9 Benefits of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Software for Manufacturers

Whether you're a marketing professional or a business executive, you've probably heard us mention marketing automation software. We've been talking about it for more than a decade, but today's innovations are more impactful than ever.

As a Platinum-certified HubSpot Agency Partner, TMC Digital Media is committed to the benefits that marketing (and sales and service) automation can provide. Let's walk through the top nine now to make sure manufacturing companies like yours are taking full advantage of the HubSpot marketing automation software platform.

1) Leverage Buyer Personas

Assuming you have been taking the time to map out on paper what your ideal customers look like, where they go for information, and what challenges they face - what do you do with them now?  

Buyer personas help marketers create the ideal content strategy and campaigns to drive their leads through the buyer's journey. HubSpot allows a marketer to store, reference, and ask new visitors what kind of buyer persona they are. Once we know a visitor/lead's buyer persona, we can nurture them down the right content path to become a sales-qualified lead automatically. 

2) Optimize Keywords

Keyword research is essential to getting found on the web. Once you have identified hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords, how do you determine how your content ranks? How do you optimize your blog posts, landing pages, and key website pages? 

HubSpot's SEO Marketing Software provides direct insight to help companies build authority in search with tools that help you plan your SEO strategy, optimize your content, and measure ROI.

3) Track Marketing Campaigns

Think blogs, landing pages, thank you pages, forms, emails, social media posts, and traditional print. How do we track these individual tools and tie them all back to a single campaign to measure results?  

Set up and track campaigns in HubSpot. Determine whether a print ad outperforms a digital ad by viewing the number of visits, conversions, and net new leads. Need to determine which blog post or email is performing better than the others? Analyze the most important data for your campaign to determine what's working and where to double down.

4) Use Sales & Marketing Intelligence

As your website visitors engage with you online by self-identifying and filling out forms, HubSpot collects this intel in specific fields. Having all of this marketing and sales intel available allows marketers to target specific lists of current and future customers with the most relevant additional content.

Remember, the prospect/customer has all the power. With one click, they can unsubscribe from your list, and they'll never hear from you again. Do you know who is on your website and what content they are interested in? Maybe it's time to leverage this data, and HubSpot can help make that happen.

5) Personalize

Marketing to your buyer personas is all about trust. After you provide valuable content to a prospect that causes some form of engagement, it's time to get that visitor back to your website for additional content of value. How? Personalization. One way to get them back is by sending them a targeted, personalized email.  

Using HubSpot Smart Forms, content, and workflows, marketers can determine the visitor's buyer persona, their current challenge, and where they are in the buyer's journey since this intel is collected on the backend. Take email, for example. A follow-up email using their email and company name can be sent to the contact thanking them for reading a particular post or downloading a particular offer and guiding them to the next article (i.e., case study, success story). Doing so only increases the chances for this email to be read and action to be taken.

Are you personalizing your emails and content for your current and future customers?    

6) Get the Most Out of Social Media

Social media management can be time-consuming. A marketing manager has to schedule daily posts (sometimes up to 10+ times on Twitter), reply to followers, listen to what's going on in their social world, and drive leads from their social followers.  

HubSpot provides a suite of social media tools to schedule and manage posts, even directly from your Chrome browser. You can set up keywords to follow and track activity across your important platforms to ensure a prompt reply. Most importantly, you can track how many visitors, leads, and customers you acquire from your social media efforts. What social media tools is your company using? And how much are you spending on them? Maybe HubSpot could provide a more impactful solution.

7) Send (Only) Qualified Leads to Sales

It's marketing's job to pass the most qualified sales leads to your sales team, right? Assuming your company has defined what a sales qualified lead is, HubSpot can track the Lifecycle Stages of the lead process.  

Once a lead is labeled an SQL, it is ready to be shared with sales. All of the visitor's website/content history collected over time is then shared with sales as well. Marketers can set up HubSpot to automatically label leads as SQLs based on various triggers, such as answering 'yes' to the question, "Are you ready to speak with your local sales rep?"

Is your marketing team sending the most qualified leads to sales? If not, why?

8) Close the Loop and Measure ROI

One of the biggest challenges for any manufacturer is measuring its return on investment in marketing campaigns. Think about all the money spent on tradeshows—hundreds of thousands of dollars because you HAVE to be there. How much of your marketing budget is allocated to print campaigns? How much are you spending on blogging, social media, email marketing, and other inbound marketing methods?

Now ask the question, "Am I able to determine how many customers we have closed (that have bought our product/service) because of tradeshows, print, inbound, and other marketing dollars spent?"

The HubSpot platform allows marketers and executives to track marketing campaigns and determine exactly how many net new leads and customers they have acquired. Leadership can then determine which campaigns are working better than others and adjust their budgets accordingly to meet specific goals.   

Do you know the ROI of all that money you spend on marketing? HubSpot can help.

9) Share Data Across All Business Units with CRM Integration

Another equally important challenge for factories is sharing marketing, sales, and post-sales data/intel with all of the necessary business units. Does your service team have direct access to customer data? How about your salesperson who is about to call an existing client? Do they know of the support issue and whether it was resolved before potentially walking into a firestorm? How do we keep everyone on the same page? If you use the FREE HubSpot CRM, all data seamlessly syncs between the marketing and sales sides.

There is still a lot for marketers, sales, and executives to figure out in order for manufacturers to continue cost-efficient growth. Think of HubSpot as the vehicle that will help get us all there. However, someone has to know how to drive this vehicle, which is why manufacturers are looking to tap into TMC Digital Media's expertise.