Now that you decided to move to a marketing automation platform it’s important to think about the implementation plan and how you will measure success.
There are many terrific marketing automation systems including Hubspot, Marketo, Infusion Soft, and others. In my opinion, most marketing automation systems offer many similar features and functionality necessary to achieve your goals. However, the pricing and set up among their solutions differ, so it’s important to consider what is best for your business.
The pricing models also differ across various platforms. For example, some marketing automation systems price based on the number of user seats, the number of contacts, the number of emails, and even specific features on an a la carte basis.
When we decided to begin using HubSpot there were several factors that helped with the decision process. The first was that they offer both a sales and a marketing solution, allowing Hubspot to be the one stop shop for our organization. We found that the sales solution was easy to implement once we created the following:
- Email templates
- Email sequences
- Workflows
- Imported our contacts
- Downloaded necessary plugins, such as the Hubspot Gmail plugin
- Setup our integrations with various tools (such as PandaDoc)
- Organized our pipeline
The marketing took us much longer to implement. At the time, we decided to try using HubSpot’s website content management system but found that it was much more difficult than our prior solution (WordPress). Ultimately, we made the decision to keep using WordPress.
Another aspect of the marketing tool which takes a long time to implement is creating the content. Many of the marketing tools require a substantial amount of content, such as blogs and content assets to use for email nurturing campaigns, landing pages, and attracting new leads to your website.
If you are using Hubspot for the first time and don’t have any content on hand, you’ll want to begin creating a content library as quickly as possible. Hubspot’s inbound marketing methodology requires content to guide the prospect through the sales cycle. While Hubspot’s email tools might be easy to setup, writing the emails and creating the content that is included in the emails is the most time consuming part.
A few best practices when implementing Hubspot
- Create a glossary for various email templates, email sequences, workflows, and custom fields so that when you bring more people to your team, they’ll be able to understand what the purpose of each email template is being used for. Additionally, it saves everyone time in the long run.
- Organize your data so that you don’t bring your old mess into your new mess. Importing the data is pretty seamless using a CSV file. The worst part of the import was importing existing deals to the pipeline, as deals need to be created manually.
- As you choose a marketing automation solution, look to see what integrations are available. Integrations save so much time and make the usability so much more enjoyable because your systems are talking to one another.
- Utilize Hubspot’s great educational system and knowledge base which can answer most of your questions. The platform will walk you through simple tasks like creating your email signature and updating your notification preferences. The video academy will teach you the strategy behind the campaigns and systems that you build. Be strategic with the checklists to ensure you are productive with your time. There are so many bells and whistles that could distract you!
Buyer personas and Voice Profiles for content marketing
Hubspot’s buyer persona is important to ensure that your campaigns are targeting the right people and that your messages are strategic. Tempesta Media can utilize a Hubspot’s buyer persona within a Voice Profile to make sure that the content is being written for that particular audience segment. When content is written in a way that addresses the buyer persona’s pain points and is easily digestible, the content will perform better.
