Here at Bluleadz, we’re all pretty big advocates for the HubSpot platform. Not only do we use it for our own website, customer relationship management, sales pipeline, and more, most of our customers are HubSpot users as well!
As a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, we leverage HubSpot capabilities and tools every day to help our clients transform the way they market, sell, and service their own customers.
However, simply having HubSpot (or any other full stack marketing platform) doesn’t guarantee success. Users have encountered a few problems with HubSpot in the past – using the platform for years without seeing significant improvements in their marketing or sales results.
In many of these cases, the missing ingredient in the recipe for success is a well-reasoned inbound strategy for their marketing.
Read on to discover some of the most common HubSpot problems people encounter, why having an inbound marketing strategy is so important, and some of the HubSpot tools and capabilities that you can align with your inbound strategy to improve results long term.
One question that the Bluleadz team frequently hears from prospects and new clients goes something like this: “I’ve had HubSpot for a while now, but nothing’s improving. Why?”
There may be many reasons why you might not see an improvement in your website traffic and lead generation after adopting HubSpot’s platform.
Here are a few of the most frequently cited HubSpot problems that businesses experience:
Quite a few business owners sign up for different HubSpot capabilities with some high –and unrealistic – expectations. While the HubSpot platform can provide some recommendations about on-page search engine optimization (SEO) and will help you track vital page performance statistics, it doesn’t do all the work for you.
It’s still important to perform research into SEO to identify the right keywords and topics to use in your content so that your pages will be relevant and valuable to your customers (and visible to search engines).
You still need to create and design attractive, easy-to-navigate website pages that help guide potential customers down the sales funnel smoothly. And, you need to provide quality products or services that help build long and successful relationships.
Simply having HubSpot doesn’t guarantee strong SEO on its own. You, or your marketing team, still need to put in the time and effort to improve your site and its content to attract customers.
HubSpot has fairly robust features for creating automated lead nurturing workflows and sending them out to contacts based on a range of properties.
For example, you could create workflows that automatically trigger when a customer makes a purchase to promote related products and services, to deliver a simple “thank you” email to maintain contact after specific interactions, or to execute targeted campaigns for promoting a new product or service.
However, just creating a series of emails and triggers is no guarantee of success from lead nurturing. The lead nurturing emails you create have to be good. They need to be focused on the recipient’s needs and provide a sense of value for them.
Doing so requires some study of your customers and why they come to your website. With this information, you can tweak your lead nurturing workflows to make them more valuable to your target audience.
A/B testing different elements in emails can also help. For example, you can try out two different versions of an email subject line to see which one gets more opens, or have two different versions of the email’s body copy and see which one gets more clicks.
One of the most common issues with HubSpot is that there may be too many tools for a new user to come to grips with them all quickly.
Although there are many training tools available in the HubSpot Academy to help, users may still feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of menus, buttons, and dashboards they’re being asked to navigate.
Many users often focus on just one or two HubSpot capabilities and forsake the rest. Although HubSpot has many pricing tiers and features that are designed to work for businesses of different sizes and needs, it can be a costly solution – and not using the full range of HubSpot capabilities available to you is a waste of money.
This is why, before adopting HubSpot, it’s important to come up with a set of goals (e.g., what you want from the platform) and to assess which features and pricing tiers can best help you meet those goals.
Additionally, it can help to take the time to go through the HubSpot Academy, talk to your HubSpot representative, or sign up for onboarding and training for your inbound marketing team to learn more about the platform and how to use it.
HubSpot’s analytics tools are the bread and butter of the platform.
Being able to see detailed reports on website and webpage traffic, traffic sources, click-through rate (CTR), new customers and leads generated by specific pages, and other crucial data can be invaluable for businesses. With the right data, you can optimize your website to attract, delight, and retain more customers.
Unfortunately, HubSpot may not capture all of the data you need, or it might not display it in a format that suits your needs.
Here, the easiest solution may be to use additional analytics tools to get the information you want. Some supplemental tools that you might want to use include:
Solutions like Hotjar can capture specific data about how users interact with your website that HubSpot can’t. For example, you could analyze how far down a page your visitors scroll down, where they’re clicking on the screen, and more.
Need to know not just where visitors are coming from, but what devices they’re using? Google’s free analytics tool can provide all sorts of vital information that you might not get from HubSpot’s own tracking solutions.
Tools like Moz Keyword Explorer and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer can be great resources to track the performance of keywords and to even identify new keywords or topic clusters.
Data is vital to inbound strategies, which makes this particular HubSpot issue critical. However, it’s important to note that the data HubSpot provides is still invaluable for marketing efforts.
Much of the data about your contacts from the HubSpot customer relationship management (CRM) tool can provide even more useful information for improving service and sales than data from Google Analytics.
An inbound strategy (or inbound marketing strategy) is a method of engaging with your business’ customers in a less intrusive way.
It focuses on providing value for your consumers so they seek out information about your company rather than having your marketing messages disrupting their lives. It’s basically the opposite of “outbound” or traditional marketing strategies.
Inbound strategy is your answer to unlocking all of HubSpot's capabilities because it was built around the inbound methodology. Virtually every tool in the platform is designed to help users draw in traffic to their website while minimizing the need for outbound strategies like cold calling or spam emails.
Having an inbound strategy, complete with goals to meet, is crucial for picking out the right HubSpot capabilities.
For example, if your goal is to increase website visits, then picking out tools that directly relate to collecting data about your webpages and finding opportunities to improve on-page SEO makes sense.
On the other hand, what if your goal is to increase conversions or to have your existing customers re-convert on your site by purchasing additional products and services related to whatever they’ve already purchased or interacted with on your site?
Then, you may want to invest more heavily in tools related to creating and sending out automated workflows and in your contact management.
Modern consumers don’t like having their personal time invaded with intrusive ads. Thanks to services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and YouTube Red, consumers can get their entertainment commercial-free just by paying a subscription.
Even online ads are getting blocked: According to data from Statista, “The average global adblocking rate in early 2018 was estimated at 27 percent… In 2017, the display ad market was worth around 100 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, but some 40 percent of that amount was believed to be lost because of adblocking.”
This shows that inbound strategies are the best way to attract customers to your site in today's marketplace. If you are still skeptical about HubSpot and the way it can help you with your inbound strategy, take a look at the HubSpot capabilities that can enhance your strategy.
There are a ton of HubSpot features and capabilities that can be used to benefit your inbound strategy. Many of these features are available as different “hubs” on the HubSpot platform.
Different subscriptions will provide access to different hubs, though there is some overlap in the capabilities of certain hubs. For example, the HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales Hub both have a lot of features centered around customer and prospect data and interactions so sales team members can close more deals.
Here are a few of the major HubSpot capabilities that virtually any company can benefit from:
The Marketing Hub is HubSpot’s bread-and-butter service for companies looking to get into inbound marketing. The content creation capabilities found in the Marketing Hub are crucial for inbound strategies and include things like:
HubSpot makes it pretty easy to create basic blogs from standardized templates – and then to track important blogging statistics like page views, traffic source types (direct, paid, social, organic, etc.), clicks on CTAs in the blog, and more.
You can also update blog content with a simple editor and check for on-page SEO improvement opportunities.
Create email workflows for various products, services, and target audiences, then establish automatic triggers for those emails.
Personalization tokens help make your email marketing more impactful while saving time and improving speed of response to specific actions from your leads.
HubSpot has a simple CTA creation feature that allows users to make their own custom CTA buttons for visitors to click on.
Simple button CTAs are easy to make by just selecting a button type, color, and link, then inserting some display text to entice people to click.
HubSpot's Sales Hub offers sales team members several capabilities that make it easier to connect with and sell to prospects.
Some key features of this hub include:
Share links with leads that allow them to choose a time and meeting solution that works for both you and them.
The HubSpot meeting tool works with Google Calendar, Office 365, and the HubSpot CRM tool (naturally).
Get alerts when prospects are engaging with your site and route chat conversations to salespeople in real time.
Don’t have a 24/7 sales team? Integrate with a chatbot solution to handle common questions and encourage prospects to schedule a formal meeting.
Chasing down poor-fit prospects who aren’t likely to close is a major waste of sales team time and resources.
Lead scoring helps you assess prospects to determine if they’re a good fit or not so you can focus your time and energy on high-value targets that are likely to close.
The Service Hub is a relatively recent addition to the HubSpot platform. However, it helps fill a critical gap in the sales cycle to delight customers and convince them to reconvert:
These bots help to improve your live chat feature and make managing “1-to-1” interactions more scalable for your business.
They can route customers to relevant documents or sales and customer service team members in response to certain queries.
Keep an eye on important customer service metrics such as ticket response time, time to resolution, and other statistics that impact your service-level agreements (SLAs).
Do customers keep coming to you with the same few questions or concerns?
Turn those queries and comments into articles for a detailed knowledge base and give customers everything they need to answer their most common concerns!
The HubSpot CRM solution has a range of features for sales leaders, representatives, and even marketers.
These features are designed to help everyone in your business improve their interactions with customers so you can fuel your sales cycle more efficiently.
Some of the capabilities of the free HubSpot CRM include:
Get detailed reports on sales activity and performance. Get the info you need to assess how your team is tracking toward their quotas.
Whether your business has a single sales team member or 100 of them, you can track the data for them all as well as the activity of up to a million contacts.
Keep your sales team in the know whenever a prospect opens an email or clicks on a link. This information can be critical for helping prep your sales team to talk about the things that most interest your prospects.
The HubSpot Content Management System (CMS) Hub makes it easy for even complete noobs without a scrap of coding expertise to build their own website.
Even so, however, we strongly recommend retaining such an expert to help ensure that your site is stable and well-optimized for modern browsers.
Some key features of HubSpot CMS include:
HubSpot uses a drag-and-drop module editor to allow users to build their own ideal website, one piece at a time.
A variety of templates on the HubSpot marketplace makes it easy to find a website theme that matches your company’s style.
HubSpot’s site page builder provides some basic SEO recommendations that you can use to improve your pages and help them rank higher in Google.
Insert personalization tokens and even personalized modules into your website to create a tailored experience for your contacts and help them down the sales funnel.
For example, if a visitor is already a customer, you could change a CTA on your site to show a special offer for existing customers instead of an introductory content offer by using smart content.
These are just a handful of the features that you can use to improve your inbound strategy, attract leads, and close deals! Use them now to get started creating your next effective inbound campaign.