As an all-in-one marketing platform, HubSpot has everything you need to manage your business’ marketing and sales activity without having to acquire additional tools. Of course, while HubSpot can deliver the key functionalities you need as everything is all in one place, it often means there’s a lot of information to manage.
Sure - your sales team will love having all of that information - after all, the more information they have in their sales portal, the better position they will be in to sell - but in order for your business to effectively manage data (and ensure that data is accurate) that data needs to be governed properly.
With regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the horizon, managing the data in your HubSpot portal should be a key consideration - and having clear rules in place will make it easier years down the line.
Here are five things you can do right now to clean up and improve your HubSpot portal.
1. Collect affirmative consent on all of your forms
This is a must have not just for 2020, but for May 2018. With the GDPR coming into place, it’s incredibly important that you start collecting affirmative consent from people. This means including a tick box on all of your forms asking contacts if they are happy to hear from you in the future. Pre-ticked boxes are a no-go!
2. Implement naming conventions
Tidy house, tidy mind?
Tidy HubSpot, tidy marketing?
If you don’t follow a specific naming convention for your web pages, landing pages or other content assets - you need to as soon as possible. Naming conventions make it easy for you to find what you are looking for in HubSpot, avoid duplicate versions of files, and know what content assets, web pages, blogs and campaigns were used for. You just need to set some ground rules and get everyone in the business to stick to them. Days, weeks, and months later, you’ll be thankful for having a naming convention and actually being able to find ‘DRAFT 5’ of a piece of content.
Want a good starting point? Try using the below:
{Content type} - {Content name} - {Campaign} - {Month} - {Year}
E.g.
Landing Page - HubSpot Website eBook - HubSpot Websites - March - 2018
3. Manage your offline sources
When you generate leads through your website, the HubSpot platform assigns an original source for each lead based on how they first arrived on your website. HubSpot breaks down website traffic into the following source categories:
- Organic search - visits from search engines
- Referrals - visits from other websites
- Paid search - visits from pay-per-click ads
- Email marketing - visits from email campaigns
- Social media - visits from social media sites
- Direct traffic - visits from users reaching your site by typing in a URL
However, the one leftover from this list is...
- Offline sources - contacts and customers who originated outside of your website
Offline sources are contacts and customers who originated outside of your website and have been manually added or imported into the system. These contacts or customers have either been created and added, or uploaded via a CSV file or data list. In order to ensure that you are creating an original source for all leads, whether online or offline, we would suggest creating a new custom property that associates any ‘offline source’ contacts with offline activity, for example:
- Lead telephoned into the office
- Lead emailed into the office
- Referral from a known contact
- Lead was met at an event
- Cold prospect uploaded to CRM
- Customer uploaded to CRM
4. Clean up lists and dashboard views on a monthly basis
HubSpot is a huge tool; there are lots of different data points and pieces of information on each contact, all of which can be useful, but when it comes to getting the most important information, it can sometimes get in the way.
To ensure you only ever look at the information you need on each contact, you customise what’s shown on a contact’s record to ensure only the most critical pieces of information - the information your marketing and sales team need - are displayed.
In a B2B environment, this usually is:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Company Name
- Website URL
- Email Address
- Job Title
- Lead Owner
- Lifecycle stage
We would advise that you create a list that includes any contact missing any of this information. Essentially, your goal is to keep this list empty. As soon as you complete any contact record missing information, you can then move it over and the list will be empty again. By implementing a system like this and setting aside thirty minutes each week to update contact records, you ensure your data is never incomplete and always accurate - meaning no gaps.
5. Move your website into the HubSpot CMS
For us, it’s a no-brainer. We love HubSpot and think it’s head-and-shoulders above the competition - and so do many others! It’s one of the leading all-in-one marketing and sales solutions on the market - and it’s constantly growing.
We would, without a doubt, recommend that you move your website into the HubSpot CMS or build your website with it. And if you’re a current HubSpot user, why wouldn’t you move your website into HubSpot to take advantage of its tools and consolidate your marketing and sales activity?
It’s incredibly easy to use from a marketing perspective. You don’t need any development skills, web pages can be created on the fly (pre-built templates provide a variety of options), pages can be cloned with ease, and editing text and/or images on web pages is simple - and that’s just the beginning!
So there you have it, five things that we recommend every HubSpot user does in order to improve their use and management of the platform. Find out the right way to set up HubSpot using best practices in our detailed guide to a HubSpot Setup.
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