Businesses today rely a lot on generating leads and converting them. With a solid lead gen strategy, brands can target their customer persona(s) with content relevant to them, collect their data, and build a personalized relationship with them until they are ready to make a purchase.
Besides having a solid lead gen strategy, it is important to have a powerful marketing automation software that enables you to execute your strategy to get the best results. According to a survey by Ascend2, marketers that integrate marketing automation with prospects have experienced not less than a 95 percent success rate.
And while there are different marketing automation and lead generation tools, we use and recommend HubSpot at First Page because we love it so much. So in this article, we’ll be focusing on how HubSpot enables you to solve some of the major challenges of lead generation.
Let’s get started...
4 Major Challenges of Lead Generation
1. Generating Unqualified Leads
Getting leads is one thing; getting the right kind of leads that will facilitate your business growth is another. Unfortunately, many businesses are targeting unqualified leads (unknowingly), and the likelihood of these leads converting to paying customers is pretty low.
In order to close more sales, your focus should be on generating leads that show organic interest in your business and will easily purchase your products/services with little or no effort. Qualified leads are willing to provide you with their information in exchange for your valuable offers, and targeting them is triple rewarding as targeting unqualified leads.
2. Creating Personalized and Laser-Targeted Lead Generation Content
Creating highly personalized lead gen content allows you to serve your potential customers at any stage of their buyer journey. According to SmarterHQ, 72 percent of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging. Unfortunately, a lot of companies struggle with creating content that is tailored to fit their prospects’ needs. Instead of creating personalized content for different visitors, they opt for generic offers and CTAs. This, in turn, will lead to lower conversion rates and a high bounce rate.
With the personal information leads provide in forms they fill out, you can create personalized banners, email campaigns, and CTAs that will not only match their buyer stage but also nurture them down the sales funnel.
3. Having Limited Resources
Most companies do not have in-depth information about their targeted audience nor the tools to get this information. Without ample data and a tool that sets your lead generation channel up for success, it’s difficult to understand your target’s pain points, biggest motivators, hobbies, demographics, online searching/researching patterns, and other information you need to create highly relevant content pieces for lead gen and lead nurturing.
4. Managing Multiple Lead Generation Tools
Lead generation is multi-faceted, and therefore you might think that one tool can’t cater to every tactic you want to tackle. Most companies have different tools for different aspects of lead generation management (data collection, scheduling and automation, creating and modifying landing pages, building forms, chatbots, and automating workflow). Keeping track of these tools can be very time-consuming and draining. Not only that, but you will also need to learn how to effectively use each of these tools and have them feed appropriately into your analytics dashboard or marketing data of record so that you can holistically review and optimize the results of your lead generation channel.
5 Reasons You Should Use HubSpot for Lead Generation
1. Manage Your Marketing/Sales Effort All in One Place
One of the major benefits of using HubSpot is that it caters to every aspect of marketing, service, and sales using their Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub that all integrate with each other. With HubSpot, you can stop worrying about layering on separate tools to do one thing well since it provides an all-in-one marketing/sales solution. Sometimes we find that HubSpot’s version of a tool might not be the “best in its class.” For example, some social media management tools such as Sprout Social have very complex features. But what makes HubSpot usually stand out as the best option is that it integrates with everything else. So instead of managing your social media in a silo, using HubSpot means you can start to see how your leads interact with your brand on social media and when they’re clicking and sharing links from your social sites. This kind of information can feed into a lead scoring model that tells your sales team or marketing team when a lead is more qualified because they are engaged with the content you’re sharing on social.
HubSpot lead generation is seamless. You can collect data on your leads, create personalized content form this data, schedule posts on social media, send emails to continuously engage in conversation with your leads, and implement all of your lead gen and inbound marketing strategies in one place and then analyze the results in one place. Furthermore, HubSpot allows you to integrate your marketing to its Service and Sales Hubs when you’re ready to move into conversion and sales. This helps to ensure that your lead generation is synced around the entire customer journey: from the minute they become a lead through to a sales-qualified lead and conversations with your sales team, and then after when they’re a customer and need support (before or after purchase).
The software’s Service and Sales Hubs also allow you to:
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Uncover new leads in less time
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Monitor and track your entire pipeline
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Automate outreach and workflows
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Build a frictionless customer experience
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Score your leads to identify qualified leads
HubSpot helps you to score both existing and new leads. You can prioritize leads and determine their sales-readiness based on their interest and interaction on your website. This allows you to create two new lifecycle stages once you get really sophisticated with your lead generation: marketing-qualified leads (MQL) and sales-qualified leads (SQL). You can set up score properties to qualify leads and to create an automated lead scoring process based on interactions with your brand, such as viewing/reading a certain landing page, downloading a piece of content, or opening an email. Additionally, HubSpot uses machine learning to create a predictive lead scoring process that helps you determine the best leads with the highest chance of converting into customers. With this, your sales team can prioritize leads without wasting time and resources on unqualified leads.
2. Automate Lead Nurturing
The majority of the visitors that land on your website won’t be ready to make a purchase instantly. Therefore, you’ll need to interact with them, strike up conversations, check-in, and provide them with valuables that will lead them to the end of the sales funnel cycle. These are sometimes called “premium content,” “downloadable content,” or “offers.”It’s also good to send blog posts that will help their purchasing journey as well.
You can nurture your leads with automated emails using HubSpot workflows, providing them with the right information at the right time and converting them when they’re ready to make a purchase. HubSpot workflows allow you to set up and automate complete lead nurturing campaigns with segmentation for each buyer journey or persona.
With the workflow feature on HubSpot, you can:
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Target specific people or industries
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Automate campaigns
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Move leads through each buyer’s stage
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Streamline your lead gen process to run seamlessly
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Enhance your productivity and effectiveness
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Reduce the chances of human error
3. Publish and Manage Your Website Content
In addition to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub, their (new to 2020) HubSpot CMS allows you to create new website content and manage existing content. You can also easily add new landing pages, blog posts, pop-up forms, and CTAs from the data and work you’re doing in your Marketing Hub. You can also modify and optimize the existing website content to make it rank on search engines and convert better.
The HubSpot CMS allows you to add important elements to your site like:
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Search optimization, such as meta description, page title, page URL, featured images
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Personalization such as banners, CTAs, or forms that speak directly to different visitors, personas, or customers who might have already converted
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Frequent SEO or content changes required from your marketing plan — without working it into your product development cycle
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Multiple language options that you can toggle between for leads located in different countries (if you operate outside the U.S.)
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Conversion testing options that allow you to test different versions of your landing pages and adapt to what converts leads quickest
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And more
4. Use HubSpot Data to Understand Your Leads and Personalize Content
When you use a tool like HubSpot, it automatically gathers information about your leads using publically available data. Some of this demographic data can also help tailor your message and personalize your landing pages, therefore converting leads faster (as we mentioned earlier).
If you still don’t feel like you’re getting the information you want to know about your leads, then it’s important to analyze the questions you’re using in your forms and think about how you can change the questions you’re asking. A great one that we always include in forms for our clients is a qualifying question that will immediately funnel your leads into top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), or bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
HubSpot also allows you to customize the forms you create to capture your lead’s information, and also use “progressive profiling” that asks new questions when leads return and fill out a second or third form. All of this information is stored in the Properties of your CRM and can be used to segment and personalize emails, CTAs, and more (and build website content, if you’re using HubSpot CMS).
5. Track Your Campaigns and ROI
HubSpot has a powerful built-in analytic tool that lets you measure the performance of all your campaigns in real time. You can keep tabs on the complete lifecycle of both your loyal customers and anonymous web visitors. You can monitor your site performance too and measure both the quality and the quantity of your website traffic. You can use Campaigns to track a complete campaign by tying different marketing assets to it, such as social media posts, landing pages, emails, etc.
HubSpot will provide you with a detailed report on how each of your website pages is performing and will help you pinpoint your best traffic source.
The HubSpot reporting feature is vast and complicated, with many reports that will help drill down into the ROI of your lead generation campaigns and the channel as a whole.
Conclusion
Lead generation, if done right, can bring incredible growth to your business. But it also requires a lot of time investment, experience, and the right tool to get the job done. At First Page, we’re dedicated to helping our clients generate quality leads that will drive revenue up. We’ve built lead generation channels for our clients that have gathered 10,000 leads in six months and more than 30,000 leads in a year. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can turn your website into a lead generating machine.
