Big or small, old or new, all businesses face problems – and they’re usually of a similar nature: getting leads through the door, delighting your existing clients, giving your team the tools they need to perform at their best.
Fortunately, the HubSpot growth platform can help you overcome many commonplace problems – including these four.
Problem #1: you’re not getting enough leads
To ensure success in sales, you need a lead generation strategy that grabs attention, attracts people to you and persuades them that you’re the brand for them.
A lead is someone who shows interest in buying what you’re selling. These can be:
- Marketing-qualified leads. They have engaged with your marketing in a way that reflects they may be open to a future call or meeting, such as when you submit your contact details in return for a newsletter.
- Sales-qualified leads. They have expressed an interest in what you’re selling, perhaps by contacting you via email or your website’s chatbot.
- Product-qualified leads. They have tried your product already – perhaps as a free trial – and are sufficiently convinced that you’re worth investing in.
- Service-qualified leads. They have told one of your customer service representatives that they’re interested in what you offer.
Essentially, turning a browser into a buyer is about getting to know your visitors – what motivates them, the problems they face, the hopes they have – and how you can help them get what they want. You can do this through online forms, speaking to them via live chat when they’re browsing your site, or through email campaigns.
Which, as luck would have it, can all be done through HubSpot.
The solution: use HubSpot to optimise your website
Least surprising news of the day: your website is your most important digital asset – your online equivalent of a bricks ‘n’ mortar shop. And as COVID continues to make us wary of physical retail spaces – an attitude that could lead to a foundational shift towards online shopping in the future – having a website that is clear, concise and speaks to your target audience isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore.
Fortunately, HubSpot can help you optimise your website so that you can turn more browsers into buyers. Here are a few ways how:
1. Add a headline and a call to action right off the bat.
What’s the most important part of a newspaper? Ask any editor and they’ll tell you it’s the headline. The same is true of websites. As soon as someone lands on your site, you’ve got just a few moments to grab hold of them and keep them reading.
The best way to do that? Distil your promise – the thing you offer someone – into a short, sharp sentence, so they immediately know what you’re about and how you can help them – then follow it up with an inviting call to action (CTA). Just as our friends HubSpot have done here:
2. Add forms to the pages that get the most traffic.
Use tools like Google Analytics to conduct an audit of where most of your online traffic comes from — your lead generators. This could be via email marketing, social media, blog posts or landing pages.
Once you know where your traffic is landing, and where it’s coming from, you can adapt those pages with forms, calls to action, pop-up boxes or conversational marketing chatbots to capture lead information and encourage them to contact you.
3. Test again and again. And again.
It’s vital that you stress-test your website. You won’t know how to improve it if you don’t. Use HubSpot’s analytics tools – combined with a heatmap tool like Hotjar – to work out what your visitors are doing on your site. And, crucially, where they’re dropping off.
You might find that users aren’t getting to your products because your homepage is too long or hard to navigate. Or it could be something simpler, like your CTAs not being as effective as they could be. And if you think such a small thing might not make a difference, speak to Friendbuy. As this HubSpot blog shows , by changing their CTA they achieved a 211% improvement in click-through rates.
Problem #2: you need to improve – and prove – your ROI
One of the biggest problems marketing and sales teams face is justifying their work through return on investment (ROI). Of course, marketers will point to their work fuelling long-term brand awareness – work that’s vital but difficult to measure. While sales teams might find themselves struggling to convert if the business’ marketing efforts aren’t up to par.
HubSpot, however, can help you not only improve your ROI – but also prove it.
The solution: create measurable digital marketing campaigns using HubSpot
As a marketing, sales and customer service platform, HubSpot helps bring the three main tenets of your business together, helping your business create more awareness, attract more customers and keep existing customers coming back. (Our recent blog on how HubSpot can help your business grow – even during a recession – goes into more detail on how you achieve this.)
HubSpot’s 2018 study on the ROI of using their growth platform revealed the following:
What’s more, by using HubSpot to improve sales via your digital marketing, you can measure precisely how well your budgets have been spent.
Traditional marketing channels such as television and print have always struggled with ROI transparency, but with digital marketing – and HubSpot’s analytical tools – you know how hard each penny worked during your marketing campaigns. In fact, with access to real-time data, you can use HubSpot to amend campaigns during their lifespan, tweaking messaging, target audiences and channels as appropriate.
Problem #3: you need to increase brand awareness
Did you hear about the business with the Best Product Ever™ – a real game-changer – but didn’t know how to market themselves?
No, you didn’t. Because they didn’t know how to market themselves.
You could have a great product but if you can’t get your message out there, all you have is untapped potential. In this competitive world, maximising the digital tools at your disposal is essential in being seen, trusted and, ultimately, successful.
The solution: learn from the HubSpot Academy
We’ll keep this one short because, well, the answer is pretty big. How to market yourself successfully in the digital world is more the subject of books than blogs. It involves building websites, understanding conversion rate optimisation and search engine optimisation, building a brand identity, nurturing engaging social media accounts, writing value-adding content, creating attention-grabbing advertising – and many other things.
But even though it’s an all-encompassing challenge, HubSpot can help you increase your brand awareness thanks to its comprehensive and ever-expanding academy.
The HubSpot Academy is a world-leading resource to help businesses of all shapes and sizes grow. Whether it’s through bite-sized practical courses or in-depth certifications, you can learn how to build your business – and the brand awareness to go with it. From how to get the most out of your email marketing to the learning the fundamentals of digital advertising, the HubSpot Academy is here to help when you need it. Oh, and it’s free. (Bless their kind hearts.)
Problem #4: your team needs training
As any business owner, football manager or five-star general knows, having a plan is one thing, getting people to follow it is another. There’s little point pontificating on and planning out your strategy if your team isn’t going to follow it – or don’t have the tools to follow it.
You need all members of your marketing, sales and service teams pulling together in the same direction to make your business work better, from your marketing campaigns to your lead prioritisation, your client follow-ups to your long-term client relationships.
The solution: use HubSpot to create consistent processes and comms
Before using HubSpot, you first need to get them up to speed on what HubSpot is and how it can help you bring more customers in with its inbound marketing methodology.
Before we continue, a quick crash-course on inbound marketing. Inbound is about attracting, engaging and delighting customers with unobtrusive marketing that interests and brings value to them. Think social media, landing pages, newsletters and so on – all backed up with websites optimised for conversions and search engine rankings.
Unlike traditional outbound forms of marketing – TV, magazine and radio ads – inbound doesn’t interrupt the consumer; instead, it shows them something they’re intrigued by and offers them the opportunity to find out more. In short, inbound marketing is about being the magnet, not the megaphone.
And the first part of getting your team to work together? Get them up to speed on the above. If you’re using HubSpot, you’re using inbound marketing – so make sure everyone knows what that is, what it will achieve and how each team can play their part in achieving it. Read this HubSpot guide for more details on how to do just that.
With everyone on board, you can then use the free HubSpot CRM, which gives everyone in your marketing, sales and service teams:
- The ability to attract more visitors to your site with ad management tools and grow your database by converting visitors into qualified leads.
- The chance to help and convert prospects in real time with HubSpot’s live chatbot tool – no coding necessary.
- A real-time view of your sales pipeline on an easy-to-read dashboard, so you’re always on top of your cash flow and sales projections.
- Access to contact data and relationship history, so any member of your team knows your past interactions with your clients, allowing them to personalise their approach.
- A ticketing system that allows you to organise all your customers’ issues in one place, prioritise who gets seen to quickest, and draft template emails for common queries.
And many (many) features more, besides.
And while these tools are split into rough marketing, sales and service ‘genres’, by having regular updates with stakeholders from each of these teams, you can find out what’s working, what needs a rethink, and what you might integrate into your strategy as one team.
So, there we have it, four ways in which HubSpot can help you solve some of the biggest problems that all businesses face.
But what about your business? How can it help you, specifically? Well, the best way to find out is to have a free consultation with us at Woven. We’re a HubSpot Gold Partner agency and we specialise in helping businesses boost sales using this powerful platform.
So get in touch and let’s see how we can help you grow better.