Maximizing HubSpot ROI Through Customer Insights

Improving Your HubSpot ROI: Getting to Know Your Customers

By John McTigueJul 17 /2017

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It’s not uncommon for HubSpot to be viewed as a cure-all marketing platform. However, as many companies discover, it’s not the immediate magical fix they expected. While HubSpot provides the tools to revolutionize your marketing, it takes a few extra steps to truly get the return on investment you expect.

In our first post about improving your HubSpot ROI, we discussed the need to get your plans and goals organized, then make sure your sales and marketing departments were aligned to best achieve those goals. Next, we looked at the importance of having a lean and clean database that would be ready to get the most out of your HubSpot investment as soon as possible.

If you’ve been following along with this series, you’ve already made substantial strides toward HubSpot success—but we aren’t done yet. Up next is a common challenge all sales and marketing professionals face: getting to know your customers.

Why Getting to Know Your Customers is So Important

Though this hopefully feels like an obvious suggestion, understanding your current and prospective customer base is crucial to any successful marketing strategy. Knowing who your buyers are, what they’re looking for and why they need it allows your company to position your products and services with a target audience that is primed and ready to hear your pitch. The right message at the right time to the right person can make all the difference.

And it’s no secret that understanding your customers is essential to generating revenue. In fact, segmented and targeted emails generate 58 percent of all revenue.

You can do everything else right. You can build a beautiful, modern and accessible websiteYou can produce seemingly helpful content. You can launch paid search campaigns and study SEO all day. But none of it will make any difference if it isn’t aligned with clear, accurate and well-developed buyer personas that reflect your customers’ values.

So, how do you get to know your customers? Start with these basic questions.

7 Questions to Help You Get to Know Your Customers

1. Have you interviewed or surveyed your customers?

Again, it’s an obvious suggestion, but you’d be surprised how many companies make getting to know their customers a guessing game. Instead, don’t complicate things — just ask for the information you need.

2. Do you know their pain points and reasons for purchase?

If you don’t know the “why” behind your customers’ purchases, you’ll never know how your product or service can best solve their problem.

3. Do you know why they picked you and not your competitors?

Understanding what differentiates your company from the competition allows you to identify your edge. Once you know which of your qualities set you apart, you can use them to best position your company within the marketplace.

4. Have you created an ideal buyer profile and a set of buyer personas?

Buyer personas do the work of putting your customer traits into character and keeping everyone on your sales and marketing team on the same page. By using the information you discover from your customer research, you can make an ideal buyer profile and set of personas that is accurate and useable.

5. Do you know where they frequent online and what content they consume?

It won’t matter if you’re producing the most helpful content on the internet if no one sees it. Figure out where you can find your current and prospective customers online to ensure they can find you, too.

6. Do you know what keywords and phrases they use in a search for your products?

This knowledge can help you craft content that finds your target audience and speaks directly to their biggest concerns.

7. Do you know what messages and user experience they seek?

More than simply finding your content, you want to make sure your current and prospective customers like what they find. Taking the time to learn what they’re looking for in a user experience helps you check additional criteria off their list.

These questions—and the research that will help you answer them—will put you on the right track to understanding your customers and creating effective buyer personas that you can put to work. When you have a clear understanding of your customers, you can use HubSpot to create more highly targeted—and, therefore, high-converting—marketing campaigns that bring in qualified leads for your marketing team to nurture. And when your sales team has the knowledge they need to better connect with leads, your company stands a better chance at closing more sales and bringing in more revenue. Before you know it, you’ll be seeing a bigger improvement to your HubSpot ROI than you even expected.

But that’s not all. Stay tuned for the next installment in this series: “Getting Your Website Together for Inbound Sales and Marketing.”

Can’t wait? Download the complete eBook, Improve Your HubSpot ROI: 100+ Questions to Ask.

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The Author

John McTigue

With over 30 years of business and marketing experience, John loves to blog about ideas and trends that challenge inbound marketers and sales and marketing executives. John has a unique way of blending truth with sarcasm and passion with wit. You can connect with John via LinkedIn and Twitter.
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