Running a small business is no joke. You may experience sleepless nights, worries about keeping your pipeline full, and wondering how to get everything done on a limited budget. And while there are certain bells and whistles that may not be necessary right now, everyone needs efficient ways to conduct marketing, sales, and customer service.
Regardless of whether or not you have a department for each of these elements or three people running the show, HubSpot can streamline processes and help you attract the right audience, nurture them until they’re ready to become customers, and help you keep them long-term with an extraordinary customer experience.
There are many reasons why HubSpot is the all-in-one platform that’s also a panacea for your small business challenges.
Depending on whether you’re a startup or have been around the block a few times, your contacts list may vary in length. Two things remain certain across the board, though: You want to scale, and you don’t want anyone to fall through the cracks.
HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) software is excellent for small businesses, because (a) it’s free, and (b) it keeps your contacts organized and segmented based on their specific categories. For example, qualified leads, existing customers, former customers, vendors, partner agencies, leads who went MIA, etc…
This makes it a lot easier for you to find all information in one centralized location, and to tailor your communications to each of these categories based on what’s relevant to them. Being relevant = more engagement.
In addition, since the CRM stores all contact’s data, you can view their entire history with your business: prior communications, previous purchases, and any customer service issues. No need to repeat stories or put them on hold while you try to figure out what’s going on and how to best help them.
Not everyone who makes contact with your business is ready to buy. Maybe they’re just online browsing, or doing preliminary research, or comparing different vendors to choose the one they find most appealing.
A great way to stay on their radar — and to stand out from the competition — is to send them regular communications. But not just run-of-the-mill annoying marketing emails. HubSpot enables you to nurture them by sending them personalized and helpful communications that can solve short-term issues for them (e.g. infographics, video tutorials, or even a short listicle that addresses something they’re facing).
This helps create brand awareness and you’ll be top of mind when they’re ready to move along their buyer’s journey.
Speaking of lead nurturing, HubSpot's marketing hub comes with easy-to-use email templates with CTA creators and A/B testing to help you determine what kind of messaging your readers are more likely to engage with. You can also develop email marketing strategies, create targeted drip campaigns, and send tailored communications to your segmented contacts. And once you send them, you can track their performance, such as open rates and clickthrough rates.
As a small business owner, you’re already ultra busy wearing too many hats. HubSpot makes your life easier by automating communications based on user triggers you can preset on their workflows feature. Someone subscribed to your blog? Automatic Thank You email. Someone abandoned their cart? Automatic reminder that they need this item ASAP and it may sell out.
You set it and forget it… until your phone starts ringing because a lead received an automated communication that got them to act.
If you hired someone to take care of sales (or if you have a small sales team), it’s always good practice to provide them with all the resources they need to do their jobs effectively. This can be playbooks, answers to common apprehensions, product or service descriptions, knowledge bases, and/or how to identify upsell opportunities. HubSpot lets you create a resource library so that your sales people have all the information they need, right when they need it to close that deal.
Customer service is the backbone of every business. In fact, a significant portion of consumers are willing to pay more for better customer service. So it’s crucial for you to be proactive about how to be that company that exceeds their expectations. HubSpot’s service hub has a help desk that automatically creates tickets. You can also route them to the appropriate individual, organize them in order of priority, and integrate social media channels so that communications are directed to your HubSpot inbox.
And to give your customers more control over their accounts with you, you can also set up customer portals, where they can review project status, past communications, and anything else pertaining to their relationship with your business.
In addition to the administrative elements, HubSpot can help you optimize your business website in several ways.
The platform comes with many themes and templates so you can choose something that matches your brand. You can also create landing pages and calls to action with drag-and-drop functionalities and CTA creators. No coding knowledge required. And if you’re not sure how to even get started, you can always reach out to a HubSpot partner agency to help you implement the features you want to use, or to manage your tasks for you.
Inbound marketing is an ideal way to attract the right audience. By creating helpful and educational content regularly, you increase the likelihood that people will find you when they enter a related query into online search bars. HubSpot’s content management system (CMS) makes it easy to draft, edit, and publish content; and it comes with built-in search engine optimization (SEO) recommendations — something that many other platforms usually offer only through third-party plug-ins.
Once you have a good business website, you want to keep people coming back. But how can you entice them to give you their email address for you to keep in contact with them? The answer is by offering them valuable free content in exchange for their information. These are referred to as lead magnets, and can you can create them in any format your buyer personas would enjoy the most — ebooks, guide books, white papers, research reports, worksheets, webinars, or templates, to name a few. And in addition to help you grow your email list, they help you establish yourself as an industry expert. And you can create all of them with HubSpot's very user-friendly CMS.
Every quarter, you have different goals. Maybe you want more website traffic, or want people to enroll in your new webinar, or download an ebook you wrote, or you want to track a marketing campaign’s performance. You can set up analytics dashboards and customize them so they look the way that’s easiest for you to read and analyze; so you can then make data driven decisions based on what works — and modify what doesn’t.
Get a Free HubSpot Demo
If you’d like to see how different HubSpot hubs and features can best align with your specific business goals, get a free demo on how to use the platform. You can ask us questions about unique needs you may have, and get an overview of how to move forward with confidence when selecting a HubSpot plan.