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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
Elizabeth Winkelman (00:05)
Hey everybody, it's Elizabeth here. You know, now is a great time to look at your marketing efforts throughout the year. It's always a time of reflection in December, right? Everybody wants to do a new year, new you, or a new year, new marketing initiatives. And so now is a great time to catch up on things, because you may have marketing efforts that are coming to a close. Maybe you're winding down for the holiday season. So this is a great time to take an honest look.
at your efforts to then align or set goals for 2025. If you're one of those fortunate teams that has a company goal already defined for 2025, that's amazing. Take that goal and figure out a way that marketing can help impact it. Obviously, bringing in leads so that the sales team has more opportunities, meetings, things like that to then improve their close rates. Obviously, that's something that you want to do.
But just bringing in any lead isn't necessarily helpful, right? It could be a waste of their time. So what I like to start with is taking a look, if you're using something like HubSpot, for example, what I've got here is taking a look at your deals, where the leads came from, deal sources, things like that. There's all kinds of different reports in HubSpot that you can pull. You do not need to be a reporting guru.
In order to find them in HubSpot, you can use customer journey reports, funnels, even attribution. And there's even an AI report generator, which it does a decent job. It's not perfect all the time, but it does a pretty good job if you've got a simple report to pull. But basically, let the system tell you where the leads are coming from, right? It also doesn't hurt to actually talk to your sales reps. Ask them, get information from them.
and see what's been helpful, hurtful. Hurtful is kind of a funny word, but you get where I'm going. Yeah, so if it's obviously every company wants to increase sales, increase revenue, so that's kind of an obvious one. But if you're having issues, let's say you've gone to the email tool in HubSpot, I'm in the test portal, so this is all just bogus data. If you notice that your scores are low, you have high hard bounce and unsubscribe rates,
probably because your data is gross, right? You might be attracting the wrong people. You might be delivering the wrong content, right? So leverage the email tool. Look down here. It'll tell you high and low performing emails and even give you tips to improve your email health, right? On the analyze tab, same thing. You can look at different metrics on this analyze tab, which is fantastic. But the other thing that I actually like doing
is to edit the columns here. You can see there's actually quite a few options here that you can add to help further inform your efforts. Because this way you can see, all right, this one had a high open rate. This was the subject line. It was delivered to this list, blah, blah. If you're having, like if one of your objective is to clean up data and you've noticed you've got a lot of contacts, let's say they're missing a first name or something like that.
You know, there's things that you can do like considering adding to your default forms, right? You can make certain things required. That way, over time, you'll get better data in the long run when anybody creates a contact deal, something like that. The other thing you can do to help your data hygiene efforts, if that's one of your 2025 goals is to market smarter, right? Is to set up views.
Or you can leverage the active list that will help pull in different information. So maybe contacts missing an email or contacts missing a first name or something like that. You can do things like that inside of HubSpot to help your marketing efforts. If you're also having email health issues, well, just you want to improve your marketing efforts overall. I'm not even going to say necessarily email health.
Another thing to look into is lead scoring. You can see this is new in HubSpot, a new tool. They've always had HubSpot score, but this one actually divides the score into fit and engagement, which is really awesome. So the fit, use your ICP to figure out who it is you want to sell to. Obviously, you're going to entertain almost any person, right? But there are some buyers that just aren't an ideal fit, and that's okay. Take that fit.
base it off to ICP, work with sales and service to get that figured out. And then the engagement score, use your metrics inside of HubSpot to then calculate the lead scoring. You can then pull lists based off of lead score. You can do high fit, high engagement, things like that, and then leverage those people and talk to them differently. The other thing too is to make, take an honest look at your content and compare that to the customer journey, right? What pieces of content do I have?
at the right stage. You you don't want just all awareness or just all decision. You want some consideration content in there too. Which leads me into my next question about delivering content at the right time. So yes, you want to align that with the buyer stage, right? But you also want the content to be relevant and useful and you want it to be positioning you as an authority figure in the space, right? An expert, somebody that they can trust. So...
One thing that I've seen great success with is actually talking to your sales reps, asking them about the questions that they get, not just objections, but questions in general when they're doing discovery calls, demos, anything like that, and then use that to back into different content types. So for example, I'm going to use my previous job.
I worked at a payroll and HR software company, right? And HR does a lot of things on a schedule, right? Every year at this time of year, they have to prep for year end. Every department that runs payroll needs to do that, right? And that's a known thing. The other thing they have to do is, you know, open enrollment for benefits or performance reviews at a certain time, things like that. And I know performance reviews kind of ebb and flow, right? But
My point is if you deliver them helpful content ahead of when they actually need it, that helps them organize it for when they actually do need it, then that's a win, right? You're going to get more engagement, better quality leads, and you get the opportunity to surprise and delight someone, which is always super fun in my opinion. The other thing that I like to mention about HubSpot is all over HubSpot there's these little hidden nuggets.
like little gems that make your life easier, right? On the Campaigns tool, for example, if you're using Campaigns in HubSpot, there's this Compare Campaigns feature. So you can go in and select two campaigns, up to 10. Look, put them side by side. And again, this is a test portal, so no data. But you can see high level analytics, who's doing what, when.
Any revenue attributed anything like that inside of HubSpot? I believe the revenue may be based on your but anyway you get the picture. Use campaigns to help you, you know, inform your marketing decisions, right? The other thing too is if you didn't have a campaign built, you can pull a campaign together, put things into the campaign, the assets. Remember an asset can only live in one campaign at a time.
And then you can use this compare campaigns feature. You can even export it if you need to and see how your marketing metrics did. The other little hidden nugget that we've already looked at is the analyze tool in email and also email health. If there's some emails that you wanted to pit side by side, you can do that. See the performance of the email. I know these are two surveys, but you get the idea. And then again, you can export that those results if you needed to out of HubSpot.
There's also, if you go down into this library, and if you're someone that's using Sales Hub, if you click on Templates, underneath this Analyze, there's View Sales Content Analytics, which I love. So, Templates, you can see template performance, documents, which is fantastic if your sales team is sending out documents, or your service team, whoever that may be. You can see performance, things like that, and then also sequences, which is really, really cool.
So then you can work with the sales team, help them figure out where they can improve opportunities, I guess you should say, using these baked-in tools inside of HubSpot. But definitely do, on your radar, should definitely be a content audit and even just an overall processes, right? Because just because you've done something one way doesn't mean it's working.
So take an honest hard look at it, right? Decide what is working what's not working and if it's not working Why isn't it working get to the why right if your emails aren't getting opened or your pages aren't converting? Maybe you're just not talking to the right people or the content you have isn't relevant and I'll give you a big fat for instance Example at my previous job. I ran a webinar and it was just for
the payroll persona, right? And it was an epic failure. I had nobody sign up for the webinar, not one person, which told me that, you know what, maybe that audience isn't interested in it, or maybe they weren't interested in what I was presenting, right? So we decided to pivot. Like, yes, it was a bummer. We were frustrated that it flopped majorly. But we, you know, made lemonade out of lemons, right? Use those
failures to learn, figure out what it is, test if you can, if you have the data, the audience to do that, and then figure out a new game plan for 2025. But to grab average deal size, and then that way you can figure out the marketing ROI. You can say, all right, I brought in a thousand leads.
If your average deal size is $10, that's easy math. Because then you can prove the spend was worth it for marketing. Because as long as you're bringing in good quality leads, like don't count the spam submissions or people saying, hey, I want to post on your blog or can you link back to mine? Don't count those actual leads that you have passed over to sales. That should go into your marketing efforts, right? And inform your marketing budget for 2025.
And I know deal size, average deal size, could be low, it could be high, but at least then you're going to get a ballpark estimate of how much potential the marketing efforts brought to the sales team, right? And this isn't to knock on the sales groups. We love our sales teams. But that way you can just prove, hey, this is how much potential we had. Just a thought on that. But then also look at that yearly goal for your company.
Obviously there's always a revenue one, right? If there's anything else, figure out how to break those down into smaller attainable chunks, something quarterly, right? Make that a SMART goal, so make it SMART, measurable, attainable, all those good acronyms. Break it down into things that are a stretch, but they're attainable. So don't make it impossible, because that's going to be frustrating, right? And then figure out a way to have HubSpot record that stuff for you, right?
There might be a baked in report from the report library over here that you could use to inform or, you know, prove, not prove, track, there we go, your goal progression or your rock, whatever you want to call it. But if there isn't, you can always create a custom report here. And then my favorite thing in HubSpot is you can have this emailed to you. You don't even have to log in. If you need to send this to someone like,
manager, VP, C-suite person, email the dashboard. You can set it up as a recurring email, same thing with reports. Email it to them so they know, hey, this is what marketing did this month. It's helpful. People usually like it, but be proactive instead of reactive.
Anyway, good luck. Let us know what you're going to do in the comments to prep for marketing in 2025.