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5 Ways to Maximize HubSpot and Your End-of-Year Budget Surplus

5 Ways to Maximize HubSpot and Your End-of-Year Budget Surplus

Fourth quarter is just around the corner, and for many marketing directors that means find that final project that will use up any remaining budget surplus for the year. With many companies following a “use it or lose it” philosophy, it’s vital to find ways of using your budget and proving ROI of your marketing efforts.

If you are a HubSpot user, or use another marketing automation solution for your content management and inbound marketing, consider putting your remaining 2017 budget toward one of these projects. Every one of them will help you start your 2018 marketing year even stronger.

1. Conduct a Marketing Success Audit

With the myriad metrics HubSpot tracks, the hardest part of conducting a marketing success or marketing content audit is wading through all of the data.

A marketing success audit is an in-depth review of the metrics you are already tracking, with a focus on dialing in successful strategies to increase traffic, leads and conversion rates.

Chances are you already track dozens of different metrics, from click-through rates on emails to conversion rates on your landing pages, along with website visits, social media engagement, and revenue by source. Now is the perfect time to pull reports from the last 12 months and really study them to determine:

  • Current reach—via website traffic, blog readership, social media (both paid and organic)

  • Inbound marketing lead generation numbers

  • Lead nurturing statistics—close rates, lead qualification criteria

  • Revenue—goals vs. actual

Of course, if you are new to HubSpot or your marketing automation software, it may be challenging to decide which metrics are most important to determining your next strategy, or even how to get the reports you most want. A HubSpot-certified agency will be proficient at navigating the dashboards and reports provided to give you the data you need, and will be able to craft recommendations based on that data. Click here for a checklist of criteria you should consider if you choose to contract with an agency to complete a marketing success audit.

2. Conduct a Marketing Content Audit

An outside perspective is also useful in conducting a marketing content audit. This type of audit reviews all of your current marketing content to pinpoint gaps in content variety, targeted customer personas or stages of the sales funnel.

If you contract with an agency to audit your content, make sure they include:

  • Types of content developed

  • Topics covered

  • Stages of funnel included in content strategy

  • Customer personas targeted with specific content

  • Utilization of calls-to-action and landing pages that drive lead generation and lead nurturing

After combing through your content offerings, an experienced inbound marketing agency can provide specific campaign and content recommendations to fill in gaps in your current messaging.

3. Conduct a Blog Audit Comparing Your Blog to Your Competitors

A blog audit would combine elements of the marketing success and marketing content audits, but with a specific focus on your business blog.  Periodic reviews of your blog’s readership, click-through rate on CTAs, conversion rate on related landing pages, subscribers and unsubscribe rates, social media shares, and more will help you see where there may be room for improvement.

The audit should also review your stated content strategy and check how well it aligns with what you are actually publishing on your blog. Are you following the criteria for quality content, or meeting these 20 guidelines for publishing blog posts that are optimized for SEO and lead generation?

 (Perhaps there are other audits you sense would be beneficial? Download our Media, Messaging and Marketing Audit Checklist for a look at what you should expect from an agency for five different audit projects.)

4. Plan Next Year’s Content Strategy & Calendar

Another use for your remaining end-of-year budget is development of a complete and concrete content strategy and calendar for the next year. Whether you use the budget to engage an agency to review your brand identity and buyer personas to determine your next campaigns, or do the work in-house with existing staff, advance planning will yield better content and strategies for the next year.

Here are a few tools to help you along the way:

5. Begin Creating Content for Your Next Campaign

Who wouldn’t want to start 2018 with all of the content for your first few campaigns “in the can” ready to go? Working with an agency, freelance writers, or your in-house staff, put your extra budget toward starting the next year ready to roll before Jan. 1. (Not sure what your best approach is? Download our Guide to Resourcing Your Inbound Marketing Strategy for pros and cons of in-house, freelance or agency content creation.)

By starting the new year with a larger resource library of content to support email campaigns, inbound marketing efforts, and blog development, you may free up time to try something new, such as introducing video to your automated lead nurturing emails.

Whether you choose an audit that helps you “prove it”—that elusive effort to prove ROI—or strategy and content development outsourcing to simply “use it,” now is the time to consider how you will use the budget that remains before Q4 ends. In addition to these 5 projects, you’ll find 8 more in our two-page reference: 13 Ways to Use Your End-of-Year Budget.

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