So you've bought Hubspot, now what?

The big question is, now that you’re using this amazing platform that can help you improve results, what’s next?

What’s the next step? How do you start? And how do you start well.

After using the platform for over 5 years, I have made many errors and learnt from each one. I now know how to start my HubSpot journey on the right note, and set myself up for success. This post gives you a process you can follow, to ensure you maximise the opportunities with HubSpot.

STEP ONE

At this point, you’re eager to use the platform, your higher authority is asking for results immediately and he/she wants an ROI ‘yesterday’. I recommend you follow 3 steps before you start your HubSpot journey.

1. Benchmark your current results: What ROI have you seen on your current marketing efforts? What % of your customers are coming from online methods? What is the current cost per lead? And what is your current lead – customer conversion rate? You should start to understand these metrics before you jump in head first. Your biggest challenge is to generate a quick ROI on the platform, then prove that HubSpot is worth its weight in gold. Make sure you have dedicated time to analysing your data before putting these figures into HubSpot so you can benchmark future results.
2. Set goals, plans, challenges, timelines: What are your goals? Is it leads, customers or revenue? Everyone has different goals and you need to set these before you use the platform, because your usage or plan may differ. Remember, these must be SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely). Recognise that you will meet some challenges on your path to these goals, that may mean additional training and additional resources, so account for this early. I strongly recommend that you set yourself a timeline and break this up into SMART-based objectives first.
3. Roles and Responsibilities: These are your must-have roles on your B2B marketing team. Try placing each member of your team into the first three stages in the inbound marketing methodology: Attract, Convert, Close. Here's an idea of which roles belong where:

• Attract:Your content writers, designers, SEO specialists, and social media managers.
• Convert: Everyone involved in conversion optimisation, including landing pages, calls-to-action, lead scoring, and nurturing.
• Close:Your sales enablement marketers helping the sales team close opportunities

For companies with a smaller marketing team of 0-5 people, you will need to control all 3 stages, however, make sure you break down the responsibilities to determine your KPIS’s. If you are on your own, you might look to outsource responsibilities to a partner HubSpot agency.

STEP TWO

Now that you have established your goals, plan, results and understand who own what responsibility you need to:

1. Determine you Buyer Persona: Your buyer persona dictates how all communications are crafted, from offers and campaigns to social and blog posts. Don't just focus on demographical data as this will limit your ability to market. Understand the goals, challenges, objectives, common objections, the pains of your best client, which develop a general buyer persona.
2. Outline your Buyer Journey: Your buyer journey works as the framework for a marketing strategy. Consider your buyer’s needs and expectations at each stage; Awareness, Consideration and Decision. These build out into campaigns to target your buyer persona at each stage in order to appropriately guide them through the inbound marketing funnel. At this stage, determine what criteria constitutes to a lead, a marketing qualified lead, a sales qualified lead and an opportunity.
3. Social Media Calendar/Blog Post Calendar: Mapping out your social and blog posting dates is integral. Your calendar should include the who, what, when and where of content publishing. Think about what you send out, what keywords are attached to each post and how often you share your content. This will allow you to account for the time you need to interact socially at the Attraction level and nurture your potential customers.
4. Website CTAs: Your website is your most central marketing tool, start mapping your where your CTA/s are placed, which offers support your CTAs and how leads are guided to landing pages. Your main goal with CTAs is clicks and conversions, so they need to speak to the direct pain points of your buyer persona.
5. Connecting your marketing and sale teams: Your inbound methodology will connect the marketing and sales team, creating the ‘smarketing’ team. You goal for connecting these teams is to maintain SMART goals, which are shared and agreed to between each team to improve accountability. These goals are made together and re-evaluated monthly so that you can identify opportunities for improvement.

This is what we define as the best start to your HubSpot use. HubSpot may have advise that you need to spend 8 hours within your portal each week, but you will need to put in more time in the first three months in order to do it right the first time around.

If you’re overwhelmed by the size of the platform, how much you need to learn and how much is involved in setting up the platform for success, reach out to a partner who can customise your platform to get you up and running asap.

Check out our range of Hubspot training and on boarding courses on offer.