Overview

Congratulations on your new HubSpot Marketing Hub Software instance! Now it’s time to get to work by implementing the instance into your RevOps tech stack. Before diving in and setting up your new account, be sure to review this HubSpot Glossary to familiarize yourself with common terms and definitions. Another recommendation is to create a user for the HubSpot Community. This will provide the opportunity to learn and collaborate with a global group of HubSpot users and project managers.

Moving on to the actual implementation! Follow the steps below to build a detailed project plan for your implementation to guarantee success.

Define Project Objectives and KPIs

The first step is to set clear objectives for your HubSpot Marketing Hub implementation by developing a detailed project plan. The best place to start is to revisit the reasons your organization decided to adopt HubSpot. This should include organizational pain points and areas of improvement. From there, we encourage organizations to define project objectives and KPI to measure the success of your implementation project.

Project objectives should be able to measure success of addressing key organization pain points, such as:

• General implementation project objectives such as improving lead conversion or improving platform onboarding and utilization
• Once project objectives are defined, we recommend establishing metrics to define their success. Think: conversion rate, CSAT score and process or user adoption rate.

The objectives listed above are just a starting point. You should define objectives and KPIs for your organization based on your overall project goals. Once you decide on this list, be sure to share with your entire project team to ensure all project members are working towards the same goal.

Develop Project Plan

Once the project objectives and KPIs have been documented, it’s time to create a full project plan with the key steps to implement your HubSpot instance. There are some key areas to focus on during this phase which are outlined below.

Data Cleanup and Migration

Part of a HubSpot implementation may involve migrating data from another MAP or other external data sources. If this is the case within your implementation, some things to consider:

• Determine which data needs to be migrated and confirm the number of records are within the contractual agreements of your subscription. If you go over the allowable marketing contacts, then you could incur an increase in costs at your next billing cycle.
• Once data is identified to migrate, be sure to cleanse the data: clean up duplicates, normalize the data and organize into a format for migration. One caveat here is if you are integrating with a third party CRM (ie: SalesForce) speak with your data teams to determine which system is best to import.
• If connecting your instance to an external CRM, configure your sync settings in the connect app area to reduce risks of creating bad data.

Marketing Hub Setup and Administration

During this stage, as a super admin, you will configure important parts of your instance. Completing this step will ensure your HubSpot instance is configured correctly for marketing efforts. HubSpot documentation does a great job of outlining the steps but we have organized some quick links and descriptions below to get you started:

• Account Setup: customize your instance based on your organization’s requirements, this includes inviting users, setting instance timezone, connecting third party apps. Completing your account setup should be one of the first steps. It should be noted that account settings will be applied to the entire instance for all users.
• Domain Setup: arguably one of the most important steps, configuring your domain appropriately will support email deliverability success and brand reputation
• Automation / Workflows: HubSpot automation is driven by workflows that are used to translate your business processes to technical automation. Workflows should be built and tested to support your marketing initiatives.
• Marketing Tool Configuration: next up is creating assets within HubSpot to build marketing campaigns that support your contact generation and nurturing strategy. This includes items such as: templates, forms, ads and social posts – to name a few.
• Scoring: configuring HubSpot scoring properties has many benefits, including: prioritizing contacts, improving sales handoff efficiency and aligning marketing and sales efforts.
• Segmentation/Lists: grouping contacts by specific attributes provides you the ability to better target and personalize marketing campaigns, also adhering to compliance regulations
• Reports: when ready you may also want to build some custom reports in your instance to analyze different data sources and overall marketing campaign effectiveness

Marketing Hub Training and User Enablement

As mentioned above, we recommend joining the HubSpot user community for the opportunity to learn and collaborate with other users. In addition to the community, the HubSpot Academy has a wealth of resources to learn about the Marketing Hub as well as other Hubs in the HubSpot ecosystem.

When we have worked with customers to enable training, we have found that having dedicated training folders in the instance with reduced permissions is also a helpful strategy. It provides users the ability to use the tool without cluttering the production area of the tool. This also supports one of the key objectives of user adoption.

Conclusion

Configuring your new HubSpot instance in an organized manner will help ensure your organization is set up for success. There are a number of ways to manage your project plan but we have put together this implementation checklist that you can download and use as a guide.

Please reach out with any questions!