Whether you’re looking to attract unique visitors and turn them into leads, add automation to what you’re already doing manually, or create excellent customer service routines, HubSpot is the tool for you.
They are centered around an incredible CRM (customer relationship management) which helps you create lasting relationships with your customers – and guess what, their CRM is 100% free… always!
HubSpot includes three different “Hubs” – service, marketing, and sales – with CRM being the core of their business. Today we will be focused on the Marketing hub, but we wanted to provide you with a little description of what each do:
1. CRM
The core. All things on HubSpot are centered around their CRM. Here you can collect and see all sorts of insight of each contact/lead, organize these contacts, and perform in-depth monitoring that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
2. Marketing Hub
The Marketing hub’s main goal is to set you up with a great conversion rate and amount of traffic. The tools provided will have you converting visitors to customers as quickly as possible with their marketing campaigns.
3. Service Hub
The Service hub acts to help you connect with customers in the best way possible that they may love and trust your company. From here, you can turn these customers into promoters for your company to help you grow bigger than ever.
4. Sales Hub
The tools provided here are for turning sales over as quickly and efficiently as possible. With the help of the Sales hub, you will be closing more sales in no time.
Let’s Get Started!
HubSpot offers free features of each of their programs to let you play around until you’re comfortable and start paying for more of their features once you’re loving it.
Head on over to Hubspot to get started with their excellent marketing tools!
- Click “Get HubSpot free” and scroll to “Marketing Hub”.
- Press “Get started free” and here you will create your account, fill in some information about your business, and answer a couple of questions. (You will also be asked to embed some code into your website so that HubSpot can work with your platform, but it’s as simple as copying and pasting.)
Once you’ve set up your account, you’ll be brought to a page that will walk you through getting set up with HubSpot. This includes tutorials, articles, and slideshows to help you better understand how to work with them.
Walk through these at your own pace, you can always return to this screen by clicking the orange icon in the upper left-hand corner. In the upper banner, you will also see a horizontal menu of all of the features you can use (if there is a lock icon, this means you will need to upgrade for these features).
Here are some descriptions of what the different items on the getting-started checklist do:
1. Contact record
Here you can create contacts to act as your leads. These would be the people that you know either are already leads for you or people that you think would benefit from receiving your emails and incentives. You can add as little or as much data about each contact as you want such as their company, specific notes, and extra contact information.
Within someone’s contact record, you can also see when they joined, pages they’ve visited within your site, attachments for them, a place where all of their questions resides, and the company they’re associated with. Once you start collecting this information, you will be able to see everything on one page per customer to help you create the best relationship with them.
2. Import your contacts
Pretty self-explanatory, but here you can import existing contacts from other sites/sources to your HubSpot database. (They make this super simple and convenient to do!)
3. Creating a form
Create a powerful form that will help you convert visitors to leads. Once someone uses your form, they will be added to your contacts and from there you will be able to use HubSpot’s tools to convert them into customers!
4. Add live chat
Here you are able to see every conversation you are having with your customers/leads/etc. in one place regardless of if they’re happening in a chat or an email. You can gain access to the full conversation and information about the person you’re chatting with so that you can get them the help they’re looking for.
5. Invite your team
Here you can create your team of people (most likely other employees) so that you can all be working collaboratively from the same database.
6. Dashboard
Here you can see all of the areas of your HubSpot account and see what you need to be working on and areas in which you can approve upon. This feature is amazing for holding you accountable for your goals and progress.
7. Creating a lead ad
Here you will be able to create ads for Instagram and Facebook in order to increase the audiences you’re targeting. You can then see all of your marketing practices in one place on HubSpot so that you can determine what is working best for you in terms of getting leads.
With their paid membership, you’ll get more features such as:
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Customer feedback
- An FAQ page
- A routine of best practices
- Email sequences
- In-depth automation(s)
- Lists
- Custom reporting
Hubspot’s free features are enough to get you started and in love with the service they provide, however, once you’re on board to start their paid-membership (which is decently-priced if I may say so) you won’t regret doing so.
The greatest part of HubSpot’s platform is their easy-to-use, easy-to-navigate structure. They provide walk-throughs of almost every tool available so that you as a user can feel like you aren’t in the dark about how to use their website.
There is so much you can accomplish by using HubSpot’s marketing tools. In terms of customer service, this platform is excelling. They are centered around the most important part of a business: the customer. And for this reason, they are genius.
Fran Kolars is a blogging intern for LadyBossBlogger. She is currently working towards her bachelor’s degree in Retail Merchandising and Interior Design at the University of Minnesota. Blogging is an interest of hers that was sparked by her passion for mental health, self-care, and motivation for women.