If you are considering putting an automation solution like HubSpot to work for your content management, lead nurturing and CRM needs, here is a primer on what your first three months will need to include in order to start out successfully.
Automation is great—it can improve your team’s efficiency and effectiveness and be a lifesaver in scaling content management, email and lead qualification efforts as you grow—but automation alone won’t foster growth. The software can only streamline processes. Increasing lead generation and sales through content and marketing automation requires a commitment to the inbound marketing philosophy and a comprehensive strategy centered around maximizing the ROI of those efficiencies.
As a HubSpot certified partner agency, JONES has helped multiple brands take advantage of all that HubSpot offers, from content management and email automation to customer-relationship management, analysis and reporting.
We’ve outlined a full 18-month implementation timeline with estimated resources needed in this downloadable resource: HubSpot Implementation Timeline & Planning Template. Even if your chosen automation tool isn’t HubSpot, this timeline and the details I’ll share below about how to tackle your first three months provide a great starting point for any new venture into content marketing and email automation.
It may seem like our Inbound Accelerator blog talks a lot about starting every strategy with goals, but that’s just because it is so important. (See here: Marketing Goals + Documented Strategy = More Marketing Success, Why & How To Set Goals For Your Content, or Do The Math To Calculate Marketing Goals (how-to video).)
Setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound) goals for your marketing content and automation with HubSpot begins with your company’s revenue goals and works backward from there.
Those goals will guide everything you do in developing and implementing a HubSpot marketing automation strategy.
If you have already been using content marketing for some time, and are just switching to a new automation platform, you may already have customer or buyer personas defined and in use. If not, spend some time before sketching out your overall marketing content strategy defining who your best customers are, what they need from you, and how they want to receive that information. Consider their pain points, what terms they are searching online as they look for solutions, and what their typical decision-making style looks like.
These blog posts and resources can guide your buyer persona development process:
Once you have your goals and personas in place, it’s time to think through your overall marketing strategy. It pays off to think through the entire strategy (not just individual campaigns or content plans) and put it into writing. Why?
According to CoSchedule, marketers with a documented strategy are more than five times as likely to report success as those without. (See more here.)
Your overall strategy should include:
Consider these statistics about how marketers are approaching marketing, and how consumers and B2B decision makers find the information they need: 101 Statistics To Know For Your 2020 Marketing Strategy.
Now, what is the difference between the overall marketing strategy outlined above and your content strategy? Your overall strategy sets up the parameters for all of your marketing efforts, while the content strategy gets more specific.
Your marketing strategy may say that you will target three key markets or buyer personas, using digital channels only, and will outline what constitutes a marketing qualified lead that is ready to be sent on the sales department.
Your content strategy gets into the details of how you will create and deploy content.
For example, your content strategy might outline that you will conduct a consumer survey each year, designed to produce the data needed for 4 quarterly reports. Each report would be supported and promoted by:
This is just an example, but you get the idea.
This strategy guides each campaign you will create to support your inbound marketing and content marketing efforts.
Again, each step gets more specific. Now you are going to combine the content strategy from above and the keywords and topics from Step 3 to outline each piece of content you will create in the first year.
Using our content strategy example, you might have quarterly campaigns, though we recommend working hard to complete the content for a new campaign each month. Here’s why “more” really is more when it comes to inbound marketing—but it has to be high quality.
You can use a format like our Campaign Planning Calendar Template to outline specific content pieces for each level of the sales funnel, from awareness through sales enablement. This would include the initial downloadable report to generate leads, blog posts, social media updates, thought leadership articles, and additional downloadable resources such as templates or case studies to appeal to leads as they reach the consideration and decision stages of the buying cycle.
If you want to see what a full campaign looks like in action, download a sample here: Creating A Winning Inbound Program Sample Campaign.
Finally! We’re moving out of the planning stages into the work that feels like it produces something to show for all the time.
If you are using a survey to generate data for content creation, your timeline might be pushed back a bit in order to complete quality survey. (Find more about using surveys to drive marketing content here.)
Of course, you may have had plenty of topic ideas and information ready to use for your marketing content already at hand. (Where Marketers Find Their Content Ideas)
That means it is time to start creating, either using your in-house team or by identifying partners who can create the content for you: full-service agencies, specialized content agencies such as video producers, or freelancers. Each option has its own pros and cons.
If you need help in creating content, these blog posts can help you find the right partner for your team:
HubSpot’s many offerings can manage and automate a wide range of marketing tasks, including content management (blog posts, social media, downloadable assets, landing pages, etc.), lead nurturing workflows, outbound email marketing, customer relationship management and more, not to mention the analysis and reporting that goes along with all of those.
It will take time to tap into all that it offers, which is why we suggest your team have at least one point-person take time to train in all of the features you will be using with your HubSpot contract.
As a certified HubSpot agency, we can also be a great resource—we have used most of those features and been through the training ourselves. And if we don’t know the answer to a specific question, we probably know exactly who to ask to find out right away.
Before you start promoting your new business blog or linking back to landing pages, I suggest making sure you have that first campaign all in the system and ready to go. This means everything from the first few blog posts loaded up (and set to publish on a specified date), landing pages tested by in-house staff, nurturing workflows programmed in, and social media updates scheduled and just waiting for the right date to roll around. By having everything in place before you launch, you are ready to roll with any troubleshooting that may arise.
Or, better yet, you may be able to take a quick breather as your hard work begins to pay off before starting steps 6 and 8 all over again.
Successfully moving the needle on your lead generation and sales conversions with inbound marketing is definitely an investment of resources. In fact, we estimate that if you are to follow HubSpot’s best practices (which call for 30-40 blog posts a month, plus downloadable assets and the supporting social media needed to promote them), your team will need to invest more than 640 hours in the first quarter.
With more than 40 percent of marketers saying that a lack of human resources is their greatest barrier to effective content marketing, sometimes you just need a partner to help you get over the hurdle of starting a program like this.
Among the benefits of working with a certified HubSpot agency to get your content and marketing automation up and running:
Learn more about how to choose the right HubSpot agency by downloading our checklist of what you should expect, or check out the JONES HubSpot Solution, which outlines how our marketing methodology and experience match up to HubSpot’s tools and efficiencies to provide results.
I would also be glad to schedule a no-obligation consultation to visit with you about your needs for inbound and content marketing and marketing automation. You can choose a time on my calendar here.