What

HubSpot as a platform

When deciding whether a transition to modern marketing and marketing automation is the right choice for you, it is important to start by looking more broadly at the business strategy. Are there any parts of it that can be developed through inbound marketing as a method?

# 1 Do you want to reach specific growth goals?  

Growth requires new customers or more sales to existing customers. Often even both. Where will the new leads come from? Lead generation is central to modern and data-driven marketing. So if the goal is to get more leads, inbound marketing is the right method. This is because it helps to attract and convert the modern buyer. To sell more to existing customers, marketing automation is an effective tool. It lets you keep track of what existing customers are interested in and you can reach out to them at the right time. You can read more about this later in the guide.

# 2 Do you want to shorten the sales process?

Many B2B companies have long sales cycles of up to 12 months. If this time were to be shortened, it would be of great value to these companies.

Marketing automation contributes to this in the following ways:

1. You can let your «inbound marketing machine» be responsible for the first qualification of leads. This way, sales can focus on the leads that are relevant to spend time on.
   
   
2. You can use lead nurturing workflows to educate your leads and help them further in the buyer's journey before sales take over.
   
   
3. Thanks to marketing automation, you can contact your leads at just the right time, based on the lead's interaction with your marketing activities. Either via automated emails, or by a salesperson who is notified that the lead is ready for a call.

# 3 Do you want to be a thought leader?

Being recognised as an expert in your field can feel like a diffused KPI. It is not as measurable as creating more leads and shortening your sales processes, but still many knowledge-based B2B companies have this as a goal. If you can achieve a position as a thought leader, it is easier to attract customers and also new employees.

Valuable content (content marketing) is the fuel in the marketing engine. It is the publishing of content – blog posts, white-papers, guides, how-to videos and so on – that creates the positioning as an expert. The difference between those who claim to be experts, and those who actually are, is that the latter understands the value of imparting knowledge and is willing to share it.  

# 4 Want to be able to document the value of your marketing?

This may not be part of the business strategy today, but it is a great advantage and gives you good arguments when you need to convince management that marketing is a good idea. Predictability is something that is perceived very positively by most CEOs and data-driven marketing is directly measurable. You can directly see how many leads you generate, and how many of them become customers, and thus how much your marketing has contributed to the company's sales. In addition, you can dive deeper and see exactly which activities have generated the best leads, so in the future you know what to do more of. When you can document the effect, it will always be easier to get a budget for new initiatives and marketing activities in the future.

# 5 Do you want to gather your marketing activities in a single platform?

The argument for replacing a fragmented landscape of marketing platforms with a single-platform tool (HubSpot) is apparently rather weak. But the value should not be underestimated, as it will save you time. When important marketing activities and functions, such as blogs, email marketing, landing pages, social media and advertising, are able to be coordinated much more effectively.

Something that is important in this context: you will not spend less time on marketing after starting to use HubSpot. But this time is spent on doing the right things. Although the individual activities take less time, you get much more time left to do more, with new opportunities to take marketing to the next level.

Do you have the arguments for a good business case?

The previous 5 points are good arguments for investing in inbound marketing and HubSpot. If there is no concrete need to do any of the previous 5 points, it will be difficult for you to present a good business case for the investment. And then it may be better to save the money, or use it on something that apparently already works well. But if you are like most of the ambitious B2B companies, there is always a need for more leads, more sales and a more modern way of marketing. In the next chapter, we will dive deeper into what you can actually use HubSpot for.

How

What can you do with HubSpot?

Let's have a look at what HubSpot does and what opportunities it can give you. Basically, HubSpot is a marketing automation platform that integrates a number of marketing tools – blogs, emails, social media, landing pages, forms, call to actions, etc – and connects them to your CRM in an intelligent way. The purpose is to optimise lead generation, lead nurturing and finally sales. Here are a few examples of common goals many marketing teams want to reach and how HubSpot can help: 

Goal 1:

Get cold leads to be hot before sales take over

Getting there:

Create automated lead nurturing workflows

Let's skip the entire first phase of inbound marketing, lead generation. We assume that you have already published valuable content that your visitors can download on your website in exchange for them sharing their contact information. You now have some downloads, and that's fine, but there's a long way to go. Now it's time to move your leads further in the buyer's journey. HubSpot works with 3 phases: awareness, consideration and decision. It is your content that moves the leads to the next phases, but you must be able to automate and direct the content to the specific lead. This is called lead nurturing.

Example:

Your company sells inventory management systems, and you have published a guide with 7 tips on how to achieve competitive advantages through inventory optimisation. In HubSpot, you create a workflow with a series of emails with content related to the guide and educate the lead further. In the simplest version, you can decide that your emails should come in a flow every few days. The smart thing comes when you start letting your workflows depend on information that your lead has given you. For example, via filling out forms or behaviour on your website. You can do this by adding "if / then" functions, which allow you to divide your emails into branches, giving the possibility to send email 1 or email 2, depending on a specific data. Even more concretely: Our lead «Jane Doe» has filled out a form on the website where she downloaded a guide. In the form, Jane Doe filled out that her title is warehouse manager. When we then create our email feeds, we can use that information to send the right content for Jane Doe.

In other words:

If the title is equal to Warehouse Manager – send material X after 3 days. If the title is equal to CFO – send material Y after 3 days.

The next step in the chain can be a customer case. If you have good information about Jane Doe's company, you can even adapt so that she gets a customer case that better relates to her field of business. You also have the opportunity, through Jane Doe's activity on your website, to ensure that she receives content she has not seen before. Maybe she has already downloaded and read that particular case on your website, this makes it irrelevant to send to Jane Doe. Instead, you can, by using if / then, choose that IF Jane Doe has already read your case, she will receive email X instead. Furthermore, you can decide if she didn’t open the email you just sent her, you can send the same email again with a different title and minor edits to the content. But workflows don't have to be triggered by a download. You can also use Jane Doe's visit to your website as a trigger for a workflow to start.

Goal 2:

More accurate marketing.

Getting there:

Progressive profiling and segmentation of The contact database.

Accurate marketing requires knowledge and information about your leads. Information that you can collect via forms on your website, often in connection with downloading material. The challenge is that you want to gather a lot of information about your leads, but the more you ask for in a form, the lower the conversion rate – usually. Let us therefore introduce «progressive profiling». By making your forms in HubSpot progressive, you can put fields in a sequence.

For example:

Your form shows 4 fields as a starting point:

• First name
• Surname
• Company
• Email

Then you can put these in order:

• Title
• Industry
• Your biggest challenge

Instead of asking the same 4 questions on each download, we can change what information we ask for the next download. We therefore replace the questions we already have answers to with new questions. For the second downloading, you will instead see:

• Email (which we keep)
• Title (new question)
• Industry (new question)
• Your biggest challenge (new question)

This way you can find out a lot more information, and at the same time not suffocate the person with lots of questions at once.

HubSpots smart lists 

HubSpot also includes another smart tool that helps you get more accurate in your marketing. This feature is called «smart lists» and you can use it to segment your contacts in the database. These are lists that you customise yourself, based on the data they should be sorted by. All the data you have collected about a lead can be used to segment and create your smart lists, including their activity and behaviour on your website.

For example:

You want to run a campaign on product X, and only email the people you know are interested. In this case you set up a smart list with the following rules:

• Everyone who visited the product page X the last 60 days

and

• Belongs to industry Y.

You will soon discover that you get a list of relevant leads to target with your marketing. Smart lists can be used for much more than «just» efficient segmentation in your CRM. You can also use them to become wiser about your contacts, and be able to test theses and find common denominators. For example, you can find out if there is a pattern in which pages on the website a lead has visited before it becomes a customer. This gives you greater insight as a marketer, and can make ways for new ideas and initiatives.

Goal 3:

Push the potential buyers further in the buyer's journey

Getting there:

Use smart content to deliver the right messages at the right time

The idea behind progressive profiling also goes back to the possibilities of using smart content with HubSpot. This lets the system automatically adjust the content on the website and adapt to the visitor. The aim is also to be as accurate and relevant as possible!

For example:

A blog post ends with a call-to-action (CTA) that leads the visitor to a landing page with a downloadable guide. This opens up the possibility for the person to convert and become a lead. But what if the visitor has already downloaded the guide? Then it is unnecessary to lead them from the blog post to the same guide with the same message. Instead, you can use a «smart CTA button» and set up different rules for when and how this appears to a visitor.

1. « 10 ways to optimise your inventory » (standard CTA button)
2. « Guide: Should You Choose ERP or WMS? »  (appears in cases where the reader has already downloaded # 1)
3. « Calculate the ROI on your inventory management project » (in cases when the reader has downloaded # 2)

# 1 is in the awareness phase
# 2 relates to the consideration phase
# 3 is at the bottom of the funnel – the decision phase.

In HubSpot you can automatically set that when a lead downloads a material in a certain phase, the life cycle phase of the contact changes. For example, if a lead downloads material in the decision stage, the life cycle stage can be set to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead which can then be passed on to the sales team). The sales team can then decide if the lead is an MQL or if  it is warm enough to be qualified as a SQL (Sales Qualified lead). How this works in details depends on your businesses sales process. This way you get an overview of who is most interesting to focus on. But more on that in the next chapter.

Goal 4:

Focus on the most relevant leads.

Getting there:

Use lead scoring to rank your leads.

Lead scoring is a key element of HubSpot and a feature that often arouses the enthusiasm of marketers. With lead scoring, you can rank your leads by how hot they are. You choose what gives your leads points, and you can score both based on the lead's activity and behaviour on the website and the information they have provided. For example, you set a visit to your product pages to 5 points, customer case to 10 points, downloading material to 25 points, a click in a specific email to 10 points, and so on. Maybe you are particularly interested in a specific industry or a certain size of company, and set that to add 15 points. And vice versa, there may be a particular industry that is not in your target group, that you don't want to spend time on, and you set as - 50 points. You can also decide that the score should be reset after a certain time, for example every 90 days. Lead scoring can also be used to trigger a workflow.

Example:

When a lead reaches 50 points, an email is sent out with an invitation to book an unconditional meeting with a person from the sales team. Or that when the lead gets a certain point, an internal email is sent to a salesperson to contact the person.

Goal 5:

Improve cross-selling and upselling to existing customers.

Getting there:

Let the sales team receive notifications when your customers show interest.

It is often much easier to sell more to existing customers than it is to bring in completely new customers. Therefore, many companies focus on cross-sell and additional sales to existing customers, but how do you know if and when their needs arise? The common way is for the seller to put a follow-up notice in their calendar. The problem with this method is that it is the seller's calendar, and not the customer's interest that governs when additional sales are to be addressed.

What if you could keep an eye on when customers start showing interest in your marketing efforts instead? You can do that with HubSpot. For example, you can ensure that the right sales person receives a notification the second the customer shows a specific behaviour. This can for example be when they clicks on a link in a newsletter or reads specific pages on the website. In this way, the seller can make sure to make the call at the very moment the customer is thinking of buying more or checking out what else you can offer. HubSpot is a tool that allows you to detect the behaviours of existing customers and gives you the opportunity to automate the follow-up so that it takes place at just the right time. And every salesperson knows how important it is to have timing in the sales process.

How

What does modern marketing and HubSpot require of me?

Modern marketing is in many ways the answer to how marketing departments interest and engage with the modern buyer. Modern marketing takes time and requires resources for it to yield results and work optimally. It is not a method you just test, but is a new way to drive marketing and sales.

Effective marketing is an investment

If you are not willing to see marketing costs as an investment, your marketing efforts will have a hard time to efficient. Modern marketing is basically a long-term investment in a well-stocked and predictable sales pipeline.

Whether you choose to let your own organisation do the majority of the work or enlist the help of an agency, it is still associated with resource consumption. If you start completely from scratch and completely without marketing activities, it is a reasonable rule of thumb to compare the investment with a new employee.

1. Software

HubSpot has a variety of packages to choose from. The pro license, which is the obvious choice for most companies, has a starting price at €1,474/mo.

2. Setup of HubSpot portal

A set up of your new portal costs between 4000–6000 EUR depending on what you want help with. It is usually more cost-effective to hire an agency for this than to hire someone who is technically skilled in the system.

3. Ongoing content production

How much time and money should you spend on content production each month? Of course, it depends on ambition, competition and many other things. But when you calculate it, the display will hardly show less than 4000 EUR per month.

4. Maintenance and development of the platform

This is a cost that is difficult to quantify. But you will want to develop your platform further than just what was done when it was set up the first time. There are many opportunities that you certainly want to take advantage of.

5. Paid distribution of content

Feel free to set aside a budget for advertising, so that you can attract more people to your content. Partly to use Google AdWords, but also paid content on social media. Of course, it depends on the context, but in general you often get a good ROI for a small amount of money.

In total, an annual budget of around 55-65,000 EUR is a fair estimate for a full-time employee and in many ways it is a good comparison with how the investment should be considered. The challenge, however, requires you to be really lucky to find a candidate who can take the full load of tasks that comes with an overall marketing effort and strategy. After all, there are few who master both strategy, content production, design, social media, paid advertising and media, SEO, web development, marketing automation and so on. Regardless of how you choose to bring in the expertise, it often requires the organisation to make a strategic choice to invest in modern marketing.

This is also one of the reasons why it is important to get support for projects from the highest levels in the organisation. And the easiest way to get this is to show that the investment is worth the money.

Magic does not happen over night...

Once you have kicked off your HubSpot project, both management and the sales department will be impatient. When will the never-ending river of leads start to pour in? However, modern and data-driven marketing is a long-term strategy and method, so it is important to remember that it can take between 6-12 months before the machine is in full swing. Fortunately, you don't have to wait for real results.

As soon as the sales department gets valuable content to work with, and that supports their work, you will soon discover that stakeholders understand the value of the modern approach to marketing. It is the modern way of marketing because it is adapted to the customers' way of buying. And in addition to being effective and value-creating in a number of areas, it is much more fun than continuing with the old tactics that have lost their effectiveness.

Want to know more about modern and data-driven marketing, HubSpot, or need help getting started? Contact us, we are here for you!