Anyone who’s worked in Marketing Operations knows that Marketing Automation is the name of the game. When done right, marketing automation can help you target prospects with the right messaging at the right time, leading to higher lead conversion, and give your sales team higher quality leads. However, when done wrong, marketing automation can easily become a “batch and blast” tool, causing potential harm to your brand and drying up the lead funnel.

Whether you’ve just taken over as the new Hubspot admin for your company, or your company just purchased Hubspot marketing Hub and you’re looking to get set up – here are 5 steps to get started:

1. Audit Hubspot and compare to your Marketing Strategy

Making a plan may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to dive into tasks without first looking at how it will all work together. How does marketing automation fit into your overall marketing strategy? Will you be building journeys for prospects only or including customers? How will you know if you’re successful? What other tools are in use that might complement the new MAP? Understanding the answers to these questions can help you streamline your Hubspot Marketing Hub implementation and save you heaps of heartache down the road.

2. Set Hubspot Access and Ownership Boundaries

Who will need access to Hubspot in order to help you achieve your goals? Does the whole marketing team need access, or only the users who will be building assets in Hubspot? Does your C-Suite need access, or can you provide insight and reporting another way? This is a great time for you to take note of how many user licenses you have, delete any old or unused user accounts, and ask yourself “what could this person contribute to my marketing efforts by having access to Hubspot?” If you can’t come up with a good answer, better to save the license for someone else.

3. Make a Tracking List of Cross-Team Roles and Responsibilities to Own Hubspot

You now know what your ideal Hubspot looks like, and who you need to help build it out – next it’s time to define ownership of key components. Who will be responsible for working with the website team to install Hubspot’s tracking code and update forms? Who will own building email assets and automation flows inside of Hubspot? And most importantly – who will own connecting Hubspot to your CRM and building out segmentation? You can’t run marketing automation effectively without a strong data foundation.

For example:

• Website Team: Install Hubspot Tracking Code
• Website Team: Update Hubspot Forms (on-going)
• Website Team/MOPs: Build Original Hubspot Email Template
• Website Team/MOPs: Build Original Hubspot Landing Page Template
• Sales Ops: Owning the CRM sync from Hubspot (if applicable)
• Marketing Leadership: Determine top-level Targeting
• MOPs: Translate top-level Targeting into Hubspot segmentations

4. Inventory your Marketing Assets and Content Library; Ensure Assets are Prospect-Facing

Whether your company is brand new to marketing automation or you’re taking over the existing Hubspot instance, chances are you aren’t starting from ground zero. Review what marketing assets are available for you today – have you been sending emails using a different platform? What about content pieces that are currently housed on your website? Partner with your team to find what exists now and what needs to be created (or re-created) in Hubspot. Now is also the time to dig out your branding guide to ensure consistency amongst the assets you’ll be creating.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of assets you’ll need:

• Emails currently active in Marketing Automation Platform
• Landing Pages currently actively in MAP, by URLs
• Premium content assets like whitepapers, PDFs, on-demand videos, or more
• Company branding image assets from your branding guide and asset inventory
• Forms currently active on the WWW website (your core website) as well as subdomains or in-product features
  • Group these by: native forms, embedded forms, or form-posts

5. Turn your Hubspot Audit into a Hubspot Roadmap: Plan your Hubspot Roadmap annually, then assign resources to deliver

Don’t hesitate to take advantage of Hubspot’s expansive content library. Whether you’re looking for help developing your marketing plan, wanting to take a quick course on becoming a Hubspot Admin, or want to review Hubspot’s 2023 Marketing Strategy & Trends Report, there is a plethora of information at your fingertips.

Implementing or revamping your marketing automation tool can be daunting, but you don’t have to go at it alone. Whether you’re configuring a new Hubspot instance, need to audit and clean up an existing instance, or need reporting to show your C-Suite that you are in fact, crushing it, we’re here to help. We’ll bring the best practices, you bring the business problems, and together we’ll get you from Point I-Have-No-Idea-What’s-Going-on-in-There to Point Wow-I-Understand-Marketing-ROI-and-So-Does-My-Boss.