Let’s start by researching marketing automation and email marketing to understand what HubSpot brings to your business.
It’s common for you to talk about marketing automation and email marketing software as if they’re all the same thing.
Though email marketing is a function of marketing automation, they aren’t the same thing.
What is Marketing Automation
Marketing is where your brand’s relationship with its ideal buyer begins. Over time, as your business grows it becomes more complicated. Next thing you know, it’s time to hire an internal position or hire an agency to build and drive marketing performance and conversion programs.
Ultimately, your marketing efforts will get so big that it can’t possibly be managed by fractured software, like Outlook, Word, and spreadsheets. You need a system that can take the repeatable, redundant tasks and automate the system. This is marketing automation.
Marketing automation software is a tool to manage customer acquisition and retention that fits your company’s marketing and sales funnels.
Marketing Automation and HubSpot
Marketing Automation leads us to HubSpot, a marketing automation software. When executing marketing automation with HubSpot at its highest level, your company will become more like Amazon and less like All About Pies. (Gerber reference)
When we say “like Amazon” we mean; when HubSpot is working, you get to nurture your ideal buyers with useful and personalized content that helps the prospect become a customer. This same level of nurturing is also used to delight the buyers, post purchase so that they can become brand evangelists. This level of marketing automation and HubSpot typically generates a significant increase in revenue for your business and, a great marketing/sales ROI.
Yeah, sounds great but HubSpot doesn’t work for my business.
Mastering HubSpot can be an overwhelming task. Let’s run through the reasons why HubSpot doesn’t work.
Unclear Expectations
So here’s the problem with unclear expectations. This is a hurdle for many businesses. A HubSpot rep, internal marketer, or an agency is telling you that HubSpot will increase your traffic, leads, and sales by 500%. To your business, this is an incredible opportunity. So let’s invest in HubSpot. You, the company, don’t know anything about marketing automation, content marketing, or the inbound methodology, but it sounds plausible. Six months later, after hundreds of hours and possibly outsourced fees you don’t see the 500% increase.
Any unclear expectations is a huge challenge. In our modern internet world content marketing, just like SEO, takes some time to show results. You can have the best systems in place, but you still need the volume (traffic) and right buyer.
It’s unrealistic to start blogging and after three months expect your website traffic to triple. It’s also unrealistic to add two ebooks to your website and expect 100’s of quality leads per month.
It is the case that modern SEO takes a lot of time to show results. Modern content marketing works the same way. You’re not going to start producing blog posts or interactive content or big content pieces and 3 months from now go, “Well, we made 50 new content pieces, and thus our traffic has tripled.”
That’s not how it works.
The problem here is that HubSpot doesn’t work based on your expectations. With the right expectations and effort it does.
Not committed to content or the inbound methodology
You want to grow your website traffic and the leads your business is getting from the website.
So you ask your director of marketing or yourself to start generating content via your blog and for the first 30 days you follow a definite step by step plan. You add eBooks, webinars, whitepapers, case studies and clear calls-to-actions to get your visitors to download useful content in exchange for their email, so you get them as a lead. You’re committed to creating content, following inbound principles and using HubSpot as the all-in-one tool for managing these efforts.
You get an “A” for enthusiasm but in your haste you didn’t take the time to study why you need content and the inbound methodology, you solely saw it as a means to an end.
At the end of 30 days these inbound efforts, you’ve identified a new traffic-boosting strategy that you ask your marketer to pursue. You get distracted by the next big social network and other PPC opportunities for quick wins and place your content and inbound efforts on the back burner.
At your next strategic review, you announce to the team that HubSpot doesn’t work. The software expense and the time put into marketing automation is not longer worth it.
This approach goes against the core goals of HubSpot and marketing automation, which is to nurture prospects for the long-term.
If you stay committed to content and the inbound methodology as a long-term initiative, you’ll find that HubSpot works.
If you feel these two don’t apply to you and your efforts with HubSpot still doesn’t work then, it may not be a good fit for your business, and that’s okay.
HubSpot is a tool that when combined with the right company and skilled marketers will empower your company to do the following:
- Run dynamic campaigns that speak to an individual’s specific buyers persona. For instance, you can send targeted emails and content offers based on interactions the person has with your company.
- Segment buyers and prospects by common traits, interests, demographics, and engagement behavior with your company. This is known as lead/database segmentation.
- Execute and optimize frequent marketing campaigns and improve performance by monitoring patterns. You’ll be able to test different campaign variables like email subjects, headings, time of emails and content personalization.
- Fully integrate your marketing channels to create a cross-platform brand experience that is comprehensive and cohesive. You’ll be able to make sure that every touch point provides value to your ideal buyer and is optimized for conversions.
If HubSpot doesn’t work for you – We’ll give you a 30 minute free inbound marketing consultation.
