From leads to loyalty: Nurturing customer relationships with HubSpot

By Woven Agency, Wednesday July 17, 2024

Throughout the entire landscape of marketing efforts, it’s always said that word of mouth is the holy grail. If you can get loyal customers to recommend you, it’s an incredible position to be in. But there’s a lot of work behind the scenes that’s needed to be done before you can get to this point.

Thinking long term is the true way to go for brand strategy, and nurturing customer relationships is crucial for long-term success.

At Woven we are big advocates of HubSpot. Here we explore how HubSpot can be utilised to enhance customer relationships, capture leads and create a more personalised experience during the whole sales and marketing interaction with your brand.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot marketing refers to the use of HubSpot’s suite of tools to attract and manage customers. HubSpot is split into different “hubs” with various functions, and utilising all of these can have a big impact on how you nurture customer relationships. Let’s take a look some of the key features and how they can help us do this.

Nurturing customer relationships

Lead capture

Effective lead capture and management can be a daunting task. HubSpot however offers great tools for capturing leads through forms, live chat, and landing pages.

Within HubSpot you can customise these elements, and they also offer the ability to integrate with many other technologies and content management systems, including the popular WordPress which has its own HubSpot plugin.

There are a few elements involved here:

Lead forms and landing pages are where you aim to convert visitors into leads by collecting their contact information.

These forms can be embedded pretty much anywhere, making it easy to capture leads from various sources such as your website or social profiles.

Lead nurturing has various features including automated workflows to help nurture leads by sending targeted emails based on behaviour and engagement. This ensures that leads receive relevant content that interests them, increasing the likelihood of conversion. For example you may have 5 different landing pages for 5 different services. With lead nurturing you are able to send automated follow ups based on which page a form was submitted on, with content tailored to the relevant service page.

Lead scoring is HubSpot’s predictive lead scoring metric that uses their algorithms to prioritise leads based on their likelihood to convert into customers. Whilst this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, over time it can help your sales team focus their efforts on high-value leads.

Personalisation

This is where the nurturing aspect of marketing really shines. HubSpot enables you to deliver personalised experiences through advanced segmentation, personalised content, and smart CTAs (call-to-actions, such as a website button).

Whilst segmentation is not unique to HubSpot, they have long been at the forefront of the technology. Segmentation allows you to create specific lists based on user behaviour, demographics, and engagement levels. Referring back to our previous example, you could segment your audience into interests in specific services. From there you then have a number of options to engage with the segmented audience in a more personalised way.

Smart CTAs use some clever tech to change CTA’s based on the visitors stage in your sales process. This means that the call-to-action is always relevant to the individual, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Social media integration

By integrating social media management into the HubSpot platform, you can streamline social media efforts and ensure consistency across channels.

Social media monitoring tracks brand mentions and industry keywords across social platforms, providing valuable insights into customer sentiments and trends (see also our article on digital tools for brand decisions). This allows you to stay informed about what your audience is saying about your brand, giving you the opportunity to respond promptly.

There are also publishing tools within HubSpot for scheduling posts across multiple social media platforms from one centralised dashboard. Anyone who has managed social media platforms before knows that it can be a bit of a nightmare, and these features simplify the process of keeping regular and consistent social posts active.

Analytics within HubSpot also provide social media insights (as well as website and lead gen insights etc), helping you understand what resonates with your audience. At Woven we often use these metrics to understand how well the platforms are working to generate new traffic – and from there we can see which content is actually generating leads.

The Customer Service Hub

Customer service functions are not always considered as part of the marketing function of a business, but we believe they should be. HubSpot in this respect has an excellent customer service hub which offers a range of tools designed to enhance customer support and satisfaction. Happy customers often spread the word about your brand, so you want to take advantage of this.

The ticketing system: is a central place for you to manage customer inquiries that may come from either web forms, emails or web chat. Often you will have multiple people dealing with these kinds of requests, and tickets can be automatically assigned to the appropriate team members, making them much easier to manage.

An increasingly popular tool is the knowledge base – HubSpot’s self-service resource for customers that sits on your website (usually on a subdomain). With the knowledge base you can add articles, FAQs, guides etc and give your customers a one stop place to find information on your products and services. This gives your customer service team a central place to add more of these as they discover new answers whilst dealing with customer queries.

Customer feedback helps you collect and analyse feedback from customers. This feedback can be used to identify areas for improvement and ensure that customer needs are being met. For SEO reasons, we recommend also using a platform such as Google Business Profile or TrustPilot to collect reviews too.

Nurturing loyalty

Above are some incredible features of HubSpot that can help you get closer to your customers and deliver much more personalised campaigns. At Woven we love HubSpot as we can go from brand strategy to marketing tactics, and HubSpot allows us to think about our client’s distribution of content and how we can make this ever more personalised and integrate key brand messaging.

If you’d like to talk to us about integrating HubSpot into your organisation, get in touch.