What Your Team Needs to Know to Make HubSpot Work

You’ve decided to take the plunge and do inbound marketing right, using HubSpot, a pioneer in inbound marketing strategy and software solutions. But with a minimum investment that demands attention, you want to make sure you get a return on that investment.

Realizing a top ROI on your HubSpot investment requires investing time in your staff, as well, so they understand how and why inbound marketing works, and how all of the moving parts work together.

Let’s review the most important concepts your marketing team needs to understand to maximize your inbound marketing results.

Your marketing team needs to learn:

1. How content drives website traffic (and how to optimize blog posts for search)

If your team is making the transition from an approach focused on pushing messages out to prospects through paid ads, outbound email, print media, paid social media and other outbound tactics, they’ll need to think differently. Inbound marketing starts with content focused on bringing visitors to your site, rather than getting in your prospect’s face.

Content, especially your business blog is the key to optimizing your website for search, shooting for the coveted top three organic results for the keywords and phrases your prospects are most likely to search. Those three organic results—not the paid results—earn 60 percent of the clicks.

Your team needs to think about what your customers are typing into that query when they open a search engine to find a solution to their problems. And then they need to write content focused on solving those problems.

2. How to use content and offers to capture leads

Bringing visitors to your website is just the first part of the journey. While the content creation that initially draws visitors to your website may look more like the content public relations pros are accustomed to creating (no hard sell), your team still needs to take a term from the sales team and put it to work in order to capture leads. That term is a call-to-action.

But in the case of HubSpot’s inbound marketing approach, the CTAs included in most content, such as blog posts, won’t be of the “Buy Now” variety. Instead, these CTAs are providing some other middle-of-the-sales-funnel offer —value, but not yet asking for the sale.

Every blog post should include at least one CTA for a related offer, such as downloadable template or case study, a free trial, or a newsletter subscription. Visitors exchange their contact information for this additional, useful, related content, and in the process are entered into your lead nurturing system.

3. How to use lead nurturing to guide leads through the sales funnel

Inbound marketing requires thinking through the entire sales funnel, from introduction/awareness through consideration, comparison and closing a sale. When it comes to content creation, unlike outbound marketing that might focus on a single, simple eye-catching theme, inbound marketing and lead nurturing require thinking about what a customer needs at each of those stages and planning a complete campaign and workflow that guides them through the funnel with related offers.

4. How to use inbound marketing data to qualify leads

Fewer than 25 percent of the visitors who convert to leads on your website are ready at that time to make a purchase. Some aren’t ever going to make a purchase—they may just be doing research for something only tangentially related to your business.

Some are just beginning to gather information, but need more time. Some may not be in the position of authority to make a purchasing decision.

The data you receive through HubSpot’s lead nurturing system, both on individual leads and aggregate data that shows patterns of behavior, can help you pinpoint the characteristics of a lead that is ready to make a purchase, and then to identify leads exhibiting those characteristics and transition them to sales. (Get our Lead Qualification Checklist here.)

5. How to share lead intelligence with sales to increase closures

Your marketing team also needs to think in terms of enabling sales bysharing information. As a lead moves through your nurturing system, HubSpot collects information about what offers they access (i.e. what problems they are trying to solve), as well as gathering additional contact and identifying information through progressive forms that request more detailed information as leads move through the sales funnel.

That information is invaluable to your sales personnel as they make personal contacts with leads to close the gap between a lead and sale. And since closing sales and generating revenue is the ultimate goal of any marketing department, it just makes sense to keep that transition transparent.

With HubSpot’s built-in CRM, sharing lead intelligence is free and seamless.

6. How to analyze HubSpot data to optimize future campaigns

Our lead contact with HubSpot reminded me recently that “HubSpot can manage a lot things, but it can measure even more.”

HubSpot’s measurement tools are one of its strongest assets, giving marketing teams or their partner agencies access to a wealth of information about what content attracts traffic, which offers generate leads, what types of offers are most likely to lead to eventual sales, and many more detailed metrics.

You and your marketing team need to be prepared to invest resources, either your own or that of an experienced agency, into analyzing the data to find what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can optimize future campaigns to improve ROI.

It’s a lot to think about and learn. But it pays off in the end.

All of these skills are really concepts your staff will need to internalize to guide all of your strategy and content development. The hard skills—actual use of HubSpot’s software and system—are a topic for another day, and equally important.

Successfully launching inbound marketing with HubSpot isn’t an overnight effort. It takes time and resources. Download our HubSpot Implementation Timeline and Planning Template for a look at how you should budget your team’s training, planning, content creation and implementation time during the first 12 months of your inbound investment.