Embarking on a journey with HubSpot can be a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their operations and enhance customer engagement. But how can you ensure that your investment in this platform is fully maximized?
Let’s dig into some insightful tips and practices that can elevate your HubSpot experience, ensuring that every feature and tool is utilized to its utmost potential.
Leveraging HubSpot’s Core Features
HubSpot is a powerhouse suite of tools designed to optimize your marketing, sales, and service efforts. Marketing Hub, for instance, is not just about sending emails but creating targeted, personalized marketing campaigns that speak directly to your audience. It allows you to track customer interactions, analyze website traffic, and even manage ad campaigns.
On the other hand, Sales Hub is a comprehensive sales management tool that enables you to manage deals, track deal revenue and prospect and customer interactions, and automate sales processes with workflows.
Service Hub allows you to manage customer queries and feedback efficiently through tickets and feedback tools. It’s not just about using these tools but about integrating them with your business strategies, ensuring that every interaction, deal, and campaign is managed and optimized through HubSpot.
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Making the Most of HubSpot’s Free Tools
HubSpot’s free tools are a treasure trove of functionality. The ability to send marketing emails, manage a service hub pipeline, and utilize a basic project management tool provides a foundational CRM that can significantly enhance your business processes without a significant financial investment.
Maximizing these tools means exploring every feature, understanding its application, and implementing it in your processes. Be sure that every aspect of your HubSpot portal, from email campaigns to ticket management, is used to its fullest. Even if you are primarily using HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, you can still improve your customer interactions and internal processes even without a premium Sales or Service Hub subscription. Of course, there will always be more you can do with a Service or Sales seat, but for scaling businesses, optimize the use of every part of HubSpot that is available to you.
Automation, Personalization, and Analytics: The HubSpot Trifecta
Automation, personalization, and analytics in HubSpot are the three pillars holding up your inbound marketing temple. Automation, through workflows or “the engine” of HubSpot, ensures that no deal is forgotten or lost in the shuffle and that no form submission is left ignored.
For instance, you can automate reminder tasks for salespeople to follow up on deals that have been in a stage for too long, so no opportunities are missed. With automation and different workflows, you can set routines for your team so they can focus on the nitty-gritty details of their jobs.
Personalization, from sending birthday greetings to renewal reminders, enhances customer engagement and fosters a connection between your brand and your customers. There are several time-based or event-based workflows you can tap into — and people engage with them at a higher rate than other content.
Analytics, through HubSpot’s extensive library of pre-built reports and dashboards, provides not just data but insights and foresight into your business operations and customer interactions, ensuring that your strategies are not just data-driven but insight-driven, optimizing every campaign, interaction, and process.
And the best part? These templatized reports and dashboards can be customized to your liking, so you only see what is most important to your weekly, monthly, or quarterly reporting needs.
Read More – The Ins and Outs of HubSpot Reporting: Tips, Tricks, and More
Maintaining a Clean HubSpot Portal
HubSpot hygiene is as essential as your own — seriously. Maintaining a clean HubSpot portal is like ensuring a highway to your business goals is smooth, well-marked, and free of obstacles. Clear naming conventions, organized properties, and coherent folders provide every user with a clean, navigable experience.
For instance, a naming convention like “Q1 2024 Marketing – Young Professionals Outreach” ensures clarity and coherence over “Miley’s We Were Good Workflow from September.” As your business progresses, people will come and go, and naming, grouping, and other organizational conventions will help them pick up how your portal operates immediately.
Comments (which can be added to a myriad of features in HubSpot) with explainer videos or documents embedded within workflows or other items can serve as embedded custom support tips, guiding users and providing crucial context and information, ensuring that your HubSpot portal is not just intuitive and accessible but also a comprehensive, self-contained knowledge base for your users. The goal? Build a Hubspot user support system within your portal that gets everyone working in there where they need to go with no traffic or confusion.
Pro Tip: Use HubSpot’s project management tool and create projects that take your team through HubSpot. For example, you can create a “Getting Started with Workflows” project that houses all the information someone needs for their first workflow in your specific portal.
The Importance of Data Quality
Imagine moving into a new house. You want to move all your stuff but don’t have time to go through it thoroughly. Now, picture bringing along boxes from the basement, unchecked and potentially filled with mildew. That may be a fine Saturday afternoon project for your family, but importing dirty or “mildewed” data into your HubSpot portal can cause real trouble.
Ensuring that the data you import or integrate into HubSpot is clean and accurate is crucial. Utilize deduplication tools, validate email addresses, and ensure that all relevant fields are accurate and up-to-date. If your timeline allows, try only to bring clean data to your portal from Day 1. Or, if you’re already a HubSpot user, take time from your schedule to go through your data as mentioned. This ensures that inaccurate data do not hamper your sales and marketing efforts and that your communications remain relevant and engaging.
Conducting Regular Portal Audits
Using HubSpot is a commitment, like one you’d make when buying your first car. If you want it to work for you, you must put work back into it. Conducting regular portal audits is like giving your car the service check-up it needs — everything from an oil change to rotating the tires.
It involves checking for errors in data, ensuring that workflows are functioning as intended, and that data is reported accurately in the analytics. It also involves checking integrations, and ensuring data is transferred accurately and efficiently between HubSpot and any integrated platforms.
Additionally, reviewing user access and permissions, ensuring that each user has the appropriate level of access and that no former employees still have access, is also crucial. These audits guarantee your HubSpot portal remains clean, secure, and efficient and that any issues are identified and addressed promptly.
Pro Tip: If your company has the resources, designate someone to be your dedicated HubSpot administrator. They can manage your portal and uncover issues before they become critical. If that is not feasible, try allowing someone to allocate 50% of their job to managing their portal.
Partnering with a HubSpot Agency
Collaborating with a HubSpot agency can provide invaluable insights, support, and expertise in maximizing your HubSpot investment. From assisting with portal audits to guiding best practices, a HubSpot agency can be a valuable ally in ensuring that your business makes the most of every available tool and feature. When selecting an agency, consider the following:
- Their expertise. Most agencies are small- to medium-sized businesses and will specialize in a few areas. If they’re quick to say they can do anything and everything under the sun, dig into their reputation a little more.
- Will they be a partner? You and your agency will depend on each other. They will have the necessary skill sets, but you know your company, industry, and customer base. If you work well together, you’ll be able to achieve success.
- Word of mouth. A lot of HubSpot agencies are recommended to their clients. That may be from a previous customer moving to a new company and hiring, or someone’s colleague at another organization who’s had success with them in the past.
- Reviews. HubSpot has an agency directory where you can hear from customers like you about their experience with a company.
- Their location. While it may seem like a moot point, it’s worth investigating where an agency is based. If you’re in the same time zone, you can more effectively schedule meetings and escalate issues.
Finally, see how well they align with your business goals and values, ensuring your partnership is mutually beneficial and aligned with your HubSpot objectives. Whatever your objectives, come prepared during your first meeting with one of their reps and be ready to suss them out!
Read More – How to Know If It’s Time to Break Up With Your Marketing Agency
Wrapping Up
Maximizing your HubSpot investment is not just about utilizing every tool and feature but doing so in a coherent, organized way that makes sense for your business — because who wants to pay a lot for software that’s not working for them?
From maintaining a clean portal to ensuring data quality and conducting regular audits, each step you take should be toward ensuring that your HubSpot portal is a comprehensive, intuitive solution that supports and enhances your business operations. With the proper practices, strategies, and possibly, the right HubSpot agency partner (like Lynton), your investment in HubSpot will become an integral component in driving your business toward success.
