The Dirty Little Secret Plaguing Legacy HubSpot Customers

Note: This post first appeared on Quintain Marketing's blog. View the original post here.

Are you a HubSpot customer? Did you purchase HubSpot a few years ago? If you've been on HubSpot for two years or more, my guess is that if I looked "under the hood" of your HubSpot portal, what I would find is a big, fat mess! Too many forms, all kinds of outdated landing pages, contacts that haven't been assigned to a persona, old calls to action, etc. I could go on and on...

This is a "dirty little secret" that many of HubSpot's oldest customers are experiencing. I know, because as an agency owner, I've been in the back end of countless customer portals and I've seen this problem more than I'd like to admit. Unfortunately, cleaning up this mess is complicated and most HubSpot customers don't have a clue where to begin. 

HubSpot has changed a lot over the years and while most of those changes have resulted in massive improvements for us as customers, many have also made it difficult to keep our marketing automation assets in order.

In my video blog, I'm sharing Quintain's experience (hint: we were the cobbler's child and our portal was a mess too!) and what we've been doing to update our HubSpot portal and clean up the mess.

Watch this quick video (just over 4 minutes long!) to learn why long time HubSpot customers face a unique challenge and how to clean up your HubSpot portal...

Here's What You Missed...

Back when we started using HubSpot in 2012, the software not only looked different, it also functioned differently than it does today. As a result, the best practices for using HubSpot have evolved quite a bit. 

For example, when we came onboard, we were taught (by HubSpot) to create a brand new conversion form for every landing page and/or conversion offer. This was important because, at the time, HubSpot used the name of the form that a lead converted on to determine what kind of follow up emails (and other associated activity) to trigger. Now, you can use information about the form and cross-reference that with the landing page that the form is on to trigger email workflows. This has streamlined things quite a bit, and now, best practice is to create just a few forms (starting with one each for the top, middle and bottom of the funnel) and use each of them on multiple landing pages. This makes it easier to ensure you're gathering the most important information about your prospects, making the best use of HubSpot's progressive profiling capabilities, and using forms that support your ability to score your leads.

What does this change have to do with having a messy HubSpot portal? Well, if you're anything like us (and I know a lof you are, because I've seen my fair share of customer portals over the years!), you have tons of forms that were created "back in the day" that need to be replaced with their newer, more streamlined counterparts, but you're afraid to touch them because they might "break" your workflows or cause some other issues that you can foresee with your marketing automation. 

I get it, and the bad news is, forms aren't the only problem. There's all those landing pages you created using old, outdated templates, old call to action buttons scattered throughout your site, etc. The list goes on and on and cleaning up this mess is a massively daunting task. That's why we developed a process for auditing and cleaning up older HubSpot portals.

Here's a quick breakdown of how it works:

1. The process starts with a review of your audience personas and the segmentation questions you're asking. The key is to make sure that these questions are being used in a customer-facing way (ie. in your conversion forms) so that you are able to gather the data needed to effectively segment your database.
2. Next comes your conversion forms. Start by creating three forms - one each for the top, middle and bottom of the funnel - and using these wherever possible to ensure your data is consistent and you can make full use of HubSpot's progressive profiling and lead scoring features.
3. With personas and forms in place, head to the whiteboard and do a content audit. List all of your landing pages and offers and label them as TOFU (top of the funnel), MOFU (middle of the funnel), or BOFU (bottom of the funnel). Then, use the HubSpot page performance tool to find out which of these yields the most leads.
4. Take this data and use it to create conversion funnels. Start with your top performing TOFU offers and map them to a persona. Then, identify logical MOFU and BOFU offers to link these to (and don't be surprised if you identify some gaps in your content at this point). Do this with ALL of your content, and the result will look something like a family tree, but instead of people, you'll have ebooks, webinars, direct sales offers, etc.
5. Once you have your conversion funnels mapped out, its time for a some housekeeping. Create naming conventions for your landing pages and go through and rename all of the pages in your portal so that they conform to these new rules. This makes it much easier to find what you're looking for down the road.
6. Next, swap out the forms on your existing landing pages so that they are aligned with the stage of the buyer's journey (ex. top of the funnel offers should use the TOFU form you created in step 2).
7. Review your workflows to ensure they correspond with the conversion funnels you created in step 4, and at this point, create any new emails that you'll need to complete the workflows.

There are quite a few more steps in this process, but if you get through steps one through seven, you'll be well on your way to a cleaner, more organized HubSpot portal.

Why Should You Bother?

When we first started talking about this issue with our team here at Quintain, one of the biggest questions was whether this was something really worth spending time on. It's a valid question. Undertaking this clean up process is time consuming and we're big believers in putting our effort where it will have the biggest impact on our ability to deliver outstanding service to our customers. Given that our HubSpot portal is something our customers never see, we had to ask ourselves, "why bother?"

The answer to this is grounded in the dynamics driving change in the world of marketing. If you think about the future of marketing - and you do any reading on this topic - you'll see clearly that we are moving in a direction that relies heavily on data. We use data for audience research and segmentation and to evaluate and improve messaging and targeting. Without data, all you've got is gut instinct and that is no way to design and run a marketing campaign.

At its core, HubSpot is really just a big database and if you're database is a mess, you won't be able to extract the full value from it. Keeping it clean and well organized - or in other words, practicing good "data hygiene" - is essential to the success of the modern marketer.

So yes, the answer is that this effort is absolutely worth it.

Is Your Portal a Mess?

We first tested this clean up strategy on our own portal, and had great results. Now we're offering to do the same for you! If you're interested, contact us (well, contact Rich, our Director of Sales) for more information.