In Part 1, we looked at some of the marketing tools that are at the heart of what we love about HubSpot and ultimately make creating and running campaigns so much easier.
If you haven’t read Part 1, I’d start there and then come back to Part 2.
In the second part of this little HubSpot mini-series, we are going to dive a little deeper into some of the more advanced features, including:
- Smarter ad campaigns
- ROI & attribution reporting
- Promote sales & marketing collaboration
- Adaptive testing
- It’s the future
Let’s dive in, shall we...
6. Smarter ad campaigns
Most businesses are no stranger to Google Adwords or paid social media. In South Africa, in particular, it seems that in the last decade paid media has been the go-to tool for both large and small businesses.
The game, however, has moved on...
Paid media platforms, which were once a rather blunt instrument, have now evolved significantly to try and ensure users see ads that are most relevant to them.
On top of that, organic reach on your thoughtfully crafted Facebook post is all but nonexistent.
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So if you are going to see any sort of positive ROI from your ad spend then you will need to get smarter about it.
This brings me back to HubSpot. Nice segway Dane ;)
HubSpot’s ads tool does two things that are vitally important. Firstly, it allows you to use first-party data, meaning your data, to target audiences. Targeting the right audience is the foundation of any strong campaign. Getting your ad in front of the most relevant audience means higher click-through rates, more conversions, lower cost-per-click and a whole bunch of other great stuff.
With HubSpot, you can create audiences and then sync them with Facebook, Adwords and LinkedIn to significantly improve your targeting.
While you do get some of these features directly in each ad platform, HubSpot allows you to go beyond some simple remarketing or segmentation.
For example, say you send a marketing email out to promote your latest ebook. You can create a list of people who opened the email and show them an ad for your ebook.
On top of that, where previously you needed to manually upload contact lists to Facebook and Adwords, the audiences you create in HubSpot sync automatically so your lists are always up to date.
The second important thing is that it makes measuring ROI on your spend really easy. Which brings me to my next point...
7. ROI & Attribution Reporting
The thing I often struggled with when looking at reports on Google or Facebook or any other campaign for that matter, was the disconnect between the numbers and the actual people behind those numbers.
Impressions, clicks, conversions are all very valuable metrics but with HubSpot, you get to go a level deeper by being able to see which specific contacts interacted with you.
Tracking the ROI from your ads in HubSpot is as simple as setting up your ROI calculation in the ads tool and you’re on your way.
Do you want to see which ad brought in your best customer? No problem. Or how about, which ad reengaged one of your existing clients?
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HubSpot has a range of attribution reports that allows you to move past the high-level numbers and see what is actually happening in your campaigns. They use five different attribution models which means you get to segment and look at your data from a range of different perspectives.
Having a quick glance at your traffic, leads and customer numbers or diving deeper into which campaigns are giving you the biggest return, or taking a look at which customers came from a specific ad campaign used to be a challenging task and in some cases impossible.
With HubSpot, this level of insight is at your fingertips.
8. Promote marketing and sales collaboration
This might sound like more of a team dynamic thing than a software thing but it’s not…
Well, not really.
There has always been tension between marketing and sales.
On the one side, marketing thinks that sales are not proactive enough with the leads they bring in, while on the sales side, they blame marketing for bringing in low-quality leads or simply not enough leads to support their sales activity.
It can get pretty contentious.
One of the major factors that fuel this fire is the fact that these teams use disparate systems which means there is a general lack of information flowing back and forth between these two teams.
With HubSpot, you get a single source of truth, the CRM.
This means that both marketing and sales work off exactly the same data, use the same reports and even share some of their tools.
By working with the same data on the same platform, you get immediate transparency. It’s easy for sales to see which leads marketing are bringing in with no delay, and it’s easy for marketing to see what happens once sales takes over.
Marketing campaigns and sales activity data all in one place allows for better communication and collaboration, which ultimately means more results for your business.
9. Adaptive testing
A/B testing is certainly nothing new. If you are in marketing you have probably done some sort of A/B testing on an email campaign or landing page in the past.
But A/B testing has had a few issues…
The basic premise is that you create two versions of a landing page and show variation A to 50% of your audience and variation B to the other 50%. Once you have a winner you then create a variation of that version and repeat…
Ultimately, with enough of these tests, you should have a very clear sense of what resonates better with your audience. The challenge is that in each of these tests you are losing potential conversions while the underperforming variation is still receiving 50% of your traffic.
The second issue is that it is manual. You have to create the test, monitor it, decide when the results are statistically significant and then pick a winner.
That’s sooo 2017...
Enter adaptive testing…
Adaptive testing on HubSpot allows you to create up to 5 variations of a landing page and then uses machine learning to offer up the better-performing pages and pick a winner.
A small side note here. Adaptive testing is only available on Marketing Hub Enterprise so if you’re on a Pro license you’ll have to keep doing things the old school way 🤣.
10. It’s the future
I remember sitting in my university’s computer centre back in 2007 and a friend of mine asked me if I had heard of this new social media platform called Facebook.
Trying not to be uncool, I dismissed her and said, “Yeah, but I’m on MySpace.”
She then stared at me for a few seconds and said, “Dane, Facebook is the future!”
Needless to say, today I’m on Facebook.
This is my roundabout way of saying that there is a reason most people are on Facebook today. It has made keeping in touch with friends and family simple and fun.
The way 2007 Dane felt about Facebook is kind of how I feel about HubSpot today.
It makes day-to-day marketing tasks easier, more intuitive and dare I say it FUN!
It enables experimentation and makes it easy for you to connect the dots between your marketing efforts and actual business results.
Don’t get me wrong, HubSpot isn’t some magical tool that is going to crush your marketing KPI’s and hit those sales targets alone. It requires work, a lot of content and a team effort to get the cogs in your marketing and sales machine to start moving.
If you are looking for help with HubSpot or still trying to figure out if HubSpot is right for your business, feel free to reach out to our team on Instagram or Facebook, or simply go ahead and schedule a quick call with us.
