Ultimate Guide to HubSpot Marketing Automation: 4 Critical Aspects

• June 22nd, 2021

Digital marketing is one of the most popular ways used by businesses and marketers to effectively advertise their products and services in today’s business world. Companies have learned that the internet is the ideal location to locate new clients for their goods and services. The process of designing, operating, and measuring the effectiveness of Digital Marketing campaigns, on the other hand, is not as straightforward as it appears, and here is where Marketing Automation Platforms come to the rescue!

In this article, you will be introduced to HubSpot, its key features, the concept of Marketing Automation, and the different features of Marketing Automation. You will learn about the need for Marketing Automation, its different types, and numerous tools offered by HubSpot Marketing Automation. 

Table of Contents

Introduction to HubSpot 

HubSpot Logo - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: https://www.hubspot.com/style-guide

HubSpot provides a suite of fully managed apps for managing an organization’s whole customer flow. It assists businesses in marketing their products, tracking how leads interact with their marketing assets, onboarding leads as customers, managing their purchasing experience, and providing customer care as long as they remain.

HubSpot’s major selling point is that it offers an all-in-one marketing platform solution that allows customers to scale with their business and meet changing marketing requirements. Because its user interface (UI) is incredibly sleek and easy to pick up, HubSpot takes pleasure in offering one of the greatest user experiences of any Marketing Automation software. HubSpot’s school also has a lot of tools for users to come up to speed. It offers free courses and tutorials that teach marketers about inbound marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and other topics, as well as how to use HubSpot to achieve their objectives.

Starter, Professional, and Enterprise are the three price categories offered by HubSpot. As you progress through the tier system, each product offering gets more powerful. The Enterprise package, for example, is aimed at large businesses and includes everything from hierarchical teams to revenue attribution. Despite this price structure, HubSpot offers a free tier that includes features like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and marketing tools for email marketing, ad management, landing pages, and more. HubSpot does this with the use of three applications: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub.

Official documentation about HubSpot can be found here

Key Features of HubSpot 

  • Actionable Metrics: All of the KPIs for reporting and Marketing are collected in one location.
  • Easy User Interface: HubSpot has a fantastic user interface that is incredibly easy to use, especially for beginners. HubSpot provides free access of a broad range of tools, as well as training on the platform. Despite its history of being strongly associated with small and midsize businesses, HubSpot is progressively launching new capabilities that appeal to the demands of corporate clients (SMBs).
  • Increased Efficiency: Emails and workflows that are automated can help you save time and money.
  • Funnel Automation Support: With email drip campaigns, you can put lead nurturing on autopilot. Automate your email campaigns to bring prospects deeper into the Sales Funnel and produce more qualified leads.
  • CRM Integration: HubSpot’s CRM software allows you to have a more thorough understanding of your prospects, enabling you to approach them more effectively.
  • Integration with Service Hub: HubSpot’s Service Hub connects with your CRM software and allows you to handle built-in service requests. HubSpot provides an intuitive and simple-to-use marketing platform.

Introduction to Marketing Automation 

Illustration of Marketing Automation - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: https://www.leadbi.com/10-things-you-should-know-about-marketing-automation/

Marketing Automation refers to the use of software tools and platforms to automate marketing operations or activities, which is typically done to alleviate the tedium of repeated labor. Tasks may be planned ahead of time, scheduled, and then done when they are due, which increases efficiency. Another advantage of automating the steps of a Marketing Campaign is that mistakes are eliminated. Instead of manually creating and vetting ads, processes, schedules, and other marketing elements each time, they may be produced and validated once and then rerun multiple times.

Various Software as a Service (SaaS) products offer automation capabilities for a range of sectors, including Email Marketing, Lead Tracking, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing, among others. HubSpot and Marketo are two of the most prominent alternatives in this market area. Marketing Automation systems are an important component of digital advertising since they give clients a tailored experience while considerably lowering the effort that would typically be associated with such a marketing plan. Also check out the Hubspot to PowerBI Integration method.

Marketing Automation assists you in identifying new clients and automating the process of nurturing those leads to the point where they are ready to be sold. It automates steps that lead prospects to the stage where they may be addressed directly by the Sales team with the goal of making a deal and beginning a long-term relationship, and the data it collects can help you decide which marketing techniques to use.

Marketing automation does this by dramatically increasing the productivity of your Sales Funnel, allowing you to swiftly convert a large number of leads into satisfied customers using a variety of methods.

Early in the lead-nurturing process, for example, education and awareness may be the most important duty. Marketing Automation may provide helpful information that builds trust and respect for your business, allowing prospects to grasp what they’re getting fast and simply. When prospects have narrowed down the sorts of items they’re interested in, you can reach out to them with customized content that’s particularly geared to the groups that can help your business develop. Finally, when activity recorded by the Marketing Automation system reveals even more concentrated interest, a qualified, thorough, and well-understood lead is immediately forwarded to the sales team.

Features of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation has a lot of benefits. The following are some of the most important characteristics of Marketing Automation platforms:

Lead Tracking and Metrics

All Marketing Automation and email solutions provide this feature. Many of these more complex systems are moving beyond scoring based on actions (visits, opens, clicks, etc.) to scoring based on projected intent and/or purchasing stage, according to Yield officials.

Regular Lead Nurturing

This is the practice of sending a series of automated emails to prospects in order to engage them by providing useful information.

Targeted Email Marketing 

Email personalization aids organizations in building stronger client relationships.

Continuous Campaign Management 

Email marketing may be used to nurture leads throughout the Sales Cycle. It allows teams to send customized and direct emails to huge groups of individuals.

Social Media Management

This enables the material to be shared across most major social media networks in one location.

CRM Automation Integration

This enables companies to share lead data between Marketing and Sales.

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Creation of Landing Pages

According to Yield, a tool that allows you to gather information from your prospects and then route it to multiple systems for storage and/or action.

Personalized Lead Management 

According to Yield, certain marketing automation tools act as a landing point for leads who don’t have enough information to move on to Sales. “This is becoming less significant for a rising number of B2B businesses as the quantity of data on a specific market segment makes it viable to migrate to a “contacts only” customer data structure, which puts every Account and Contact into the CRM,” according to Yield analysts.

Social Media Management

This enables the material to be shared across most major social media networks in one location.

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Understanding the Need for Marketing Automation 

Marketers may build tailored, segmented, and timely marketing experiences for prospects and consumers with Marketing Automation Platforms, which provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions. These systems automate numerous marketing functions including social networking, direct email, lead generation, digital advertising, and so forth.

The analytics function, which helps marketers assess the performance of their marketing efforts across channels and segments, is one of the most important features given by Marketing Automation Platforms. The analytics tool evaluates the impact of marketing initiatives using a variety of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), giving marketers valuable information into how they may enhance the performance of their efforts.

Lead generation is a crucial stage in every company’s development. Your team will have more time to focus on overall strategy and nurturing the prospects that show actual potential by automating several phases in the process from Marketing to Sales. This translates to more leads and customers.

Marketing Automation may also provide you with a deeper, more complete picture of potential consumers’ behavior. Marketing Automation software may assist your marketing team in understanding a prospect’s interests and where they are in the purchase lifecycle by using behavioral tracking methods such as tracking a user’s route around your website. They may then tailor any further follow-up to those action points.

Take, for example, a consumer who is reading about a large range of items. This might suggest that they are in the early stages of the buying process, studying and comparing options while putting together a shortlist. If they download white papers on a certain topic later, it might signal that they have narrowed their attention and are ready to be reached by a salesman.

Leads may be automatically scored, qualified, and prioritized by combining data from several touchpoints such as website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing. This can then be used to fuel broader marketing initiatives, such as:

  • Trigger-based marketing messages
  • Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
  • Personalized emails
  • Facebook or Twitter messages

Different Types of Marketing Automation

You should think about your company goals while selecting automation technologies. Individual processes that you may put up to execute different activities that will help you achieve the marketing strategy goals you’ve established are known as automation tools.

Email Marketing Automation

Email Marketing Illustration - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/next-gen-email-marketing/

The most prevalent use case for automation is Email Marketing Automation. There’s a lot that goes into Email Marketing, from welcome emails to post-purchase emails to re-engagement emails. Email would be a highly laborious procedure without Email Marketing Automation and processes.

In most cases, email automation is initiated by a timer or an action. In some situations, time-based emails are issued. Action-oriented emails need a little more effort. These automated emails are triggered by activities performed by a website visitor, lead, or customer, who is then sent an email or series of emails in response to that action.

Email Marketing Automation is one of the top three strategies employed by email marketers to increase performance, and it offers several advantages. The finest part is how it saves time and energy by automating processes that would otherwise be costly. While automated emails might help you create leads and boost income, it doesn’t imply your marketing staff should devote all of their effort to sending and monitoring them. That is the purpose of marketing automation.

CRM with Marketing Automation

A marketer’s closest buddy is referred to as a CRM. Fortunately, your CRM and Marketing Automation can work Together. A single database change may set off a slew of internal processes, such as lead scoring and notifying your sales staff of new leads. You may also utilize your CRM to set up email processes that are triggered by user data or user activities.

CRM Window in HubSpot - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

Social Media Marketing Automation

Anyone in the marketing industry understands how time-consuming social media marketing can be. If you want to do it correctly, you’ll have to work constantly. Marketing automation, thankfully, can assist. You may plan content, create social media monitoring filters, and even automate the response process with tools like HubSpot and Hootsuite, but this should never take the place of actual, human contact with your followers and customers.

Social Media Posts Illustration - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-marketing-examples/380202/

Advertising and Retargeting Automation

You’ve probably heard of retargeting. Having to modify the content, visuals, and timing of every advertising platform based on each customer’s specific behaviors or behavior would require an investment of lot of time and effort.. Retargeting is an example of advertising automation that adjusts and improves its approach based on customer behavior. When a consumer visits your site, your retargeting automation responds by presenting relevant advertisements on the following sites they visit.

Retargeting emails and advertisements make it simple to remind customers about the items they’ve looked at on your site and direct them back to your store to make a purchase. It’s important to remember while designing your approach that consumers don’t always buy anything the first time they see it. They may become sidetracked or may not be prepared at that moment. Consider retargeting as a mild tactic that gets consumers thinking about your products until they discover they can’t live without them.

Customer Journey Tracking Automation 

This tool helps you think more about an end-to-end experience since it enables you to graphically outline how you want people to connect with your business and see how that relationship changes over time. Email is one of the interactions you may set up to send once consumers reach a certain point in the personalized journey the system provides, but this tool is much more than that. You’re doing just that with the Customer Journey builder—creating journeys for your customers, complete with logic they must fulfill in order to progress to different interactions in your map, such as receiving an email or being removed from a group.

You may go ahead with your marketing by setting the day and time you want your material to go out, whether it’s emails, social postings, or postcards. These Automation practices are efficiently executed using Cloud Business Intelligence tools, you can find the guide for the same here.

Mobile Marketing Automation

Companies are adding mobile marketing to their Marketing Automation tool belts as SMS marketing becomes more popular and successful. Text messages, like emails, maybe automated and triggered in response to time or events, and they have a greater (and faster) open rate than emails.

Mobile Marketing through Notifications - HubSpot Marketing Automation
Image Source: http://blog.clickdimensions.com/mobile-marketing-3-key-considerations/

Marketing Automation Tools Supported in HubSpot 

Following are the tools provided by HubSpot to support Marketing Automation: 

HubSpot Marketing Automation: SEO

You may plan your content strategy around subjects that will help you gain authority in search engines, get optimization suggestions as you type, and track actual SEO [Search Engine Optimization] ROI with integrated statistics.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Blogging

With tools that speed up production, keep formatting consistent, and make it easy to optimize for search, you can publish relevant, engaging, conversion-optimized content.

Hubspot Marketing Automation: Email

You can create beautiful email templates, customize subject lines and content for each recipient automatically, and perform A/B testing to increase open and click through rates.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Lead Management

You can view every interaction you’ve had with each contact and access their information. Use this information to develop Hyper-Targeted Marketing that results in more Sales being closed.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Salesforce Integration

You are able to set upthe bi-directional syncronization with Salesforce, you can keep track of every email open, CTA [Call to Action] click, and form submission. This information may be used to score leads and generate segmented lists.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Analytics

You can identify which marketing materials are working the hardest by looking at your complete client journey. To demonstrate how marketing affects the bottom line, use multi-touch revenue attribution. Cohort Analysis is usually carried out for performing such analysis, you can find the guide for this here.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Partitioning

You may organize all of your marketing materials by the team so that each user has access to the appropriate information.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Social Media

You can measure interactions automatically, monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations, and plan your social posts to go live when the appropriate people will see them.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Calls-to-Action

You can create CTAs that visitors can’t help but click, track who clicks certain CTAs, and track performance over time to improve click through rates.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Ads

You can stop putting extra effort to justify your paid ad expenditure by tracking the ROI of your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google advertising with accuracy & precision.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Landing Pages

You can create landing pages that look great on any device, add forms that are designed for completion in a single click, and modify content based on who is reading your page.

General Marketing Automation Strategy using HubSpot 

Depending on the technologies you employ and the goals you establish, your Marketing Automation approach should change. If you wanted to use HubSpot to nurture leads who downloaded a free ebook, for example, your goal would be to convert those leads using information about why they downloaded the ebook and how your product or service could Assist Satisfy their requirements. Make a note of these Marketing Automation best practices, regardless of your Marketing Automation strategy:

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Connecting with the Audience 

Without knowing what your audience’s pain points are and how you might address them, you can’t generate targeted marketing, whether automated or not. Before you develop your Marketing Automation workflows, create buyer personas to get to know your target audience.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Understand Your Customer’s Path

Meeting your lead wherever they are is a major factor of successful Marketing Automation. You won’t be able to achieve this until you understand their path to becoming a customer. Create a customer journey map and connect your Marketing Automation to the various stages of the lead.

HubSpot Marketing Automation: Examine your Work on a Frequent Basis

Although Marketing Automation is a hands-off technique, it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. On a weekly, quarterly, and annual basis, review your Marketing Automation routines. Your automation should evolve in tandem with your company, products, and consumers. Such assessment is usually carried out using Digital Marketing Reports, the guide for which you can find here.

Conclusion 

You learned about HubSpot, its major features, the concept of Marketing Automation, and the many Marketing Automation features in this post. You also learned about the importance of Marketing Automation, its many kinds, and HubSpot Marketing Automation’s multiple tools.

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