The coronavirus has hit the business world hard.
In the UK, the pandemic has seen over 9 million jobs furloughed and, staggeringly, the BBC recently reported that 78% fewer people visited shops in June as compared to the same period last year.
That last statistic is of particular importance to businesses who haven’t yet made digital transformation an integral part of their operations. Encouraged to shop online rather than hit the high street, buyers are increasingly looking to e-commerce for their retail therapy.
Nothing better sums this up than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. His personal fortune has grown to an all-time-high of £142bn, as Amazon’s popularity – and share price – has risen to unprecedented levels during the pandemic. The growth of online shopping is revealed on a macro scale, too, with HubSpot reporting that average monthly website traffic increased by 13% in March compared to February.
Clearly, then, digital is more important than ever.
Which is a stark warning for businesses who don’t offer an engaging and user-friendly digital proposition. Audiences are favouring online shopping more than ever, and if you’re not giving them what they want with a few clicks of a button, they’ll go elsewhere – the results of which could be devastating during a recession.
Fortunately, this is where HubSpot can help.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a growth platform stacked full of software for marketing, sales, and customer service. It has a free CRM at its core and is ready to plug into all your favourite tools to helps your marketing, sales and service teams to work together to raise brand awareness, generate interest, grow sales and ensure a satisfying client experience.
It does this through a number of hubs – one each for your marketing, sales and customer service teams.
- The Marketing Hub helps you grow traffic, convert more sales and run inbound marketing campaigns.
- The Sales Hub helps you understand your prospects better, automate annoying tasks and close deals faster.
- And the Service Hub helps you turn customers into active promoters of your business.
So, let’s take a look at the four key ways in which HubSpot can help your business grow, especially during a recession.
- An enhanced online presence without the complexity
As we’ve seen, offering a satisfying online experience to your customers is more important than ever – which is why HubSpot’s ability to digitally transform your brand is one of its key features.
You can use HubSpot’s content management system (CMS) to build websites and landing pages that engage your audience and convert from browsers to buyers. Of course, you can do this with in-depth web builders that require the input of skilled developers. But HubSpot’s straightforward platform does away with a lot of coding complexity, so your developers (whether freelance or in-house) can more quickly – and thus more cheaply – create sites and pages that enhance your online presence.
If you have a smaller team, or if time is always of the essence, HubSpot’s analytics make gathering data-driven insights into how your customers are using your website simple. Other tools like Google Analytics give you more detail, but you might not have the time or expertise to really make the most of their findings. With HubSpot, analysis paralysis doesn’t slow you down
In a similar way, HubSpot’s search engine optimisation (SEO) tools keep things nice and simple. SEO is a complicated arena, full of ever-evolving rules and tricks that can take years to master. But HubSpot gives you the essentials, stripping back the complexities and allowing non-SEO experts to track keywords, improve your site’s ranking and publish SEO-friendly content.
All of which means HubSpot lets you create user-friendly, conversion-centred websites that can be improved from the data insights you gather and that will help you be found on the pages of Google.
- An automated approach
Finding ways to cut back on the time-consuming tasks that litter our days is always good business practice. But in a recession, it’s a genuine competitive advantage.
Using sophisticated machine learning and AI tools to automate email sequences, social media posting, prospecting, lead enrichment and more, HubSpot can:
- increase the productivity and performance of your sales team
- improve the accuracy of your sales process
- stop warm leads going cold
- reduce response time for your customers, so they have a better user experience
- keep sales data consistent across your business, so everyone is always in the picture
- maximise the efforts of smaller teams and limited budgets – particularly relevant during a recession.
By doing all this, HubSpot makes more of your resources. Because while it takes care of the mundane, frustrating – yet still vital – tasks, you can get on with doing more marketing, selling and customer service work.
- The HubSpot Academy
HubSpot isn’t just a piece of software, it’s a mine of information, tools and techniques to help you market, sell and service better. And because knowledge is power, educating yourself in the art of attracting more customers could be the difference between success and failure in tough economic times.
Central to this is the HubSpot Academy, which offers free online training for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service professionals. You can choose from comprehensive certifications, single-topic courses and bite-sized lessons to help you grow your business at a pace that suits you.
Popular HubSpot Academy courses include how to improve your email marketing click-through rate and conversions, how to be an inbound marketing expert, the fundamentals of digital advertising and so on. You can view their full range of courses here.
- Better data, better business
During a recession, it’s crucial that you understand how well every hour and every penny is being spent.
With the HubSpot, you can create up to 300 custom dashboards for your team based on any number of metrics to help you do just that. For example, you can build reports to see where your time and money is being spent, to show your pipeline forecast over the coming weeks and months and to see how successful your campaigns, social media and blogging outreach is.
These reports let you easily see what you’re doing well (and inspire you to do more of it) and where things might be slipping. So, if your blogs aren’t hitting the right numbers and generating leads, perhaps you can better invest your time in social media advertising campaigns or boosting your LinkedIn presence. If your website is attracting lots of visitors but the conversions are low, you might consider hiring a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) specialist and conversion copywriter to improve matters.
The point is, HubSpot gives you visibility of your business battleground, so you know how best to pick your fights.
HubSpot’s integrated CRM also ensures every member of your team knows about every client. The increased transparency this provides means you can easily spot those customers at risk of moving to a competitor, so you can take steps to keep them happy. After all, it costs a lot more to win a new customer than to keep an existing one.
So in conclusion – why Hubspot?
- It’s incredibly simple to use compared to other CRM tools.
- The Hubspot Academy’s exhaustive online resources help you and your team become better marketers, better sales people and all-round better business people.
- Their online courses offer accreditations and are regularly updated so you stay on top of any changing trends.
- One source of truth for your data.
- It significantly streamlines marketing, sales and service processes, saving you time and money.
- It keeps you connected, offering seamless integration with your third-party apps.
- Its highly specialised reporting functionality gives you total visibility of your business operations, so you know what you’re doing well and where you can improve.
- Its extensive (and ever-growing) automation tools make the mundane easy, freeing you up to do what you’re best at – growing your business.
Woven: your HubSpot Partner agency
As you can see, HubSpot provides a range of benefits to help you better position your business should recession hit.
But if the prospect of integrating HubSpot into your business feels a little daunting, we can help. As a Hubspot Gold Partner, we’re trusted by HubSpot to help businesses use their platform to attract more leads, close more sales and keep existing customers happy – during a recession or not. Get in touch to find out how working with a HubSpot Gold Partner agency can boost your business.
And if you’d like to learn more about HubSpot, you can pre-register for our ‘Unboxing HubSpot’s Growth Platform’ webinar – a 60-minute webinar hosted by Woven & HubSpot to take you through everything you need to know about how HubSpot can improve your business.