To know Trekk is to know how much we believe in the power of marketing automation tools to help create and distribute strategic, relevant content in a way that delights, engages, and informs your target audience. Our preferred marketing automation platform is HubSpot, and we prefer it so much that we’re actually a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner.
We’ve covered how HubSpot’s content management system (CMS), email marketing automation features, and lead scoring tool can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing and communication strategy. But as many companies enter the traditional end-of-year push and begin planning for the coming year, we thought we’d offer some of our favorite tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your B2B marketing.
Side bar: We dedicated most of this past August to discussing a ton of helpful HubSpot optimization tips on Trekk’s Threads profile, so make sure you follow us on Threads for more informative, Threads-sized content.
Here, let’s look at nine practical tips to help you get the most out of HubSpot’s B2B marketing automation tools, and we’ll provide specific directions as to how you can access the required HubSpot settings to take advantage of these tips.
1. Harness the power of the HubSpot Insights database
You have the option to allow HubSpot to fill properties when you add or import a company with a company domain name. This includes info like industry, revenue, number of employees, and location, all of which can be used to segment your contacts for marketing and assist your sales team with prospecting.
Allowing HubSpot to auto-fill these properties when you add a company can be achieved by following this path: Settings > Objects > Companies > Setup. Then, simply check the two boxes beneath Automation and you’ll be off and running.
2. Segment your contact lists
Personalization in sales and marketing automation is so much more than tacking on <First Name> at the beginning of an email. If you segment your lists into specific audiences, you can personalize your content, which is way more effective. Whether you do it by persona or buying role, the Lists tool will come in handy.
You can start segmenting your lists in order to create more targeted, personalized content by following this path: Contacts > Lists > Create list.
3. Customize your company record view
The company record shows certain popular properties by default, but this data may not be what’s most important to YOUR business. Put the data your team needs at their fingertips by customizing the properties that are surfaced to — and prioritized on — the company record. Plus, you can also create this level of customization for contacts, deals, and tickets.
To customize your company record view, follow: Settings > Objects > Companies > Record Customization. Once there, you can create custom properties based on the customer information or data that best suits your marketing communication or sales needs.
4. Score your leads
Lead scoring allows you to assign values to different prospect and customer behaviors, such as visiting your website, opening or clicking through emails, filling out forms, and more. The more engaged a contact, the higher their score, which empowers your team to follow up with the most engaged leads first.
You can get started with HubSpot’s lead scoring tool by following: Settings > Properties > HubSpot Score.
5. Turn on your website’s live chat feature
You may be missing out on website leads because they’re not quite ready to fill out a form. Offering a lower-stakes way for potential customers to engage with your sales team can help convert more of your traffic into leads. Set up a chatflow so that basic inquiries are handled via automation and only warm leads are funneled to your sales team.
Fire up your live chat to automate conversations with visitors to your website at: Conversations > Chatflows.
6. Use Snippets to help streamline text creation
The HubSpot Snippets tool is essentially a text expander that helps you save the time associated with creating and integrating frequently used text. The Snippets tool allows you to load a piece of text — the information you need to include in a note after a customer onboarding call, for instance — and add a hashtag.
Then, you can use that hashtag throughout your CRM and it will automatically expand said hashtag into your block of text. This can be an enormous time saver, especially for sales or service representatives who deal with high volumes of clients.
The Snippets tool can be accessed in the Conversations dropdown at the top of your HubSpot portal.
7. Put AI to work in service of creating your content
HubSpot’s Content Assistant gives your writing a little AI-powered boost. We don’t recommend using it to write a full blog post or social media posts, but it’s great for brainstorming blog or social content, subject lines for A/B testing, or compelling calls-to-action. Plus, HubSpot is rolling out a couple of other interesting AI-powered content creation tools:
- Campaign Assistant, which can help you create landing pages and ads
- Website Assistant, which HubSpot claims can build a website in just a few minutes
- AI chatbots that use the content on your website — your site pages, your blog, and your knowledge base — to answer customer questions
You can put these AI content creation tools to work by clicking on the lightning bolt throughout your portal.
8. Make it easy for prospects to book meetings with your sales teams
You can use the HubSpot Meetings tool — which integrates with each sales rep’s calendar — to remove all barriers standing between warm leads and sales. Leads can view reps’ availability and book slots that work for them. What’s more, Meetings links can easily be included in marketing emails to further reduce the barrier to entry for your prospects to connect with you.
9. Create a marketing exclusion list
To maintain healthy open rates and click-through rates on your marketing emails, it’s all about who’s on your list — and who’s not on your list. Creating a marketing exclusion list of active contacts who have hard bounced or unsubscribed, contacts who are unengaged, competitors, etc. will help you avoid sending marketing emails to contacts who are not receptive to your brand or messaging. Once you create this list, make sure you add it to the “Don’t send to” section of each email.
You can create your marketing exclusion list at: Contacts > Lists > Create list.
These recommendations will help you optimize HubSpot’s B2B marketing automation tools, but there’s more to maximizing your investment in HubSpot than we can include in one blog post. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you make the most of your HubSpot portal. Or, if you're wondering whether HubSpot makes sense for your needs, try our HubSpot ROI calculator.
