Are you a one-person marketing department, propping up an entire company?
If so, you are the office superhero.We’ve talked to many people in this role, especially those in the cloud services and managed IT industries, and the stories are pretty similar. Marketers are charged with maintaining the website, designing collateral, posting on social media, managing advertising, blogging – and somewhere in the middle of all this you must deliver new leads to the sales team.
It’s impossible for one person to do these tasks effectively, but if your company is taking its first baby steps with marketing, it’s highly unlikely you will get additional support any time soon. In the meantime, you have to do the best you can while keeping up with the ever-changing needs and demands of your organization.
Before asking your boss to invest in tools that will help you manage the work and track results, it’s a good idea to ask yourself: How easily will I be able to trace real ROI to my work?
This is difficult when you are using one app for SEO, one for social media, one for email marketing, and trying to get all the analytics to come together and give you one cohesive story. But HubSpot can help a one-man/woman band to get more done in a day, while offering clear insights into how your efforts are impacting the bottom line.
Save Time. Accomplish More.
One of the greatest benefits of an all-in-one marketing platform like HubSpot is the ability to manage several marketing tasks in one place.
Instead of cobbling several tools together and trying to make sense of the data, you can manage your blog, keyword research, social media, email marketing, lead scoring, and landing page design right from your portal. HubSpot also offers automated features at the “Pro” level that keep your campaign humming along while you work on other things.
Produce Leads, Not "Digital Marketing Metrics."
Employers are not interested in digital marketing. They want sales.
HubSpot can help a one-person marketing department deliver. Unlike most other tools, it's designed to help you find and track new sales prospects using content created by your team. Other digital marketing solutions can help you do incredible things, but very few of them are created for lead generation.
For instance, a subscription to SEM Rush will help you research keywords, track website rankings, and monitor competitors – all things that are instrumental to improving SEO, but as we’ve said before, SEO is a means to an end. Optimizing your website will not get you customers. But optimizing a site that converts visitors into leads? Now we’re talking!
Track And Report ROI
The software instantly creates a profile for each lead that converts on your site, and links it to the HubSpot CRM. Some of the data is populated by information you capture in the web form. Other pieces come from pixel tracking as the user moves about your website. You will see:
- Traffic source the user came from (direct, social, organic search, paid)
- Blog posts and website pages they’ve visited
- Forms they’ve filled out and content downloaded
- Lifecycle stage (subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, etc.)
- Company data (name, domain, phone number, annual revenue, location, social profile addresses, and company description)
- Deals your sales team is actively working on with the prospect
Each profile includes a timeline that shows a history of actions the user has taken on your website, as well as documented interactions with your marketing and sales team.
You can also produce reports that track your greatest traffic sources, and see which ones are producing the greatest number of new contacts and customers. By looking at the “Page Performance” tool, you can see the number of views for each page and post, and a click-thru-rate for the calls-to-action on those pages. This will help you figure out what content is producing the greatest results, giving you direction as you optimize the process.
What Are The Drawbacks of HubSpot?
The downside of using an all-in-one tool like HubSpot is that you will not get all the bells and whistles you would find by buying each marketing tool separately. Even though HubSpot has several optimization features, you won’t get the depth of SEO research and tracking capabilities you will get with Ahrefs or SEM Rush. The developers at HubSpot are always introducing new features, but the platform will always be a sales-driven tool. If you want to ruminate over backlink profiles and competitor paid search campaigns – you won’t find that here.
HubSpot also has a reputation for costing more than most tools, although the “Basic” package price ($200 a month) is easy to surpass if you are buying two or more marketing tools already.
One-person marketing departments have a tough gig. They will always be over-extended – that’s not going to change – but they can make a greater impact if they have the right resources. Finding customers and proving ROI is far more efficient with HubSpot than any other tool we’ve used. And for a solo-marketer, it can be a real life saver.
May 31, 2017 7:45:16 PM
