You're Getting Audited: A HubSpot Marketing Automation Checkup [Part Two]

In HubSpot Auditing Part I, we talked about internal HubSpot capabilities to help in your marketing efforts. In Part II, we’ll discuss the different capabilities that your audience will see that you need to be optimizing.

Landing Pages

Perhaps the easiest to set up initially, landing pages are often fraught with problems that make them difficult to use as a marketer. If your landing pages are bringing in leads, chances are you have them set up to be functional at a baseline, but consider the following to really strengthen them.

Organize Naming Conventions

Do the landing pages you create follow the same naming format each time, so you know what you're looking at? For Element Three clients, we often create specific landing pages for unique sources (like direct mail), so our landing page names look something like "XYZ Trade Show Promotion - Offer Page - Direct Mail."

This is even more critical when you run A/B tests or do multivariate testing with your landing pages (and you should definitely be doing this!), as it helps you define your results. If you’re running two variants of the same theme, but they’re named totally differently, it makes it very hard to track data clearly and can end in confusion.

Build Folder Structure

Create a folder structure for your landing pages to make it easier for you to find specific landing pages. If you have more than a dozen landing pages, it can quickly get difficult to keep track of all of them in one view. Assigning them to folders makes it easy to see only the ones that matter to you at a given time, and reduces the amount of time you'll spend searching through all of them to find the one you're looking for.

Templates

Check your landing page template. Are you constantly embedding forms on your landing page to get them to show up? Spoiler alert...this is NOT how HubSpot intended for forms to be placed on your site. There's a good chance that the developers who built out your site didn't put in the HubSpot markup for a form module. Modifying your templates to include this code will allow you to include forms natively using a drop-down menu.

This brings a number of benefits aside from time saved. You will be able to see all of the pages that use a particular form, all in one place. You will be able to change who receives the emails for forms submitted on that particular page, in case someone different will be handling those leads. You will also be able to choose what page people will be redirected to when they submit, so you don't need to create a unique form for each page anymore.

Utilize Best Practices

Edit the (usually very long) link path to create a reader-friendly URL that's easy to type in, especially if it's going on a piece of print marketing.

If you aren't using thank-you pages to accompany your offer pages, it's time to start. There are three big reasons for this.

1. Your prospect has already filled out the form on the offer page, but displaying an inline thank-you message means that page will still be up in front of them. Why wouldn't you want to hit them with a new message that they haven't already been staring at?
2. This is a prime opportunity for you to get a new offer in front of your prospect. This person has already downloaded something from you, so it's safe to say that he or she is "in the mood to shop." This is a good chance to nudge this person down the funnel with an offer that's a little harder-hitting than the one they just downloaded, such as a free trial or demo.
3. If you're using paid advertising tools like AdWords or Facebook Ads, having a thank-you page is a must for conversion tracking. You might not need this capability now, but if you decide to go the paid route down the road, wouldn't you rather have this built out already?

Stay away from things like top navigation and extraneous calls-to-action/links throughout the page. Keep the focus on the offer. Similarly, don't bog the reader down with unnecessary or wordy information. Communicate value efficiently, and let the reader decide quickly if he or she wants to become a lead. If your page is too content-heavy, there's a good chance your prospect will be overwhelmed and not convert. Finally, make sure your form is visible from the top of the page, and short enough that the reader doesn't have to scroll down to fill the whole thing out. Remove barriers like these and your conversion rate will soar.

Emails

This is one of the areas that can make or break your content marketing strategy. Honestly, if your emails suck, people aren't going to do anything as a result of reading them. Worse, if they can't read them in the first place, they never have the chance to act.

Without digging into style tips, the biggest thing you can do with your email templates is to audit them for performance. Are you using the smallest image sizes possible? Does the layout adjust to fit mobile email clients? Do the links actually work as intended?

While it might seem daunting to do this kind of testing, HubSpot has a nice tool built in called "preview in other inboxes." It will use a testing service to generate previews on nearly all device types, from iPhone's mail client to Microsoft Outlook on Windows.

Smart CTAs

One of the core elements of HubSpot's methodology is calls-to-action that drive visitors to your offer pages. However, if you just have standard CTAs set up, you're missing out on a big part of what HubSpot can offer.

Smart CTAs allow you to control which CTAs are viewed by which people, using advanced rules to control each one. You can segment CTA display by country, device type, referral source, list membership, or lifecycle stage. Here are a few of the most useful applications:

• Prevent people from seeing an offer if they've already converted on it. Instead, show something new.
• Show an offer relevant to the referral site, paid search campaign, or social media channel that drove someone to your site.
• Show offers that are hyper-relevant to your leads' funnel stages and/or personas.

Once you implement smart CTAs, I'd bet money that you see improved click-through and conversion rates.

Smart Content

Essentially the cousin of smart CTAs, smart content follows the same rules and has the same targeting abilities. The difference is that smart content is the actual content that shows up on your landing pages, and it can dynamically change based on the rules you set.

Smart content can save you a lot of time and trouble creating multiple pages for multiple types of site visitors. For example, rather than showing all of your company's offerings on the homepage, you can use smart content to only show relevant details based on the persona of the person who's visiting. This is only an available option if you’re using HubSpot’s email tool, landing pages, and/or Content Optimization System, but if you have it, smart content is definitely a potent tool that you should be using.

Using Forms for Progressive Profiling

Another important detail for a successful lead nurturing campaign is the ability to gather more information with each site visit. HubSpot forms allow you to do this by means of progressive profiling. You can configure your forms to hide questions once your lead answers them, and replace them with new questions. As a result, you'll be gathering a bit more about each contact with each repeat conversion.

This will be good fuel for your lead scoring algorithm and an easy way to arm your sales team with more information about marketing generated leads. If you haven't set up progressive profiling on your forms yet, it's very easy. Just get into your form editor and click the "smart" icon next to each field you want to make progressive. Then, add additional fields in the "queued questions" section. When a lead who already has the top information filled out comes to the form, they'll get the queued questions instead. And that means more info for you.

Show your best face to the world

When prospects see your marketing, in many cases you’re introducing yourself to them. It’s your first impression, and if it’s not on point, it could be your only impression. Getting all the screws tight before your landing page, email, or web content goes live is critical. Use the tools available to you to optimize all your marketing content. It could make or break a sale.