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00:00:01
Is Your Marketing Automation Platform a Glorified Email Solution?
58 Plays6 years ago
Are you giving your marketing automation or inbound marketing platform the respect it deserves? Yeah, we said respect. If you aren't fully utilizing the platform, you aren't getting a return on your investment.
In todays episode, we'll cover what you may be missing out on if all you use are the email and form features of your marketing automation/inbound marketing platform.
We specifically cover the following HubSpot features; however, your tech of choice may have similar options. (Disclosure: Jackson Marketing is a HubSpot Partner Agency.)
- Landing pages and forms (including discussion of hidden fields and progressive profiling)
- Live chat and chatbots (plus Slack integration)
- Pop-ups
- Call-to-Action buttons
- Dynamic content personalization and customization
- Contacts and lists (including static and active lists)
- Reports and analytics (including using Prospects data)
- Workflows (and several ways to use them)
- SEO strategy/topic cluster module
- Integration with CRM and ticket desk technology
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Marketing Mix Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Marketing Mix podcast with Alaina and Stacey. Each week, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your own marketing strategy. We'll share what we know as well as advice from industry experts, some of whom will join us from time to time here on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hey there, this is Stacey Jackson. And I'm Elena Jackson. We're co-founders of Jackson Marketing and we're also sisters. And we're bringing you episode number three of The Marketing Mix. Stacey, what's today's episode
Exploring Marketing Automation and HubSpot
00:00:34
Speaker
about? You know, it's good. It is about MarTech.
00:00:38
Speaker
specifically about marketing automation and inbound marketing solutions like HubSpot. Well, you know, you know, I love technology. So I'm really jazzed about today's conversation, but I've got to be honest. It's going to be a little bit of a rant right out of the gate. So before you go, I'll geekified on us with technology because you are a geek when it comes to technology, but I still love you.
00:01:05
Speaker
Let me start with this mind boggling fact before you jump into your rant. So according to Scott Brinker's 2018 marketing technology landscape, super graphic. And if you've never seen it, it is a super graphic. The number of total tech tools for marketing has grown since 2011 from 150 to around hold and wait for it, 7,000.
00:01:33
Speaker
That's an increase of over 4,000%. I mean, what the heck? With that much growth, maybe you can take it a little easy with your looming rant and don't go crazy on us.
00:01:48
Speaker
Okay. I promise I will not go crazy on people just because they don't know all almost 7,000 different solutions out there. That's not at all what my rant is about. My biggest aggravation when it comes to marketing technology, specifically tools like HubSpot, Acton, Lead Liaison, Pardot, and more, is that people just often don't give them the respect
00:02:13
Speaker
yes, respect that they deserve. Unfortunately, they just treat them like a glorified email system or a platform for gathering form fills. All that delicious, yummy technology is just sitting there unused and that is a waste. It's a shame.
00:02:32
Speaker
If all you need is to collect some form fills, some contact info, and send a few emails out once in a while, you might as well just go for the free MailChimp account and use Woofoo or Typeform to embed a form on your site. Okay, so you're right. And it's crazy that a lot of companies are paying 700 plus per month for these
00:02:58
Speaker
power-packed marketing automation or inbound platforms. So they're not getting the most out of their
Maximizing Marketing Tools for Efficiency
00:03:05
Speaker
money. They're not getting the most out of their technology. And all they're doing is spending a lot of money just to collect names and send emails. So that's kind of whacked when you think about it. They're just spending so much money and not really getting
00:03:23
Speaker
out of it what they should be getting out of it so is what you're saying that they should just dump their martech and go with some inexpensive tool no no no no no no no and no uh if you truly truly truly don't need a sophisticated
00:03:45
Speaker
a marketing automation or inbound marketing solution. Okay, fine. Just go with Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor and a form tool and have fun. But if you're in B2B and you really need to do some sophisticated things and track information,
00:04:05
Speaker
and even gain some efficiencies and productivity wins and you really need to think about making the most out of that HubSpot or other inbound marketing solution tool. It can help you improve your user and customer experiences and it can help out your sales team and give you the insights you need to make the most out of your digital marketing efforts.
00:04:30
Speaker
So just so everybody understands, and a lot of you do that are listening, but maybe not everybody does, and you are treating that expensive marketing automation platform like an email and form fill machine. Let's go through some of what our favorite HubSpot features are so that people know what they might be missing if they're not fully using their platform. Okay. And that is a great idea. But before we get started on that, let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.
00:05:05
Speaker
And we're back. And just a full disclosure before we get to digging into all this marketing automation technology, Jackson Marketing is a HubSpot partner agency. So we like to talk about HubSpot, but you may find similar features in the platform you currently use, and you may find features that HubSpot has that you don't have. So we're going to go through a lot of the things that we like about HubSpot and the things that we think are pretty cool.
00:05:34
Speaker
All right, well, let me get started with one of the obvious things that you can do with HubSpot.
Underutilized Features of HubSpot
00:05:40
Speaker
You can build cool landing pages and forms. Now, that in and of itself may not sound all that special, but one of the things I really think is neat about HubSpot Forms is
00:05:52
Speaker
you can capture hidden fields. So if you're using those UTM parameters to capture campaign information or source information, if you want to ensure that it's always captured a specific way, you can add those parameters to your links that you share and then add hidden fields to capture that UTM information. So you'll have that on file.
00:06:17
Speaker
with that contact in the future. Another thing that's really neat is the progressive profiling. So let's say someone goes to your site and fills out a form and you capture first name, last name, and email.
00:06:32
Speaker
If they come back later to fill out contact us or enter their information to download a new ebook, you could have progressive field show up where it no longer shows first name, last name. The next field it might show is company. So you progressively build that context profile without having to have it all show up on one single form.
00:06:58
Speaker
which if you did that, people probably wouldn't fill out your form anyway. Very true. And as we all know, a lot of people will bounce if you have to fill out tons of forms on a field, especially if you've already filled those out for the company before that's just so aggravating. What do you like Elena?
00:07:19
Speaker
So the next feature I want to talk about is live chat. So I hope it has live chat that you can communicate with your customers or new visitors on your website and give them immediate access to questions that they have and have someone there to talk with them.
00:07:37
Speaker
And one of the things that's cool about it is it integrates with slack. So if your company uses slack for a lot of their communication, then you can get a notification right there within slack that somebody is on your website and wants to chat. So that's a really cool feature and it gives you live real-time opportunities to talk with people that are on your site and wanting to interact with you.
00:08:01
Speaker
And then let's say you don't have people available that can just have those live chats. The next thing that they have is our chatbot. So you can set up a chatbot to automatically walk through conversations with your audience. And that's pretty cool because a lot of times maybe there's somebody in another time zone, you're already gone from the office and they still want to feel like they're getting that personalization of a conversation that's happening, but it's happening with that chatbot. And so I think that that's a lot of times
00:08:29
Speaker
a great way to incorporate that communication with your audience and a lot of people Like we were talking about forms a minute ago a lot of people kind of put up a wall right when they see a form But you could do set up a chatbot to basically talk to them and fill out the form as they're talking to them and it's not as much of a thing that where people kind of cringe at because a lot of people cringe at forms and so it's just a different way to communicate with your audience and
00:08:57
Speaker
Just a couple quick points too about chatbots. You can also program that chatbot to be specific to a page and an intention. We have a chatbot on one of our pillar pages that specifically ask the person if they're interested in a related downloadable asset. You can really customize that chatbot. Another thing I just think
00:09:24
Speaker
It's important to me as a marketer who uses chatbots Let people know that it it is a chatbot. Don't try to fool them that it's a person I just even though I think in california may be a law or a pending legislation that you have to disclose that is ai or a chatbot, but to me it just is the right thing to do anyway because people don't like to feel like they're being fooled
00:09:51
Speaker
I agree. It feels deceptive and nobody wants to start the relationship off that way. The next feature that I really like are pop-ups.
Engagement Strategies with HubSpot Tools
00:10:00
Speaker
And with pop-ups, there's a couple of different ways you can use them. You can have it when someone goes to a certain page, you can have it delay for five, 10 seconds, and then it pops up. You can make it invasive where it's over the whole screen. You can make it
00:10:15
Speaker
just down in one of the corners, you know, just whatever you feel is appropriate for your audience and You can have it tell them about an upcoming webinar encourage them to register You can encourage them to download something request a demo There's a lot of different ways that you can communicate with them through pop-ups another cool thing is say someone is on your site and they are
00:10:40
Speaker
Are starting to leave your site. So as that mouse is going up towards the Exit of your site a pop-up comes up So it's an exit intent pop-up and you kind of draw them back in and I think that's a really um cool way to keep them engaged when they're about to leave your site and maybe that's when you offer up something that is like a a wow factor that you can just throw at them and say hey
00:11:06
Speaker
Did you check this out and kind of keep them engaged on your site? I agree. But with popups, just to make sure you're not abusing them. I mean, you can get overboard, so don't drive people crazy. I completely agree because I hate going to a site where you're constantly getting popups on every single page and it's so annoying and
00:11:32
Speaker
Or I sometimes don't like the ones where they completely take over your page. I don't either. Yeah, so just keep those things in mind. Know your audience. Right. OK, the next thing that we both really like about HubSpot, and I'm sure you could find this in other marketing automation and bound tools, is the use of call to action buttons and links.
00:12:00
Speaker
Not only can you add buttons to your site, you can use a call to action graphic and load that to HubSpot and then HubSpot will track how often people interact with that call to action button or link.
00:12:16
Speaker
or graphic, whichever you choose. Yeah, and just to add on to that, I think some people forget how important those calls to actions are when you don't have them because that is going to help fill your pipeline.
00:12:31
Speaker
So I want to touch back on what you just said, Elena, with my next point. But before I leave specifically talking about CTAs, the nice thing in HubSpot is you can do A-B testing to test different color buttons or messages on the button. So there's different ways that you can make use of CTAs, images, wording, links, buttons, and you can A-B test all of that.
00:12:58
Speaker
The next point that I really want to talk about is personalization and customization without spot. Using CTAs, you could
00:13:10
Speaker
have a person's behavior based on things they've done before and use a smart CTA. If they've already filled out a form before in your site, you may want to move them to the next phase. If they've gotten top of the funnel content, maybe that CTA for that specific visitor displays some middle of the funnel offer. That helps move that person closer to a sale like Elena was talking about.
00:13:38
Speaker
Another thing on that customization dynamic content front is on your landing pages or if you host your whole website in HubSpot, you can use personalization on a page. This works really well too if you want to do account-based marketing.
00:13:56
Speaker
So if you had a specific blog post that you wanted to customize a bit for specific accounts that visit or a person that's visited in the past, you can insert their name, you can insert different variables. It's a really nice way to make the page more relevant to the people who are visiting.
00:14:16
Speaker
And speaking of some of the people that are visiting, you can really dig into your contacts in HubSpot. All your contacts that are in the system, you can see the activity that is happening. You can see where they've been, the pages they've visited, the
00:14:35
Speaker
emails that you've sent and if they open them if they click on links you can take a deeper look into your contacts activity so that's really cool to kind of gauge where your contact is and are they engaging with what you're in interacting with them about.
00:14:56
Speaker
So the next thing is also related to contacts or lists. And lists, you can have two different kind of lists. You can have a static list, which is you add in the contacts to that list and that's the list. It's done. Or you can have an active list where
00:15:14
Speaker
It's constantly being updated with new contacts based on certain criteria. Say they filled out the form on this page or they attended this webinar or they have subscribed to your newsletter. There's all different ways that you can set up active lists and to constantly be updating that you can then also use in the workflows, which we'll get to in just a second. Another great thing that HubSpot and lots of other tools offer
Enhancing Marketing with HubSpot's Reporting and Workflows
00:15:42
Speaker
its reports. HubSpot, if you host your whole website on HubSpot, you can see how different content performs. You also have the opportunity to use HubSpot activity reporting to see where different visitors come from and link back to this lead or this customer came
00:16:04
Speaker
originally from this specific source. You can also use UTM parameters to research which of your campaigns or specific sources led to visits. So that's really nice. There's also the ability to see prospects to the site. So you might see that Coca-Cola visited your site or someone from Microsoft. So while you may not have a direct
00:16:32
Speaker
person's name. You could do some research, maybe even do some targeted ads to people who work at Microsoft and marketing through LinkedIn, for example, or Facebook. So that gives you a little bit, although higher level insight, it can give you some ideas for trying to target and interact with potential accounts that are interested in your business.
00:16:57
Speaker
The next big thing, which I think helps find another marketing automation and inbound marketing tools, a real workhorse powerhouse, are workflows. And there's a couple of, several actually, different things regarding workflows that both Elena and I would like to talk through. Elena, you go first.
00:17:17
Speaker
So one of the things that I really love about workflows is it takes the manual processes out of your everyday life. So auto responders and nurturers are a great way to be in communication with your leads when you don't necessarily have the time to. So auto responders say someone has filled out a form to
00:17:44
Speaker
Attend a webinar or to download something it's going to auto respond with an email with the information Based on what form they filled out. So that's that's cool. And it takes out you know, a lot of the the legwork as well as Nurturing your lead. So once they filled out a form they got their information and
00:18:03
Speaker
You can set up a lead nurture to go out to them for the next week or two weeks, however long you want to set it up. But it's automated. You just set up the email, set up the workflow, and you're good to go. Yeah, that is very handy with workflows. But another really cool thing you can do with workflows that's kind of a step above and beyond auto responders and nurturers is
00:18:30
Speaker
use the workflow to send an email that's relevant based on an activity that a known lead has done on your site. So let's say someone filled out a form and then a few weeks later they come back and look at your pricing page. Well, that's a trigger event. So looking in that pricing page, you can say is the trigger that enrolls a known lead and
00:18:55
Speaker
maybe 15 minutes, 10 minutes after that visit to that pricing page, they'll get an email that says something about, did you know that blah, blah, blah has this pricing deal available or some kind of offer. And you can also use that trigger event to alert the salesperson who's in charge of that lead. So maybe instead of sending an automated email, you give the salesperson an opportunity to follow up.
00:19:22
Speaker
In a non creepy way don't call someone five seconds after they've been on your site, you know wait Be patient wait 15 30 minutes and then follow up
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, you don't wanna be that salesperson that comes across as a stalker. Another cool thing that you can do in Workflows is you can assign a stage in the sales cycle. So a visitor to your site has done X, Y, Z, they filled out this form, they've visited this page, blah, blah, blah. Whatever it is, the situation or the scenario that you want to set up for that, you can have them say, okay,
00:20:03
Speaker
This visitor is in the lead stage But if they do this this and this I want them to then be moved into the customer stage there are ways that you can set it up so that it automatically Updates it in the system from a lead to a customer Along the same lines
00:20:28
Speaker
What I want to talk about, another feature I like with workflows is you have the ability to add new data to a record, a contact record. So if someone fills out a ebook, you might want to add a custom field that says filled out foreign for ebook, ABC, or a line that says requested blank and then have it form fill
00:20:55
Speaker
the name of that ebook or that sell sheet or whatever item that they decided to download. And it could be anything. So you could say, if they visited page ABC, put a note to the sales rep likely candidate for product ABC.
00:21:11
Speaker
Just whenever you want, you can add that custom data to a known record and add some context for the salespeople to help them have the right information when they reach out so that they can have productive conversations that are relevant to that lead.
00:21:30
Speaker
If you remember a few minutes ago when we were talking about forms in HubSpot and using hidden fields to capture UTMs, a reason you may want to do that is because you can use a workflow in HubSpot to route people to whatever emails you want to send based on what UTM parameters are related to their most recent form fill. So if you have a campaign going and you want people who
00:21:58
Speaker
arrive at the form and fill it out from twitter to get one Email and people who arrived that filled it out based on clicking a link in linkedin to get a different email You can do that with hidden fields from the form and then using that as criteria to route them through the workflow So workflows are really powerful I'm sure there's a lot more ways than just the ones we've covered that you could use these
00:22:22
Speaker
You can use workflows based on a date, so if you have date-specific things that you want to do with workflows, that's also an option. Yeah, there's so much to do with workflows. We would have a much longer podcast if we went through everything.
00:22:40
Speaker
Okay, and another feature useful tool in HubSpot that I really like and I don't know if it's because I just like the visual of it or what, but one of the things it's it's the topic cluster to help you with your SEO.
Improving SEO and Social Media Management with HubSpot
00:22:58
Speaker
Don't you call that the spider web Elena? Yes, I do the spider web the spider because it just looks It's like a spider a spider web Uh when you when it's all said and done So you have your money page or your pillar page or something? That is going to be a top focus keyword for you and so you'll put that in the middle of it and with along with the url to the page that that you want it to focus on
00:23:24
Speaker
Then you can build out and identify other pages that you want to link back to that money page. Along with those supporting semantically related keywords. Exactly. That's what I was just about to say. You want to use not the same keyword that your main keyword is, but one that is related to it. It just builds out this little almost spider-looking or spiderweb looking thing.
00:23:52
Speaker
And then the next thing that we focus on within the tool is also social media. So we use the tool to schedule out our social media. We don't do tons in advance, but if we have a certain upcoming event or something like that that we want to schedule multiples out, then we'll use it that way as well as our daily scheduling. And we also will go onto the platforms as well to do some additional engagement.
00:24:23
Speaker
The last thing that we want to talk about is not by any means the very last thing we could talk about, but we want to mention that with a platform like HubSpot, you should be able to integrate your CRM ticket desk so you can see everything on place.
00:24:41
Speaker
And if you don't have those other sales and customer service tools, lucky for you HubSpot does offer a sales hub and ticket desk as part of its overall solution. You can just do marketing or you can add in those other layers and then get a more complete picture from prospect to customer advocate.
Strategic Investment in Marketing Technology
00:25:06
Speaker
It's really nice.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah. And some of these additional tools you can test out for free to check them out and see how, how, if it's something that you want to use going forward. Right. So I guess we've come to the end of our HubSpot love fest. Why don't we give everybody a few key takeaways, Elena, to help them consider what they should be doing with their marketing automation tools.
00:25:35
Speaker
Sounds good. So the first thing you want to do is define what you want out of a technology tool. You kind of need to know that, otherwise you're going to be spending a lot of money on something that you don't really need, like we talked about at the beginning. So if you don't care about doing anything more than just capturing a few form fills and doing some occasional emails, then
00:25:58
Speaker
Don't pay for the expensive solutions, but you need to ask yourself, am I messing up by only doing the bare minimum or is it okay for my business? You need to really think through your strategy and what it is that you're trying to achieve.
00:26:14
Speaker
Then you also need to explore the marketing automation and inbound solutions that you're using or that maybe you're looking at buying to see if it will allow you to do all the cool digital marketing things that you want to do. It's so critical that you define what it is you want out of your technology tool.
00:26:33
Speaker
Definitely.
Integrated Marketing and Effective Management
00:26:35
Speaker
Another thing that you need to think about is when you have that platform, how can you make the most out of it and get the most out of it? Like Elena mentioned earlier, we integrate our HubSpot with our live chat with our Slack channel. We use forms for lead capture and use that progressive profiling to capture additional information.
00:27:00
Speaker
We schedule social posts. We use the HubSpot CRM in combination with the marketing tool. Nurture leads personalized communications both through email and on page. And if ABM, account-based marketing is your thing, then use that marketing automation or inbound marketing tool to help you do that and make it a little more scalable. You can also send lead alerts. Hey, so-and-so has been on the pricing page.
00:27:28
Speaker
or whatever your trigger events are and then use those CTAs and pop-ups to help move people closer to a decision and improve that user experience for the people on your website.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, and when you're using all those different things, you really want to make sure that you have someone on staff who is trained to use the system. Or you need to outsource it to a MarTech manager or something else because you don't want people in there that don't understand how it all works together because it can mess things up or things won't work right.
00:28:07
Speaker
It's just critical too that you limit the number of people that are in there using it because everyone thinks differently when it comes to naming conventions and how you're going to set up your URLs. You want it to be clean so that everyone that does go in can easily find things. It's just some good housekeeping rules to make sure that
00:28:33
Speaker
you're doing things consistently throughout. And when you have too many people in there, that's when it gets all jumbled and messy.
00:28:42
Speaker
To add on to that point, even if you only have a couple of people in there, you have to document how you're going to do things. Because even though you may get trained by HubSpot, the way you and your specific organization use the tool may not be the same as how someone else uses it. So document, document, document, standard operating procedures because of
00:29:06
Speaker
your MarTech person leaves tomorrow, somebody needs to be able to figure out how to get in there and manage the solution for you. So enough preaching on that point.
Ensuring Marketing Alignment and Effectiveness
00:29:19
Speaker
Our final takeaway is use those reporting tools that are provided. You need to know if your efforts are working. Your content, your technology, is it all working together to help drive more leads, engagements, and bring more sales?
00:29:36
Speaker
All right, so I think we've probably talked everyone's ears off on marketing technology. What do you think? Probably, but if anybody wants to talk about any other cool MarTech, I'm available. Okay, so how can I reach you? You can reach me on Twitter at Stacy, S-T-A-C-Y underscore Jax, J-A-X, or reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm there.
00:30:05
Speaker
And if you want to reach me, you can reach me at Alayna underscore Jackson. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. That's on Twitter and on LinkedIn. You can just look me up for Alayna Jackson. And finally, if you want to leave a voicemail for us, which we can include in next week's show, visit anchor.fm forward slash the dash marketing dash mix.
00:30:35
Speaker
If you use the Anchor app, you can leave a voicemail. All right, folks. That's our show today. We hope you'll come back next week. Bye. The Marketing Mix is hosted by Stacey Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.