9 Steps to Maximize your Hubspot Marketing Hub Enterprise Investment

The Marketing Hub Enterprise platform has recently been updated (as of January 2020) with new functionality, including:

• Team-based partitioning - Assign assets to teams to find the right content more easily
• Adaptive testing - (AI can do testing for you without manually setting up A/B tests
• Account-Based Marketing - Inbound and ABM can work together (as of January 2020, it’s in beta but by the time you read this, it should be live!)
• Customizable chatbots - use code and webhooks to expand chat interaction with customers
• Advanced Chat Targeting - Instead of chat text in the chat box based on the Web page, create a chatflow based on a visitor’s page scroll behavior, where they came from, etc.

Those are just the new/updated features. Emails, campaigns, images, social, landing pages, blogs, CRM, lists, and more are all included in the package. It. Is. A. Lot. 

“Clicking all the right buttons” is a tongue-in-cheek way some experienced HubSpotters talk about the complexity involved in creating marketing automation for your customers and potential customers. Here’s a glimpse into that complexity:

• How do I create the list I want to use (or segment one I already have)?
• Should I send three emails in this nurture campaign? Five? 12? 
• How long should my subject lines be?
• How do I link everything into a single marketing campaign and make sense of the results?
• Should I use pop ups or will they annoy my Web visitors?

OK, now that I’ve blown your mind with how extensive HubSpot Enterprise is, here are the five steps to take that will allow you to squeeze everything you can from the tool.

9 Steps to Maximize your Hubspot Marketing Hub Enterprise Investment

Get to Know HubSpot

HubSpot does a fantastic job of giving customers the information they need to understand how to use the platform. 

Take advantage of the education -- it’s free -- to familiarize yourself with the HubSpot tools you now have at your disposal.

HubSpot offers certifications and free online training, videos, workbooks, and quizzes to test your knowledge. Certifications include both mastery of the software as well as marketing and sales concepts, such as inbound marketing. Requiring your marketing staff (and yourself!) to be certified is one way to ensure they can squeeze the most from your investment. Here’s a partial list of the HubSpot Certifications (and, yes, they’re free):

• Email Marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Growth-Driven Design
• Social Media
• HubSpot Marketing Software

You have tremendous marketing power at your fingertips now. If you don’t know what you can do, you’ll never maximize your HubSpot investment.

There are no excuses for not being able to use all of the features at your disposal.

Devote at Least One Team Member to HubSpot

Marketing automation is a bit of a misnomer. The automation occurs on the customer-facing side, for the customer. To create automation, hours of meticulous manual work is involved. 

Depending on the scope of your marketing efforts, someone could be able to use HubSpot effectively for your business as a part of their job. Larger marketing efforts will require more able bodies. There are only so many hours in a day.

Without staff, you’ll have no automation, making HubSpot a waste of your budget.

USE IT!

This might seem obvious, but many companies are overwhelmed by the options and don’t do anything.  Not only is this a waste of your budget, it’s a missed opportunity. 

Your first workflows and landing pages and emails probably won’t be perfect.  That’s OK. 

Get started using HubSpot. We learn best by doing. 

Sit Down with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support

Hubspot spans these three departments, allowing each department to mutually support the work of the other two. Working together, identify functionality to use in HubSpot HBE and where the lead and customer handoffs between departments will happen. For example, sales and marketing can work together to score leads based on their online activity. Constant communication will ensure that marketing qualified leads passed along to sales are actually qualified. Marketing can work with customer support to created automated emails to onboard new customers and answer frequently asked questions.

Do Regular Portal Audits

Over time, the HubSpot portal will accumulate old campaigns, contacts, forms, workflows, etc. Take the time to periodically archive old campaigns, delete forms no longer in use, etc. It’s easier to find things in a clean portal.

Start Tracking Revenue in HubSpot (If You Aren’t)

Because you now get multi-touch revenue attribution, you determine which marketing activities are most successful. Identify which lead touch points create sales opportunities and correctly be able to attribute success to your marketing efforts. 

Identify Key Companies You Want to Sell To

Use the account-based management functionality to fine-tune your sales and marketing approach to high-priority companies. HubSpot’s ABM features combine the best of inbound with traditional account-based marketing to deliver unique, personal communications to these targeted companies. 

Need help building your buyer personas? Use this easy template

Create a Strategy

Obvious, right? Many of you will think “Of course.” However, many companies don’t take the time to create an overall marketing strategy. Instead, they confuse marketing tactics (blogging, SEO, Google ads) and activity with having an overall strategic direction. It’s worth a moment of self-reflection to ask yourself: Do I have a marketing strategy? 

You must have an overall direction for your efforts. Without a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) marketing strategy, you’ll never achieve success (this applies to more than marketing, but that’s a blog for another time). 

The best marketing automation tool can’t create your marketing strategy for you. 

HubSpot Enterprise is the platform we know best. There are hundreds of tools to use in it. Without an overall strategy to guide the selection of which tools you’ll use to create leads for your business, you’ll fail. 

You’re also basically wasting your money. If you’re unsure of where to start, HubSpot has good advice for creating your inbound strategy. 

Get Help If You Need It

HubSpot has an excellent online community of users sharing tips and techniques for how to use HubSpot effectively. It is a great resource for any HubSpot user, from the novice to the most experienced HubSpotter.

Sometimes, however, you need more help. 

At some point, every marketer has looked at their automation platform or tool stack and thought, “How am I going to do this and where am I going to find the time?”

You don’t have to do it yourself. If you can’t afford staff, but don’t have the time to use HubSpot effectively, bring in third-party HubSpot inbound marketing experts. The right partner can help you staff up and supplement your efforts from strategy creation to simply implementing your strategy in HubSpot Enterprise.

Everyone needs a helping hand once in a while. If you’re not quite sure where to start or where to go next with your HubSpot journey, Horseshoe + Co can help guide you on your road to success.