Article written by Nicole Lontzek, marketing expert with over ten years of experience. She worked across different industries and successfully led global digital marketing projects. Her career brought her to New York, Dublin, and Zurich. Currently, she is based in Munich and serves as Head of Marketing for the electronics engineering automation pioneer CELUS. CELUS is an AI-based deep-tech company with a strong focus on automating electronics engineering from concept to layout and PCB design. As a tech enthusiast and innovation-focused, she is interested in all kinds of smart and game-changing technologies.
Creating competitive marketing campaigns is quite an intense and challenging task to do. Your goal is to stand out from the crowd and get recognized by your potential customers. Especially in the B2B sector buying cycles can be quite long and can take several months until the deal is closed.
In addition to that, targeting high volume customers can be expensive and your cost per lead in the B2B sector is one of the most important KPIs, where marketing success is measured with. This is the reason why having a compelling marketing strategy is crucial for your business.
Since you need to invest quite some brain power in coming up with creative marketing ideas, which drive leads and fill up the desks of your Sales representatives in your company, you cannot invest too much time in operational tasks, which occur on a daily basis. As a smart marketing professional, you want to automate as many tasks as you can.
HubSpot’s Marketing Automation serves this purpose. It helps you automate routine tasks and lets you focus on value creation and creativity. I will introduce five helpful features you should know when you start using HubSpot’s Marketing Automation.
1. Workflows
Let me be blunt about it. Workflows are a real blessing. This feature helps you organize your tasks in the background.
If someone downloads a Whitepaper on your website, for example, you can set up an entire row of tasks in the background. First of all, this person will automatically receive a personalized-looking email, where she is able to download the required content. When the person fulfills this action of downloading the Whitepaper, I can allocate certain points in the background to this person to rate her according to my marketing goal. Additionally, I can also schedule a follow-up email and provide related or similar content, which might be of interest to this person.
Meanwhile, the Sales people I am working with, will receive a notification of the action of the prospect, who is – by the way- already setup as a new contact in the CRM. This task could state something like “ Person XYZ – from company ABC downloaded this piece of content. You might want to get in touch and ask if you could provide any additional product information or if you should schedule a demo.”
If this person then, has received another email with similar additional marketing content and hasn’t opened it within a time period of – let’s say- five days, the workflow feature triggers an automatic reminder to the prospect and catches up for you. You can set up if/then conditions as well as exclusions and other conditions like ratings according to the lead status.
It is quite some effort, in the beginning, to set up the various workflows and there are thousands of different use cases for them, but once they are set up and work properly, they´ll do a great job for you. No more manual follow-up email and a transparent marketing performance measurement at the same time. Hurrah!
2. Lead-Scoring
I briefly mentioned it already in the workflow feature introduction, that HubSpot’s Marketing Automation tool also includes a Lead-scoring function. With this function you can classify and organize your leads according to your needs.
Take a classical SaaS Provider for example. They would target different predefined personas like an IT Director, for example. So if a person with the Job title “IT Director” enters your Website and fills in his data to either watch a webinar or download a Whitepaper, you´ll have this person in your database and marked as such.
Since the IT Director is an important person to talk to, when you want to sell your software, you would rate this person rather high in your Lead-Scoring and allocate a lot of points to him. If we assume, we use a scoring system from 1-100 points, we might want to give this person 60 points. If this person then also regularly reads your newsletter, which you would see, since the person is already in your database, then you would automatically add additional points to this prospect. Let’s say, we give this person 10 additional points for this action. Let´s further assume that this person is not only an important person to talk to and reads your newsletter, but also visits your website several times and reads additional blog articles etc., the person reaches the threshold of 100 points and becomes a real opportunity for Sales.
At this moment, the Lead-Scoring would trigger an automated task to your Salespeople and notify them about the hot opportunity, so they can take care of it and already know what this person is interested in.
3. Personas
It’s part of every B2B marketer’s job: Creating personas of your target audience. You want to know to whom you want to talk to bring home the leads. This is true for offline campaigns as well as digital campaigns.
HubSpot offers a function, where you can easily place all your relevant persona data in one place. They also offer an additional feature, where you can generate your own avatars if you are bored at work for some reason and want to play around. Jokes aside! The persona function will be used afterwards in your lead scoring and generally speaking also in your entire CRM. The different personas also have different points in your Lead-Scoring and play a crucial part in rating your leads and consequently calculate the success of your marketing activities.
4. Campaign- Feature
Talking about campaigns: I am sure, as every professional marketer out there, you have a properly planned marketing strategy in place, where you put all your marketing campaign. Maybe you also use a marketing calendar and plan quarterly campaigns as I do or maybe you have a completely different approach. No matter what, the “campaigns” feature in HubSpot will help you plan your campaigns and track the performance of your overarching marketing campaigns.
Think of it like a bucket, where you place all your cross-channel marketing activities and measure the data over time. You can set up a marketing campaign there for “ AI-based BI solutions” for example. Within this campaign, you can allocate your related blog posts, webinars, E-Books, Whitepapers or Paid campaigns and see how many people reacted to this specific topic.
You can do this for whatever size of the campaign you want or whatever duration you want to track. All the collected leads are in one place and you can see your spent budget and track your performance. By doing so, you can also compare different overarching campaigns against each other and generate insights for future business decisions.
5. SEO- recommendations
Building up a long term marketing strategy requires patience and a clear vision. One important aspect of generating long term marketing success is to be found by your potential customers. So Search Engine Optimization is a must.
To help you navigate around the tremendous amount of adjustment options in SEO, HubSpot offers you the “SEO-recommendations” Feature. This feature serves as a guide for your Onpage Optimization. HubSpot crawls your website and the indexed pages and checks whether you have a meta description in place, if there is any duplicate content, doubled H1 tags, 404 pages on your site and so on. On top of that, Hubspot also indicates the difficulty of the required changes as well as the impact it has on your SEO once it is fixed. A quite helpful feature for everyone getting started, but also on a continuous basis.
There are a lot more features in HubSpot and I could write forever to tell you all the reasons why it is worth it to start using marketing automation in your daily business. But with these five tips at hand, I think you have a solid background to start with. Automate the routine tasks and create some stunning B2B marketing campaigns. The world needs more of them.
