How to build a smarter B2B marketing strategy with HubSpot

B2B marketers are increasingly expected to do more with less. Restricted budgets, restructured teams or limited tech stacks aren’t stopping the C-suite and wider business from setting ambitious targets. According to one report, this has left nearly 60% of B2B marketers required to deliver more with fewer resources.  

This doesn’t just mean teams need to develop more effective B2B strategies, but deliver them with limited time and minimal spending. Luckily, HubSpot has plenty of tools which can help businesses reach and engage potential buyers more easily and effectively.

Here, we’ll set out what these tools do and how best to use them. 

Why might you use HubSpot to deliver your strategy? 

Whether your goals are to generate more leads, nurture your prospects or improve customer retention (or maybe all three and more), it can feel impossible to make progress if you only have a small team and budget. Plus, on top of achieving new goals, you’ve got to run the business as usual activities stakeholders expect. 

HubSpot can be used to deliver your marketing strategy if you: 

• Have limited headcount: If you’re juggling a huge workload with a small team, HubSpot can help you manage projects, assign activities and automate basic tasks to get more done with fewer colleagues.
• Need to centralise your tech stack: Trying to manage different tools can be a task in itself. HubSpot brings various channels into a centralised place, so you can manage and track activity more easily.
• Want to use your time effectively: Whether it’s finding specific metrics, answering customer questions or personalising content, HubSpot means you can use automation or smart tools to do the ‘stuff’ while you focus on the strategy.
• Struggle to track performance metrics: From a lead’s first point of contact to their initial purchase and feedback, you can track every touchpoint in HubSpot. Plus, you can run A/B tests, check effectiveness of activities and generate reports.
• Want to continuously improve: The ability to see what works and what doesn’t, or where prospects may be dropping off in their journey, means you can adjust your strategy to make it more effective and achieve your goals.

Which HubSpot tools can enhance your strategy? 

If you’re new to the platform or just getting started, here’s how HubSpot can help build your marketing strategy and drive real results. 

Campaigns 

The Campaigns area of the platform helps you keep track of your marketing efforts from both a project management and measurement perspective. Once you create a campaign, you can set tasks for different colleagues, build and put activities live, and then measure their impact in real time, all in one place. 

By bringing all these tools together, HubSpot makes it easier and faster to plan and create projects across your team. You can see which assets are ready or outstanding, and get activities off the ground more efficiently. Then, once they’re set live, you can see real-time insights into their impact, to make sure you’re getting closer to your goals. 

Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub has a range of tools to help teams be more productive. These include: 

• Forms which help you collect the right compliant data easily
• Email marketing with personalised content and performance tracking
• Social media management with scheduling and recommended posting times
• AI-enabled tools, such as customer agents and lookalike contact lists
• Analytics and reporting dashboards to track ROI and identify growth opportunities

This makes it possible to manage, report on and improve end-to-end customer journeys, whether you want to make your service more efficient, nurture prospects at scale or ensure consistency across channels. 

Target accounts

If account-based marketing is part of your strategy, then HubSpot’s target accounts tool allows you to monitor the progress of your hottest or biggest prospects. 

Once set up, you can view your target accounts, including any open deals, the open deal value, any missing buying roles or decision makers via an index page. This helps your sales and marketing teams track their progress. 

Recommendations for potential target accounts will also be given via the Website Visits page. Otherwise, you can set up scoring properties or workflows to help you identify possible prospects. 

Lead scoring

Quickly determine your warmest prospects by setting up lead scoring. Using either preset or custom values, this involves you assigning values to particular events or properties. HubSpot then automatically tracks these scores to efficiently qualify your leads. 

Tailor your lead scores to your specific business needs, factoring in contact and company engagement, demographic fit or a combination of the two. For even greater precision, you can set score limits and decay rates to accurately weigh different actions and account for the recency of an event.

Quick Tip: With a paid Sales Hub Enterprise subscription, you can now apply lead scoring to deals in the HubSpot CRM - not just contacts and companies. It’s a powerful way to focus your sales efforts on the most valuable opportunities generated from your B2B marketing strategies.

Automation

To make simple tasks easier to complete, HubSpot has a range of automation tools. These include: 

• Workflows, which triggers multiple actions to run automatically. For example, you can set up a workflow to send a follow-up email a week after a contact fills out a form and simultaneously create a task in the Sales hub for a colleague to make a call.
• Pipeline automation, which helps your internal teams manage prospects and deals more effectively, making the closure of deals and customer onboarding processes that bit easier.
• Follow-up processes, to keep your prospects engaged. For instance, when contacts submit specific forms or open particular emails, a follow-up process is triggered.
• Task automation, which automatically generate and assign tasks to your team, helping them stay organised, respond promptly and never miss important follow-ups.

This means you can stop worrying about losing your hottest leads or missing crucial follow-ups. Instead, processes will run smoothly and consistently, helping you close more deals and better serve your customers.

Start reaching your strategic goals

Alongside the right strategy, HubSpot tools can help your marketing become more effective, even if you’re overcoming challenges like small budgets or teams. With experts in both B2B marketing and HubSpot, we can support you to meet even the most ambitious goals.

To find out how HubSpot can help you deliver your B2B marketing strategy, get in touch with our team.