Your Complete Guide to a Data-driven HubSpot Strategy

When you use marketing automation to its fullest, you’ll find your company experiences these benefits.

Efficiency: some marketing teams find they can reduce their staffing costs or discontinue outsourcing aspects of their marketing once they start automating processes. Automate tasks like daily social media posting, lead scoring and more so your team can focus on strategy.

1. Marketing and sales alignment: marketing is there to support sales but without sales, marketing has little impact. The teams need to be working toward shared goals. Moving prospects from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads becomes smoother when everyone agrees on what that means and the process is automated based on set criteria.
2. Higher conversion rates: when you manage leads more effectively, they’re more likely to become customers, which increases your conversion rates. Engaging tools like retargeting website visitors who failed to convert can have an impact on your conversion rates. Automating recurring tasks frees up time for your marketing team to strategize and review data on how to convert more customers.
3. Reporting on what matters: HubSpot generates accurate reports that focus on valuable metrics that inform you how things are going. You can reduce friction points by reviewing data to see where those points are. Understanding when a lead drops off during your sales funnel can tell you where your greatest weaknesses lie and how to improve them.
4. Custom marketing: each customer or persona will have varying needs and interests. The more customized your marketing, the more likely prospects will be to convert. Create different messages based on the customer segment you’re marketing to. Target your message to each customer persona based on the channel you’re using to communicate. 
5. Lead scoring: knowing where to spend your time is important. Lead scoring can tell you how likely a prospect is to convert or if they are a marketing or sales-qualified lead. This helps you know whether to keep marketing to them or automatically transfer them to sales where they can have more in-depth conversations.
6. Scalability: your CEO might have some big goals. And those goals might mean doubling lead generation in a year or two and bringing in more revenue from marketing at a rapid rate. Big goals like that can be scary without the right tools. HubSpot has all the necessary tools to help you grow while managing team sizes.
7. Lead nurturing: many C-suites believe that if you have a great product or service, customers will flock to it. But that simply isn’t the case. While you can put tons of money and effort behind a great website and SEO, you then need to consider what happens once a prospect shows an interest in what you’re offering. They need to be nurtured to learn more about what you’re offering and why it is superior to the competition. Not using effective and customized lead nurturing could lead to challenges in converting leads to sales prospects.

Take a moment to review the industry-leading features HubSpot offers. Here’s why it’s Diaz & Cooper’s marketing automation platform of choice for data-driven marketing.

Lead Nurturing

Automate the lead nurturing process with email drip campaigns. Get timely information to your prospects to help move them through the funnel to experience higher conversion rates. HubSpot makes email design simple with modern templates and a drag-and-drop interface to avoid custom coding. You set the triggers based on what you know about your customers to send the right email at the right time.

Custom Workflows and Triggers

Visualize the customer buying journey using workflows. Consider what information a customer might need to convert and how you’ll help them find that information. Everything from a simple thank you email once a customer places an order to journeys that help customers get acquainted with complicated products or services is possible within HubSpot and its integrated CRM.

Lead Scoring

You could dedicate an entire team just to lead scoring. Instead, you can automate the process based on interactions with prospects. Once a customer takes a certain action during a workflow, you can automatically update their lead score to trigger internal processes and alert sales accordingly. HubSpot lead scoring can power additional interactions with your prospects to create a truly automated experience.

Companies that maximize their HubSpot Sales Hub often experience these benefits.

1. Track leads through lifecycle stages: identify leads most likely to convert to focus on nurturing those relationships to see the greatest ROI from your efforts.
2. Custom views and permissions: offer various users access to data and insights that they need without bombarding other staff members with data they don’t need access to. The Sales Hub hierarchical teams and advanced permissions features are in-depth to help you create the system you need to win more business.
3. Notifications that power relationships: knowing when and how to interact with a customer or prospect can be challenging. But when you get notifications about their interactions with marketing or sales collateral, it’s easier to interact at the right moment for maximum impact.
4. Real-time interactions: building rapport with customers means being there when they need you. Real-time chat helps power real-time interactions so you can build relationships.
5. Data insights: knowledge truly is power when you’re looking for ways to interact with prospects and customers more effectively. See what content is driving sales and fine-tune your strategy to match your target audience and deliver solutions for their pain points.
6. All-in-one views: if you’ve ever looked at a salesperson’s computer, you’ve probably wondered how they function with so many tabs and tools open at once. They want all the data and insights to have more meaningful conversations with prospects, but getting it is challenging. HubSpot integrates with hundreds of other tools to allow salespeople to interact with prospects and customers in one central location while getting the data and insights they need for impactful interactions.
7. Shared knowledge: when your best salespeople share their winning strategies with new recruits, everyone wins and your bottom line gets a boost. Use playbooks to share guides for how to close more deals so your salespeople can build upon past success.
8. Forecasting: visualize success based on current trends. Learn how effective your pipeline is and what you can expect based on current leads and close rates. Budget effectively and manage resources better based on sales goals and statistics.

It’s probably hard to imagine a system that delights both sales and marketing. But it does exist. Here’s a look at the sales features you’ll get with HubSpot Sales Hub.

Email Templates

Standardize sales emails using templates. That doesn’t mean every message has to be identical. Personalize the message to fit each prospect using what you know about them from your CRM. But once you find a template that works, share it across your sales team for better results.

Email Tracking

Sales reps can receive a notification when a prospect opens an email or interacts with your business in some way. This can enable your team to close more deals and do so faster. 

Document Management and Tracking

Build your library of sales content so your sales team can send it instantly from Gmail or Outlook. Then track metrics related to the content to see what helps close deals to inform better content development and use.

Conversation Intelligence

Capture and record calls. Then use AI-powered insights to coach your sales team toward better tactics that deliver results for your company. It’s a chance to test and retest sales tactics to find what resonates best with customers even during person-to-person interactions.

Call Tracking

One challenge many sales reps face is prioritizing sales calls. Sales Hub helps your team do this via lead scoring. And then it logs each call within the CRM to improve efficiency.

Sales Automation

Stay top-of-mind throughout the sales process using automated personalized emails and follow-ups with a prospect. Do the same with existing customers so they don’t fall off your sales team’s radar, which can lead to customer turnover.

As you evaluate the HubSpot email marketing tools, consider these valuable benefits that can add value to your email efforts.

1. Branded emails without coding: create email campaigns that reflect your business without hiring an email designer and developer. Enjoy responsive design that looks like you’ve spent thousands of dollars on making the email match your other digital assets.
2. Personalize content to the recipient: you know what pages of your website the prospect viewed or what page the lead form came through on. Now customize the content of your follow-up emails to match so you speak directly to what the prospect has expressed interest in. This helps reduce clutter to get right to the point so you can connect in a more meaningful way with the prospect.
3. Optimize using A/B testing: turn hypotheses into actionable insights using A/B testing. Get a full view into what resonates best with your customers to improve the impact your emails have on your customers and prospects. See what call-to-action verbiage and styles lead to the best results or test out various images and paragraphs to maximize your email outcomes.
4. It integrates with lead tracking and scoring: when a customer interacts with an email and then goes to a landing page or your website, HubSpot tracks the lead and updates its scoring accordingly. It can send notifications to sales once the prospect becomes a sales-qualified lead for seamless transitions from email marketing to closing the deal.

HubSpot’s email marketing tools are robust and integrate with other aspects of the platform, including workflows to help you create customer journeys that reflect your personas and target audience. Here are some key features that make it one of the best options available.

Drag-and-drop Editor

You shouldn’t feel the need to take a coding class to build beautiful emails. The drag-and-drop editor makes it simple to add modules and content zones within your emails to reflect your brand.

A/B Testing

Find the best design, language, calls to action and more for your audience segments with A/B testing. Learn more about your audience and what motivates them the most by testing out various layouts, formats, subject lines, buttons, images and more.

In-depth List Segmentation

One of the greatest assets of working with HubSpot is the ability to segment your audience based on a variety of criteria. The more segmented your list, the more you can speak directly to your audience.

Automation and Workflows

Using inbound email strategies offer far more benefits than outbound. But to do that, you have to find ways to introduce your company to the prospect and get them to share their email address with you. Perhaps it’s through SEO, PPC or social media. But regardless of where your prospects are coming from, you can then nurture them with effective automation and workflows that match their interests.

When using HubSpot Marketing Hub, many customers experience the following key benefits.

1. In-depth analysis: you can’t adjust marketing plans if you don’t know what’s working and where your opportunities are. HubSpot integrates marketing data to offer clear insights.
2. Time-savings: using Marketing Hub can save immense time thanks to the automated features, including lead scoring and drip campaigns. Plus, you’ll find the forms and email design functions simple to use compared to the competition, which can also save time.
3. All-in-one platform: thanks to integrations with other leading marketing tools, HubSpot makes it simple to manage various campaigns in one place.
4. Inbound marketing support: while you can build an inbound strategy without HubSpot, the platform certainly makes it easier. You can understand how various channels come together to build relationships with customers and how to capitalize on what you do well.

HubSpot breaks its Marketing Hub features into three categories: revenue-driving, time-saving and measurement. Here’s a look at what all the system can do under each of these categories.

Revenue-driving

• Online form builder
• Live chat, featuring targeted welcome messages and automation
• Salesforce integration with bi-directional sync

Time Saving 

• Contact management with single-click updates and management
• Campaign management
• Marketing automation to update lead scores, personalize emails, bulk send and more

Measurement

• Marketing analytics
• Dashboards with data integrated from other apps
• Advanced and custom reporting

HubSpot content marketing offers many outstanding benefits. Here’s a look at the benefits you can experience when using content marketing tools.

1. Improved visibility: get your content in front of more people by distributing it across various channels and optimizing it for SEO. HubSpot can help you publish and manage the content from one central location.
2. Lead generation: content isn’t just about building website traffic. You want that traffic to turn into a lead, which is one area HubSpot is very good at. Integrate lead forms throughout your content and ensure users don’t bounce before sharing their contact information by including a pop-up box.
3. Maximize each piece of content: whether you’re working with a blog or case study from two years ago or your newest infographic that just go the C-suite’s seal of approval, you can maximize the usefulness of each piece of content you have by integrating it into drip campaigns and adding it to the shared documents for your sales team.
4. Reduce customer service inquiries: an effective knowledge base or FAQs can reduce the time your customer service team spends on the phone or answering email and chat inquiries from customers. This is an essential aspect of a good content marketing plan that some companies overlook.

Ensure you’re maximizing these HubSpot Content Marketing features.

• Blogging: HubSpot can help you publish blog content, categorize it and align it to an audience segment. This can help users find your content and ensure it is as useful as possible.
• SEO: find out how well your posts are performing for SEO and get suggestions for how to improve your content’s SEO value.
• Social media: with a social media content calendar, you can organize social posts and optimize posting times. Whether you’re managing just a couple of social profiles or many, you can streamline the process using HubSpot Content Marketing.
• Paid ads: understanding more about your traffic sources and how your paid ads are performing without opening other platforms is helpful. You can segment results based on demographics and other parameters to understand your data and make it more useful.

Learn more about the various types of support you’ll find from HubSpot consultants.

Technical Consulting

Whether you want a custom-designed website or need to connect with an outside vendor via APIs, technical consulting can help you do that. Some reasons why HubSpot customers reach out to technical consultants include:

• Custom website design and development
• System administrator training
• API implementation
• Migration to HubSpot from other sales and marketing tools
• Technical issue troubleshooting

Inbound Marketing Consulting

With a few minor tweaks to your strategy, you can experience greater ROI from HubSpot and improve your lead generation and sales funnels.

No blog or online course can tell you exactly how to prepare an inbound marketing strategy that fits your target audience and customer buying journey. Turn to the experts who work within your industry or niche, and who know how to build effective campaigns that deliver results.

Sales Consulting

Lead management is an enormous task. While lead scoring offers a solution for helping manage the process, you still have to set criteria to automate the process and alert sales teams accordingly.

Understanding sales pipelines and how to provision HubSpot to fit your sales funnel and needs is complex. 

Customer Training Consulting

Perhaps your goal is to become a HubSpot expert so you can manage everything yourself. In that case, you want a customer training expert who can help you learn everything there is to know about how to work within HubSpot.

Just know that if you go this route, you likely won’t find strategy support like you will if you go with inbound or sales consulting.

Migration Services

You’ve invested in HubSpot and now you have to figure out how to move your data from one system to another. Regardless of which HubSpot Hub you’ve chosen, there'll be some migration services required.

HubSpot does not offer migration services directly. Instead, you’ll work with a certified partner, like Diaz & Cooper to ensure a smooth transition to your new marketing, sales and customer service tools.

HubSpot consultants have built careers around the platform. They spend 40+ hours a week within the system and know its ins and outs like no one else.

One of the largest setbacks that new users face is not getting support fast enough to ensure a good ROI. Some benefits that you’ll experience from working with HubSpot Consulting Services include the following.

1. Better processes: when you’re getting started with HubSpot, it’s a great time to start with a clean slate and ensure your processes are as simple and lean as possible. This will save you time and ensure you’re maximizing the automation tools within HubSpot. A consultant can review your current processes and use their expertise with HubSpot to recommend the best ways to automate and improve on those processes.
2. Identify and eliminate roadblocks: you might not even see the roadblocks in your customer’s way. But they see it. For example, perhaps you have no content for the awareness phase of the buying journey and customers are getting frustrated and going elsewhere for the information. A consultant can help identify these problems and use the platform to help you remove those roadblocks.
3. Maximize ROI: purchasing an enterprise license to HubSpot is no small investment. You want to ensure you get the greatest ROI. A consultant can help you evaluate and optimize your marketing strategies

As you look to ensure your HubSpot use is optimized and ensures the greatest ROI, consider these migration services.

• Email and marketing automation migration (e.g., migration from Marketo or Pardot to HubSpot)
• Website migration – also called replatforming (e.g., migration from Wordpress or Drupal to HubSpot) 
• CRM migration (e.g., migration from Salesforce to HubSpot)

Migrations involve four distinct steps.

1. Strategy/planning: your migration partner will assess your existing system and build a strategy for moving the framework and content to HubSpot.
2. Execution: once your HubSpot migration specialist has built a strategy for moving to HubSpot, your consultant will execute the move.
3. Testing and QA: once the data move is complete, we’ll complete thorough testing to make sure everything performs as it should.
4. Deployment: after ensuring everything is working the way it should, we’ll deploy and monitor the system, while onboarding your teams accordingly.

While you could manually move all data from legacy systems into HubSpot, it’s far more beneficial to work with a HubSpot partner skilled in migration services. Here’s a look at the benefits you’ll experience when completing your migration this way.

• Improved efficiency: moving data manually when you aren’t super familiar with HubSpot yet will be time-consuming. And you’ll be trying to do it while keeping up with your regular commitments. It’s far more efficient to allow an expert to complete the migration.
• Accurate data transfer: data integrity is so important when you’re using that data to power personalized content and sales calls. Without good data, you can harm your relationships quickly. An expert knows how to build out your HubSpot infrastructure to ensure accurate data transfer.
• Reduced downtime: if you migrate data yourself, you’ll likely spend months doing it, which takes your attention away from building campaigns that convert leads into sales. Reduce that downtime by hiring an expert.