By Marketing Managers - we know you're busy, we know you sometimes want to see the 'bigger picture' and other times want to get involved in the 'nitty gritty'.
You're keen to see your social media followers rise, just as much as you want to see the amount of sales enquiries rise too.
You're interested in saving time where possible, but want an abundance of time to think creatively about your 12-month marketing plan.
Your role is about being both strategic and tactical at the same time, which is where a software marketing tool like HubSpot can really make your job easier. Here at Yellowstep, we know you feel all of the above because we've been working with Marketing Managers for over 15 years now.
These challenges around reducing time spent on 'tactical' outputs, wanting better results from digital marketing, and ultimately have a marketing plan that generates more revenue, led us a few years ago to go in search of a sales and marketing software platform. Something we could offer to clients as a tool to make their jobs easier.
We found HubSpot
So convinced of how much it would help our clients, we embraced the platform for ourselves, started offering HubSpot to several clients, and we have since become a HubSpot Gold Partner.
It's true that HubSpot can really help to align your sales and marketing activities from a strategic point of view, helping to increase revenue and track back new clients to the marketing work you have done. But my focus in this blog is to give you an insight into the inner workings of HubSpot.
Regardless of whatever software tools you use at the minute and the amount of staff you may have in your team, I can pretty much guarantee that HubSpot can make your job as the Marketing Manager so much easier. And here's just 10 examples of how...
1 - Easily grow your organic website traffic
The equation is simple. The more organic traffic you get to your website, the more chance you have of driving more interest and revenue for your business. HubSpot allows you to easily and simply track organic traffic, much simpler than Google Analytics, and has tools for improving your current stats.
The blog portal, for example, has a built-in search engine optimisation tool that ensures that your blog will feature for the keywords your target market are searching for on Google. Unsure on what keywords your target market are searching for? HubSpot has got a tool for that too.
2 - Quickly create digital marketing reports
Whether you're updating yourself or the senior team, pulling together digital marketing reports can be boring and sometimes over complicated. (Just how many templates have you used over the past 12 months?)
HubSpot's built-in reports tool allows you to track and monitor every part of your digital marketing - from your website traffic to your social media accounts, all in one place. All reports can be downloaded as PDF and even emailed directly to your senior team, if you so wish to.
3 - Speed up your contact database growth
The big tick in the box for HubSpot is that it is built around generating leads for your business. Using a combination of content marketing and email marketing techniques, HubSpot allows you to 'nurture' contacts into genuine business leads - and that all starts by collecting their contact information.
Along with downloadable content that you make available for website visitors, you can use HubSpot's landing pages to collect visitor's email address and use this to send marketing emails. A great way to grow your database and engage visitors beyond their first visit to your website.
4 - Watch your competitors closer than ever before
Not only can you watch your competitors, you can assess their marketing grade, their website traffic rank, how many social media followers, and many more stats you would never have had access to before.
The beauty of this competitor tool is that you can regularly snoop on what they are doing, without giving them the privilege of counting as a visitor every time you go on their website! A great asset to use when reporting to the senior team every 12 months or so.
5 - Reduce the time spent on creating e-Newsletters
Emails, whether you're doing them yourself or another team member is doing them, can take a long time. If there isn't a formatting issue, there's usually something else that goes wrong that holds up your progress.
HubSpot's email tool has a range of templates ready-to-go and ready to be duplicated to aid a fast reacting marketing team. Don't think this is to the detriment of quality e-Newsletters or emails either - the designs can be as simple or as complex as you like. Just choose your design and away you go.
More importantly, HubSpot's email tool boasts advanced segmentation and automation features - allowing you to trigger a bespoke sequence of emails based on a prospect's actions or interests - all at the click of a button.
6 - Easily store and find your target market research
"I'm sure I saved the file on my desktop somewhere". You've got a busy job, the last thing you want to be doing is spending time sifting folders for that target market research that gets looked at once a year.
HubSpot puts your target market, or buyer persona as they call it, at the heart of all your marketing activity. There is a portal to load all your different target markets to, which helps to align your marketing efforts. You can even track the performance of your campaigns to attract these target markets by setting goals. No longer will you be blowing dust and cobwebs off that old PDF document!
7 - Improve the performance of your website
A standard task for any Marketing Manager now - improving the performance of your number one marketing tool, your website is key. But finding ways to improve your website can be tricky without the data you need.
HubSpot has a really good tool to help you in that respect. The 'page performance' tool allows you to assess every web page for problems, errors and SEO malpractice. This tool comes with recommendations, allowing you or your team to go into your website CMS and make the necessary changes to improve your site.
8 - Cut costs on your current CRM system
Still operating an expensive, standalone, bespoke CRM system to manage and monitor new business prospects and customers? Well not any more! HubSpot comes with a free CRM. Yes, free.
Synchronised with the marketing tools, the CRM can track new business prospects from their first visit on the website, to every interaction since, allowing for better optimisation of your marketing efforts. Also, your sales team will gain an easier to use and simpler interface allowing them to track prospects like never before.
9 - Easily plan and track activity of team members
Team members or no team members, surely there is a better way to plan time and tasks than using Microsoft Outlook calendar? Well yes, there is.
HubSpot has a great calendar tool that allows you to schedule and assign tasks as far into the future as you like. This gives you greater insight into what needs to be done, but also ensures that jobs ARE done to make sure your digital marketing is as good as it possibly can be.
10 - Track all your digital marketing in one place
While standalone tools such as Hootsuite, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Blogger, Tweetdeck, Google Analytics, and many more tools are great at what they do, the nightmare of pulling all the data together can be quite confusing.
With HubSpot, you have an all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to track all your digital marketing in one place - and requires just one password to do all of this, amazing!
HubSpot isn't for everyone
Not every Marketing Manager will see the benefit of using HubSpot. But to those who are constantly seeking to improve their marketing efforts and results, whilst trying to keep a healthy work/life balance, HubSpot could really be a useful tool for you.
For a deeper look into the world of HubSpot, and to see how you could benefit from the sales and marketing platform, get in touch with us today.
If you want to fill the gaps in your digital marketing to drive new sales, take our quiz and claim your free results report.
