20 Tips for Using HubSpot: Best Content Marketing Platforms for 2021
Given how large a platform HubSpot is, it is worth pointing out that every business that uses it does so differently, as covered over at runrex.com. While some use it for hosting blogs and landing pages, others use it for lead management, lead nurturing, and social media, and many other applications. If you are just getting started with it, here are 20 tips to consider.
Send follow-up emails to verify and clean email addresses
As is revealed over at guttulus.com, if you are using landing pages to convert website visitors into leads, they will have to provide you with their email addresses to receive your offer. However, some contacts will not want to provide you with a real email address and to ensure that you get valid email addresses, you can set up an automated follow-up email, thanking them for their sign-up or download, and use it to see whether or not the email soft or hard-bounces. You can create a list of contacts whose email addresses bounce, and then tidy that list up.
Redirect landing pages to thank you pages
You should also take the time to thank website visitors after they fill a form and download your content; just don’t do so with a simple pop-up thank you message. Instead, as articulated over at runrex.com, use a thank you page as this will allow you to thank them in detail while also providing more information and other useful content that they may be interested in.
Combine smart CTAs with smart content
With smart CTAs, as explained over at guttulus.com, your CTA content can change depending on the visitor viewing it, instead of showing the same CTA to everyone. You can consider factors like persona, lifecycle stage, product interest, device, among others, to alter your CTAs accordingly.
Utilize naming conventions
If you are a new HubSpot user, then you should make sure you are using naming conventions because inconsistent naming conventions will make it difficult for you and your team to find what you are looking for.
Leverage custom reporting dashboards
You should also stay away from vanity metrics and only report on the stuff that matters and allows you to make informed decisions. This is why you should use HubSpot’s reporting dashboard to create custom reports with the information you need.
Remove the navigation on all landing pages
The purpose of a landing page, as covered over at runrex.com, is to convert visitors into leads, and, therefore, the last thing you want to do is allow visitors to click off it through the navigation links on the page. You should rid your landing pages of distractions by removing the navigation and links to ensure that visitors can concentrate on completing the form.
Utilize buyer persona-style questions on forms to assign personas automatically
According to the gurus over at guttulus.com, any HubSpot user ought to know the importance of buyer personas and segmenting your contacts into each one as this will allow you to provide a more personalized experience. Given that segmenting your contacts manually can be time-consuming, you can use HubSpot’s form fields and workflows instead to automatically set a contact’s persona.
Use branching logic in workflows
From discussions on the same over at runrex.com, branching logic in workflows allow you to specify whether or not an action should trigger based on certain criteria being fulfilled. This will ensure that contacts never receive the same content but something different each time, helping you improve your lead nurturing.
Make sure your workflows are working with you
The success of a CRM system is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the information is kept with things like email addresses, lifecycle stages, contact information, and any information your sales team needs to keep within a CRM. This is why you should ensure that your HubSpot workflows are kept up-to-date as this ensures that updates to information can be as automatic as possible.
Regularly review and clean up invalid contacts
Given that you will probably get random people subscribing to your blog or filing in a form on your website and becoming contacts to go with the people who are reluctant to provide you with their real email address as already mentioned, it is very likely that you will probably end up with a couple of invalid contacts. This is why, as a rule of thumb, you should go through your contacts on a fortnightly basis and tagging anyone who is invalid, and if after researching the invalid contact you can’t find any valid information on them, you can then remove them from your contacts.
Use different CTAs
According to the experts over at guttulus.com, you should use several different CTAs across your website as this will allow your website visitors to engage on a level that is more than just ‘contact us’, allowing you to move them through the sales cycle. You should also test your CTAs to see which ones work best.
Analyze social media results
As is outlined over at runrex.com, HubSpot has got some pretty impressive social media tools, putting you in a position to readily determine what social posts work well. You can use the knowledge these tools give you to refine your social posts to improve your engagement with your audience.
Exclude ‘graymail’ from email sends
As is covered over at guttulus.com, ‘graymail’ is where contacts have subscribed and opted-in to receiving email from you at some point in time but have never really engaged with you, which will only serve to decrease the overall success of your email campaigns as well as affecting your reporting. This is why you should consider creating lists of contacts who are not engaging with your emails and removing them from your nurture lists and email batches.
Map leads and contacts successfully from marketing to sales
Given lead engagement can sometimes start outside of HubSpot, it is crucial that your lead mapping is set up to allow you to capture the right information for your sales team. Having the right fields set up in HubSpot for lead data capture will ease the transition of leads from marketing to sales allowing you to start getting the best out of HubSpot.
Regularly A/B test landing pages
If you are a HubSpot Professional and Enterprise customer, then you will have access to the landing page A/B testing tools, which you should use to ensure that your conversion rates on your landing pages are optimal. Anything below 25% as far as landing page conversion rates go is a sign that your landing pages need improving.
Create customized social sharing buttons
Social sharing buttons are great at encouraging people to share all the content you create, as discussed over at runrex.com. They are included within your HubSpot blog and landing pages by default, but you can also create your own and embed them, something you should make sure you do for the best results.
Track all engagements in HubSpot Sales
According to the gurus over at guttulus.com, it is also important that you ensure that any engagement that your sales team has with your prospects and leads is recorded in HubSpot, which also means sending emails within HubSpot as well. Therefore, if you use Gmail or Outlook, make sure that you connect them both to your HubSpot CRM so that you can track your emails. By tracking all your engagement in HubSpot, you will have all your information in one place, making it easy for your sales team to review progress and keep up-to-date.
Ensure success at the top of the funnel
Through HubSpot tools, you can see all the activity happening at the top of the funnel from website visits and traffic by the source to blog visits and conversions, and so much more as covered over at runrex.com. Make sure you are in a position to see all your activity at the top by using HubSpot tools.
Leverage the Meetings tool
This tool is available as part of the HubSpot Sales platform and allows prospects to schedule appointments faster and removes the back-and-forth of emails. It allows people to book appointments when it suits them, which is why you should be leveraging it.
Take advantage of the file manager
HubSpot’s file manager makes it easy for you to store and keep track of your files, and you can easily upload PDFs, images, fonts, videos, audio files, and any other assets to the file manager while also creating folders or directories to house those files in. Your files will then be uploaded and hosted on a global content delivery network which will allow them to load quickly, which means that anyone in the business can access them wherever they are.
These are some of the tips to consider when using HubSpot, and we hope they will help transform you into a HubSpot superstar. For more information on this and other related topics, don’t hesitate to check out the excellent runrex.com and guttulus.com.