isn’t always so easy. Free word of mouth marketing and direct traffic may yield a small return initially, but it’s not enough to generate traffic long-term. But guess what, HubSpot’s got tools for that! Here are some of the tools that will help you not only create that kick-ass content your audience is begging for, but help you promote it as well.

Keyword Tool

Helps find the best keyword opportunities for marketing content in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

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PRO TIP: Be strategic about the keywords you choose to target. Use long-tail keywords and phrases in your content. These keywords are typically easier to rank for and drive more targeted traffic. Look for keywords that have high monthly searches and low competition.

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Blogging Tool

Allows users to easily optimize and publish articles, videos, infographics, and other blog content. Your blog is the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy, so blog consistently and on-topic with your strategy. The more you blog, the more blogs you have for anonymous web visitors to fall in love with. Each blog you publish becomes an indexed page in search engines. As time passes, your posts will become more visible to web visitors if you use proper search engine optimization techniques.

TIP: Use the keywords you found with the keyword tool in the blog title, meta description, headers, and image text. The blogging tool gives you SEO recommendations and notifies you if you miss any optimization steps that will help your rankings. Use engaging images and video if you can. Note: Blogs with optimized videos have been proven to rank better organically in search engine results listings.

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Social Media Tool

HubSpot syncs with your specified social media accounts, allows you to monitor keywords mentions in the different social channels, and lets you distribute your content either manually or by scheduling it.

PRO TIP: USE IT. Don’t underestimate the power of scheduling your social media posts in HubSpot. You may prefer Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or even logging into each individual network, but neither funnels data and analytics back into HubSpot. Remember, a decentralized strategy creates more work than it accomplishes. Publish your new posts 3-5 times on Twitter, but don’t post the same exact tweet, mix it up, be creative.

Used properly, HubSpot’s traffic generating tools work brilliantly at attracting visitors to your website. Some of these visitors will convert to become contacts (that’s HubSpot’s word for “leads”). But without a winning strategy to nurture leads from visitors to customers, you’re missing the mark entirely. This brings us to the next set of tools.

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Tools for Conversion

HubSpot’s suite of lead nurturing tools is quite impressive to say the least. Not only can you convert web visitors into leads, but you can save a pretty penny as well. And, it's a straightforward 3-step process that most business owners can tackle quite confidently on their own. Here are the three tools and three pro tips:

Call to Action Button Creator These buttons inform the website visitor of what action they should take next in order to get something they want. Whether that’s buying a boat, scheduling an appointment, or downloading a free trial, the Call to Action button creator lets you easily create attractive custom buttons that can be quickly integrated throughout your blogs and webpages at the push of a button. Keep it short and actionable.

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TIP: A/B split test different versions of your buttons to improve click through and conversion rates. The first step is to split your audience into segment A and B. Create a CTA button with different text and colors for each segment. Then, use the buttons on separate pages/emails/blogs. A/B split testing is a tactic that allows you to see which version tests better with audiences.

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Landing Page Creator

This tool alone saves business owners hours of tedious work and several hundred dollars in design for each landing page created. Recent research shows that companies that have multiple landing pages gain significantly more leads and more business. That is because more landing pages means more conversion opportunities, more variety, and more targeting opportunities. Create an attractive landing page in less than 20 minutes with this easy to use tool.

PRO TIP: Good landing pages have an intro paragraph that summarizes the page’s content, 3-5 bullet points outlining the different benefits (these are not the same as features), and a closing paragraph giving the reader specific instructions on what they need to do to get the offer.

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Forms

With this lead generation tool you can easily create forms that capture important data about your website visitors helping you create better, more targeted content while also providing valuable lead behavior insight for your sales team.

TIP: Think about the different segments of your target audience. What are characteristics that help you identify them? Create fields on your forms to collect that info for better segmentation of your database.

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Tools For Lead Nurturing

Lists

Segmentation is key to successful marketing. Casting a wide net in order to generate web visitors is one thing, but once they’re on the hook, you must segment leads into lists based on various factors. For ex. segment leads based on what offer they downloaded, stage in the sales funnel, state, age, position in a company, etc. Until your list is properly segmented, you’re communicating to everyone the same way and there’s nothing strategic about that.

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PRO TIP: A pretty standard practice for businesses using marketing automation such as HubSpot is to separate your leads based on level of interest. Create a list for IQL (information qualified leads), MQL (marketing qualified leads), and SQL (sales qualified leads) to ensure your sales team understands who’s hot and who’s not in your lead database.

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Email and Workflow Tools

These tools used in collaboration, allow users to mimic their natural sales process online using email and marketing automation. Businesses can easily create automated sales conversations that shorten the sales cycle, create desire, and help close leads.

Starting to notice how every one of HubSpot’s features is vital to your content marketing strategy?

HubSpot’s user-friendly software can make you think that achieving success is a piece of cake. That couldn’t be further from the truth. HubSpot is a robust software program that requires a deep

understanding of the interface and functionality. So, let’s say you have taken the time to understand inbound marketing practices and how they relate to HubSpot’s tools, but you’re still not getting the results you want.

TIP: The goal of each email is to get the prospect to take the next step in your sales process. Be subtle, provide them excellent educational content and then let them know what the next step is should they wish to take it.

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5 Surefire Signs You’re Wasting Money on HubSpot

The truth of the matter is that if you are not using HubSpot properly, then you probably won’t see results, and you’re wasting your money. And unfortunately this causes businesses to give up before they’ve even given inbound a real chance to work.

The real question is WHY aren’t these businesses getting results? What are they doing wrong and how can they fix it? Here are some common reasons why many businesses never see results with HubSpot and end up throwing in the towel too early:

Underestimating the Learning Curve Involved

HubSpot offers so many training opportunities for a reason. Because you will need it in order to properly use the software and make money through your efforts. In the first part of this eBook, we touched on the essential HubSpot tools that every user must be acquainted with. That overview was the tip of a gigantic iceberg. Sadly, when it comes to learning HubSpot, most DIY users tend to stop there and this is one major cause of wasting money.

For example, every new, 98ToGo hire has to undergo training to become HubSpot and inbound marketing certified. This involves a time commitment of about 2 hours everyday for about 6 weeks. Is this time investment appropriate for you or would your time be better spent somewhere else in your business?

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Chronic Do-It-Yourselfers

There’s nothing wrong with doing things on your own. It’s a global trend that is very useful for many business owners looking to save money wherever they can. However, as with anything, there is a tipping point. Some business owners try to do everything themselves, which is damn near impossible to do unless you work 18-hour days. Of course, it’s not biologically impossible, so you will probably test your strength and give it a go on a month-to-month basis. Soon you’ll have erased what little personal life you did have, wasted hundreds (if not thousands) of hard earned dollars, and lost valuable time learning this lesson the hard way. And who wants to do that when you can get a professional to separately manage your HubSpot software and inbound marketing campaigns with more accuracy and efficiency.

Missed Opportunities

The unfortunate thing about opportunities is that they don’t always come around a second time. Missing opportunities equals lost revenue. Another effect of not utilizing all the tools effectively is that businesses tend to miss opportunities by only targeting one part of your sales funnel.

For example, only focusing on generating leads at the top of the funnel and ignoring the middle and bottom part of the sales funnel. Doing so, means you’re missing opportunities to nurture, warm up, and qualify leads, and you’ll never really be able to grow a business using that singular top of the funnel strategy. You need to have each part of the funnel in place working together like a well-oiled machine. HubSpot helps you do that, as well as see where the weak points may be in the funnel, so you can improve them.

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Pure Impatience

We’re all guilty of being impatient once in a while, but being impatient with inbound marketing can cause businesses to quit too early. HubSpot is great, but

it’s not exactly cheap. If you took the time to purchase HubSpot, you made a wise and considerable

investment in your business’ future. But be advised that inbound marketing is NOT an

overnight strategy. It typically takes 6-8 months to start seeing any real movement, and sometimes even longer to really get your inbound marketing machine humming; especially if you’re a newer business or one

with a smaller online presence.

Many business owners, although they talk a good game, are not willing to give inbound marketing the

full time needed to develop and demonstrate ROI. Businesses say they want a medium to long-term strategy, but move onto other more instantly gratifying yet more expensive marketing avenues, like paid advertising.

Zero Content Strategy

A strategy is not an illusive concept; it’s a real thing that you must have in order to not fail at inbound marketing. Whether you’re using HubSpot, or one of their competitors, you need a strategy. Call it a playbook if sports terminology makes you feel more at ease. Just as understanding the mechanics of the game won’t make you a star player, knowing how to merely operate HubSpot won’t make you successful at inbound marketing.

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Without a book of well thought out plays (your content strategy), you risk wasting time and money at shooting in the dark and hoping something works. Think about what you intend to achieve by using HubSpot. Of course you want more customers, to make more money, defeat your competitors online, etc. But exactly how do you plan to make it happen? Do you know who your ideal customers are? Do you have a content strategy?

No one likes to waste money. It’s never something you intend to do, but it happens nonetheless. Now that you understand how you’re possibly wasting money on HubSpot, let’s discuss the feasibility of managing HubSpot yourself versus hiring an outside agency to manage the tools and your inbound marketing campaigns.

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Self Management vs. Hiring In-House vs. Hiring an Agency

It can be hard for some business owners to break away from do-it-yourself tendencies. After putting years of blood, sweat, and tears into a company, it’s hard to leave something as critical as marketing up to someone else. We get that.

For some, hiring a HubSpot agency is a no-brainer, because they would rather spend time doing what they love – running the business. For others, relinquishing control is not such an easy task. In fact, we work with three different types of companies, those whose owners all want to do it themselves and just need consulting, those who have a marketing person in-house, or those who outsource these services to an agency. All reasonable choices, but they all come with a certain measure of risk.

If you’re one of the first group, a business owner who likes to take the reigns and do everything yourself, here are a few tips to help you get the most out of HubSpot.

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Learn the Ropes

If you want to play the game, you must respect the rules and abide accordingly. Carve out a specific amount of time each day to learn how to execute an inbound marketing campaign and how to use each tool in HubSpot. They offer excellent training for their customers; so don’t hesitate to dive into the sea of resources every single day until you feel comfortable with everything.

As discussed earlier, a good rule of thumb would be to set aside around 2 hours/per day for the next 6 weeks to emerse yourself in the training resources as much as possible.

Create a Strategy

We cannot say this enough. We will never stop emphasizing the need to create a strategy, because we encounter so many businesses that forget this step. A strategy isn’t another checkmark on your list of to-dos; it’s a living document that evolves as you track and measure effectiveness.

Start creating a strategy by really getting to know your ideal customers and understanding their needs. Then map out their journey from information seeker, to finding your business, and deciding whether to buy from you or another competitor. Every customer travels a specific path before buying your product or service. One you’ve mapped that out, you can determine what type of content they need at each point along this path to move them to the next step.

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Create Data-Driven Content

What you write about should be driven by what your data reveals. What type of content does your audience engage with most? What channels are most effective at driving traffic, leads, customers? What are your competitors having success with?

You want to provide answers to your customer’s most pressing questions and deliver that content to them at the most appropriate time in the places they like to consume it. This means you have to abandon your agenda of pushing your products and services and instead become your customer’s primary resource for information in your industry. This all starts by deciphering what your data is telling you about what type of content your customers like to consume and where.

Measure and Improve

One of the neatest features in HubSpot is Closed-Loop analytics. With a few clicks you can find out what content is getting the best results and

where all your visitors, leads, and customers are coming from. These details are crucial to your success. Adjust and improve your strategy as

more data emerges. Rinse & repeat this step often and watch your strategy thrive!

These steps are pretty much non-negotiable for successful inbound marketing, and as you can see it can turn into a fulltime job rather quickly.

Are you up for the challenge?

On the other hand, if you’re a company with a hefty marketing budget and would like to hire someone in-house, here is a bit of advice.

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1. Direct Experience Only

Don’t waste a dime on any person or persons that don’t have direct experience with HubSpot if they’re going to be running your inbound marketing. Otherwise, you’ll still have to deal with a lack of expertise and the learning curve involved. Why pay someone to learn something new when you could find someone with solid experience? On the job description, make sure you require HubSpot and inbound marketing experience.

And then there are those companies who have a dedicated budget and want to hire a marketing agency. This is probably the best choice to save time, money, and headaches, but don’t take our word for it, do your own due diligence. If you decide to go this route, here are some tips to help you with your search.

2. Direct Experience & Certification

A HubSpot-certified agency has five key differentiators: training/mastery with the software, accomplishments (results), expertise, clients, and strategy. Only do business with an agency that can show and explain every facet of what they have to offer you based on what they’ve already achieved.

When researching potential companies, look for case studies and whitepapers on their website. Do they practice what they preach? Dig deep into their track record and make sure they’re worth every penny. Require HubSpot and inbound marketing certification.

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3. Relationship w/HubSpot

It’s always a good thing when an agency has a good relationship with HubSpot. The partnership program offers many different tiers (silver, gold, platinum). If the agency you’re looking for is involved with the HubSpot Partner Program, then you know they have lots of experience and a great relationship with the HubSpot team.

4. Strategic Formula

Ask the agency how they come up with their strategic formula. Inbound marketing is a new marketing philosophy that yields great results, so you’re going to see a swarm of people claiming to be experts. Only hire those who can deliver using a documented content strategy. You need an agency that understands that strategy is the first step in any successful inbound marketing campaign, not tactics and deliverables.

If you simply MUST try to manage HubSpot on your own, you should adhere to the tips listed above. Keep in mind that hiring someone in-house comes with much of the same risk and uncertainty as doing it yourself. In many cases, hiring an outside agency is the best way to guarantee results, but only if they’re HubSpot and Inbound marketing certified with the portfolio to prove it. Explore your options and choose wisely.

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Developing a Winning Content Strategy with Hubspot

The moral of this story is that there are many uncertainties to consider when using HubSpot on your own. The learning curve is half the battle. While you’re spending time and money to learn a new skill, your business can suffer from neglect. You can’t do it all, no matter how many hours of sleep you miss and cups of espresso you drink. Even with a clear understanding of HubSpot, it’s totally possible to still fail at Inbound Marketing, due either to impatience or missed opportunities.

HubSpot is a great software company run by a team of extraordinary people. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter how great HubSpot is if the person operating the software lacks something necessary to achieve success with inbound marketing. By now, you should have a clear understanding of why DIY users struggle with HubSpot.

Understanding everything that goes into managing HubSpot and inbound marketing campaigns is essential for any business owner who is thinking of investing in this software. Not knowing causes one to underestimate the task at hand and underappreciate the expertise of professionals who live and breathe inbound.

A few clients of ours started out by purchasing HubSpot with every intention of doing it all in-house. After struggling to learn and operate the software during their downtime, they decided to hire us so that they could to focus on running their business and get some much needed rest and peace of mind - a wise choice.

Clients like this understand and believe in the power of inbound marketing enough to purchase HubSpot. They also have a sincere appreciation for the complex beast that is inbound marketing. They start to accept that it takes a person or team with specialized knowledge in specific areas to really get things running. By the end of a really tiring and costly DIY experience, they can appreciate and respect the process.

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So, how can you develop a winning strategy to improve HubSpot’s results? Try these simple steps:

Understand your audience – The first step in any content/inbound marketing strategy is to really understand who your ideal customer is. The best way to get this information is to interview your customers. Find out what first triggered their search for information, the steps they went through to research, consider different vendors, and finally choose your solution. What factors influenced their decision each time they narrowed their list of potential vendors? If you don’t have the luxury or time to interview your customers, talk to your staff, especially the ones that spend the most time with your customers i.e. sales people, customer service, etc.

Perform Keyword Research – Use tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google trends, Google Suggest, ubersuggest, and twitter advanced search to find the keywords that people search for in search engines and social media. Knowing your target keywords will give you an idea of what type of content your audience is most interested in.

Perform a content audit on your website – Before you figure out what content you need to create you need to know what content you already have. You might have some great stuff you created a long time ago that just needs to be updated and cleaned up that could fit right in to your content strategy. To perform a content audit, download all your website pages from the Page Performance tool in HubSpot. For each page, label who the content is targeted towards, what question it answers, whether it’s usable, what it links to, and what stage in the buyer’s journey it best fits in to.

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Map Your Content To Your Buyer’s Journey – Take what you learned in your customer interviews or from talking to staff, and map out the journey that your buyer goes through when searching for your product or service. Then take the content your already have and plug it in where it fits. Now you can sit back and find where the content gaps are and fill them smartly.

Build an Editorial Calendar – Now that you know your content needs, you can plan the creation of that content using an editorial calendar. Plan out your editorial calendar at least 6 months in advance, highlighting any important holidays as well as industry and company events. This will give you themes to create content around if you need inspiration outside of the strategic topic-driven content you need to develop to fill the holes in your buyer’s journey.

Execute The Plan – Now that you have the editorial calendar and know what content you’re creating, determine when you need to get this content written and ensure its both formatted and optimized so that it gets found by your audience and engages them when they find it. Find writers on proven writer marketplaces like Zerys and WritersAccess. Find designers via resource sites like Odesk, Dribble, and 99designs.

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Conclusion and Additional Resources

As you can see managing HubSpot on your own and being effective can be a full time job. There are pros and cons. On one hand, you’re saving money by not outsourcing to an Inbound Marketing agency. At first glance, those cost savings probably seem pretty sweet to the average business owner. BUT, if you take the hours you spend learning the tools and how to use them on top of managing the process and multiply them by what your time is worth, you might find that it’s costing you a lot more than you think.

I think once you’ve crunched the numbers and once you start to understand the weekly time commitment involved in running a successful marketing plan using the HubSpot software, you might be open to hiring an agency whose #1 focus is creating content strategy and executing that strategy within HubSpot.

If you are ready to start this search, remember the tips we shared with you above when looking for the right agency.

To check out what a partnership with the 98toGo looks like, click the button below.