Nothing beats that new software smell.
The long research process is over, you finally get those login credentials into your hands, and drive the portal off the lot (so to speak).
You’re on top of the world because you feel like this is going to change things. This is just the push you need to transform the way your business functions!
As you’ll soon discover, however, things are never quite that easy. To make your new marketing automation software work for your business, you actually have to get things set up.
Here are 5 inexcusable signs that you’re not maximizing the power and potential of your HubSpot portal:
1. You Haven’t Added Personas to Your Portal
When people are facing challenges or questions in life, they turn to search engines for the answers. Filtering through the results on the first page, they begin to understand their situation more clearly and discover possible solutions to their problems and vendors to help them.
This exact process isn’t just happening in one industry—it’s happening across all of them.
There is a huge opportunity to begin to build a relationship with these searchers, but you have to be on the first page of Google results sharing content that is answering their questions. How do you do this? An inbound marketing strategy.
An inbound marketing strategy is nothing without buyer personas. Everything you do centers around your target buyer personas. All of the content you create should be designed to answer their common questions and pains. This extends beyond your blog—it goes into your premium content offers and your lead nurturing emails.
From a HubSpot setup perspective, adding personas into your HubSpot portal allows you to segment your leads based on persona. This means you can send targeted marketing messages through lead nurturing emails, Smart Content, and Smart CTAs to these personas. This personalized and contextual approach will provide your leads with a better educational experience.
Adding a persona in HubSpot creates a new contact property called Persona. This is an option that you can add to your forms. Now when your leads download content on a landing page, they can self-identify as a specific persona. This field will add them to a new Smart List in HubSpot and trigger a workflow of emails written just for them.
2. You Haven’t Set Up Custom Lead Scoring
The inbound process is consumer driven. This means that the prospect holds the keys as they’re going about their research online.
You can’t lay out a single perfect conversion path down your marketing funnel that you’d like to see each and every lead follow. You can only reward your leads for behavior that indicates they’re becoming a more educated and more qualified lead.
HubSpot custom lead scoring allows you to give points to leads for completing activities in your marketing funnel. Items like number of page views, number of forms filled out, number of email clicks, number of email opens—along with a whole lot more—can all be rewarded with the points system.
When you’re setting up your HubSpot portal, it is up to you to determine how much you want to award for each action. The key is to create consistency in your scoring. Leads with a high score should be your more engaged and more attractive prospects.
3. You Haven’t Customized Lifecycle Stages
HubSpot comes equipped with several Lifecycle Stages. These represent various phases in the Buyer’s Journey. To put these features to work for you, you need to customize the criteria for each Lifecycle Stage.
To customize this criteria, you’re going to need to set up a combination of HubSpot Smart Lists and Workflows. The first step is to configure a Smart List for each Persona at each Lifecycle Stage. The list of lists will look something like this:
- [Persona Name][Lead]
- [Persona Name][MQL]
- [Persona Name][SQL]
For each of these lists, set the membership requirements to include the persona field and the lead score you’d like to use for that Lifecycle Stage.
With the lists created, it’s time to create a workflow. This workflow will update a contact’s Lifecycle Stage when they become a member of the corresponding Smart List.
4. You Haven’t Started Using Persona-Specific Lead Nurturing
Websites like NFL.com, Amazon.com, and Netflix.com have all trained visitors to expect a personalized and contextual experience. Each of these sites adjusts the content they share with you based on your actions on the site.
HubSpot gives you the same power to personalize the type of lead nurturing emails you’re sending to your prospect.
If you were in a sales meeting with a client in the mining industry, you wouldn’t show them a sales brochure that talks about auto manufacturing. You’d get laughed out of the building!
Organizing your contacts in Smart Lists based on persona type and lifecycle stage gives you the ability to trigger workflows. A workflow in HubSpot can send a series of emails to the members on that list. This is the best way to deliver personalized emails through marketing automation.
5. You Haven’t Implemented Smart Calls-to-Action
You’ve worked so hard to earn a visitor to your website. You’ve interviewed personas, researched keywords, crafted great content, but you’re showing a Call-to-Action that advertises an eBook that your lead has already downloaded!
With HubSpot’s Smart CTA tool you can always be pointing prospects to the next step in the funnel.
Smart CTAs are powered by Smart Lists, just like your lead nurturing. This means that members of each list are seeing the same premium content offers being promoted in your emails and in your Calls-to-Action. It doesn’t matter where these CTAs are placed, they will automatically update when a contact has been added to a new smart list.
This feature helps you maximize each opportunity you have to market to a prospects.
Getting the Most Out of Your HubSpot Portal
If you’re concerned that you’re not maximizing the potential of your HubSpot portal and would like to get a second opinion and some free suggestions, then sign up for your free HubSpot Audit.
Simply fill out the form, add a member of our team to your portal, and schedule a time for your review. It’s that easy!
You’ll walk away with a list of tips and suggested improvements that can help you more effectively implement inbound marketing for your organization.