HubSpot is a pretty notorious name in the marketing world. Over the years, we’ve worked with plenty of clients who have leveraged the capabilities of HubSpot, as well as used it for our own sales and marketing efforts. And today, we’re going to let you in on a few trade secrets on how companies can leverage HubSpot to improve their inbound game.

Prospects

While data with Google Analytics can be limited, HubSpot offers more insights that can help your sales and marketing team work and nurture leads. The prospects tool, for example, gives your team insight into the companies that are viewing and engaging with your website. An additional lead stream? Yes please!

How to Up Your HubSpot Game:

• Create and leverage saved filters to refine your prospect lists to match your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona)
• Send these daily prospect reports to your sales team
• Send your sales team revisit notifications for ICP prospects who re-engage with the site for follow up

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal. HubSpot’s lead scoring system allows you to assign value to your leads based on qualifying characteristics and/or actions. Coupled with lists and workflows (more on those tools later), lead scoring offers a powerful way to personalize the user experience and customize messaging across to leads based on where they are in the buying journey.

How to Up Your Game:

Lead scoring in general is a great way to up your HubSpot inbound game.

• Use fit and engagement as the basis for your scoring mechanism and assign values to leads based on sales qualifications as well as marketing triggers. Connect your sales CRM if applicable to assign sales value.

Lists

HubSpot’s list feature may be simple, but it’s a serious game-changer. The tool enables you to segment your audiences in more meaningful ways, which you can then create workflows or reports around. Lists can also be dynamic, so once you set the criteria, any new contact that meets the criteria will be added to the list.

How to Up Your Game:

There are so many possibilities when building lists, far too many to count! But here are a few of our favorite applications:

• Segment your leads by score
• Segment your leads by campaign
• Create dynamic (smart) lists that trigger each time a user fills out a certain form
• Create dynamic (smart) lists that trigger each time a user opts into or out of an email campaign
• So much more!

Forms

We’ve used many different form tools in the past, as well as created custom forms on our own site. What we love about HubSpot forms is their ease of use and the ability to make quick changes and deploy them across your site. HubSpot allows you to take advantage of your biggest online asset (your website) by making lead capture simple and seamless.

How to Up Your Game:

The best use you’ll get out of forms is by personalizing and customizing the user experience and finding ways to make your forms do the work for you. Think beyond your typical form or pop-up and investigate ways you can tailor your forms to users.

• Create pop-ups on your high traffic content pieces that offer a related e-book, whitepaper or upcoming webinar.
• Create pop-ups on long articles and offer the article in PDF format to email to them to read later.
• Create form fields that help qualify your leads for you, so your sales team doesn’t have to. Add in fields for estimated budget and company size to get more information about your leads.

Workflows

There aren’t enough words in our vocabulary to describe how much we love workflows. Again, a simple but very effective HubSpot tool. Workflows allow you to automate tasks, so you can work on marketing strategy and know that HubSpot is working hard in the background. There are so many ways to use workflows, and we are constantly finding new and unconventional ways to use it.

How to Up Your Game:

At the heart of HubSpot lies workflows, which connects all HubSpot features and fuels your sales and marketing efforts. Here are some of our favorite ways to utilize workflows for each of the features above.

Prospects

Use workflows to:

• Send notifications or create tasks within your sales team when qualified prospects visit or engage with your website.
• Send notifications or create tasks when a qualified prospect re-engages with your website or engages multiple times.

Lists

Use workflows to:

• Automate email campaigns based on list membership.
• Send notifications to your sales team when someone is added to a list.
• Create tasks based on list membership.

Lead Scoring

Use workflows to:

• Send notifications to lead owners when a lead score changes.
• Create tasks when a lead score changes.
• Initiate an email drip when a lead score changes.
• Send a lead a resource, reminder or follow up email when a score changes.

Forms

Use workflows to:

• Initiate an email sequence based on a form fill out.
• Create notifications when a user fills out a form.
• Automate thank you emails or short sequences based on form fill outs or downloads.

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WordPress is one of the most commonly used content management systems (CMS) because it is user-friendly and offers the ability to integrate with a variety of useful plugins. We’ve come across several WordPress SEO plugins on different client websites and some of them deserve a shout-out. These are our favorites:

1. Yoast SEO

If you’ve only ever heard of one WordPress SEO plugin, it was most likely Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is widely regarded as the number one WordPress SEO plugin because of its wide range of features for both its premium and free versions. 

Why it stands out:

Free and Premium

• Metadata is easy to view and adjust
• Schema is easy to update for faster indexing and better search visibility
• Duplicate content and metadata are identified for quick fixes
• Full breadcrumb control with options to tag or categorize content
• Readability checks

Premium

• Internal linking suggestions
• Content insights
• Redirect manager
• 24/7 technical support
• Ad-free

The Yoast SEO plugin is a solid choice for agencies and website owners alike. With seamless WordPress integration and an easy-to-use interface, it’s no wonder Yoast SEO tops most lists.

2. All-In-One SEO Pack

All-In-One SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, having been downloaded over 50 million times since 2007. All-In-One SEO Pack has many of the same features as Yoast SEO and is also easy for beginners to use. Some of the advanced features, however, are what really steal the show.

Why it stands out:

• XML Sitemap Support
• Image XML Sitemap Support
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Only free plugin with integration to eCommerce sites
• Translated into 57 languages

All-In-One SEO Pack is a great option for webmasters of all abilities. It can impressively optimize page titles and metadata automatically, so you can spend more time on website health, linking structure, and other optimizations that require more time and analysis.

3. Broken Link Checker

SEO isn’t just about keywords and metadata. Your website needs to be easy to navigate and free of errors in order to gain authority and subsequently rankings. Landing on an empty page or coming across a lot of 404 errors does not provide a quality user experience – and to Google, this is easily identifiable.

Why it stands out:

• Reveals all broken links within minutes
• All changes to broken links are done through the plugin, so you don’t have to go to each individual page
• Monitors comments and custom fields
• Also detects missing images and faulty redirects

Broken Link Checker is an amazing WordPress SEO plugin for staying on top of your website’s health and crawlability. Anything that may confuse a reader or GoogleBOT as they crawl through your site is quickly detected and easy to fix.

4. Rel NoFollow Checkbox

Rel NoFollow Checkbox is a compact WordPress plugin that can help you improve your SEO immensely. Linking is incredibly important to Google as it looks at the quality of the websites you link to and vice versa. Google looks at your outbound links to get an idea about the quality and subsequent authority of your website. If your website has affiliate links, or advertisements, this is a fantastic plugin to use. It simply allows you to add a “rel nofollow” attribute to any of your external links. This will ensure that your links don’t influence the site.

Why it stands out:

• Cuts down on time originally spent sifting through HTML code
• Easy for non-coders
• Excellent tool for affiliate marketers
• Lightweight – installs quickly and doesn’t slow down your website

5. Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is marketed to those who aren’t experts in SEO. It offers SEO insights and functionality without complicated elements. Squirrly SEO really drills into the “content is king” methodology. This WordPress SEO plugin differentiates itself in that it helps you optimize your content for SEO while you write it. Simply type in your article topic and desired keyword, and the plugin will give you additional keyword suggestions and insights as you write.

Why it stands out:

• Real-time feedback and insights for keyword optimization
• Competitor analysis tool
• Content reports that you can send within your organization
• Progress monitoring with a tool that shows recent tweets about your topic
• Bulk SEO settings
• Focus page designation

Squirrly SEO is a great WordPress plugin for websites and businesses that focus a lot on blogging. The focus page option is especially useful for those who aren’t familiar with SEO. When you designate a focus page, the plugin will outline for you the specific actions you need to take to get it to rank higher in the SERPs. This is a huge win for less experienced marketers who want to make sure their most important content performs.

SEO plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great option when building your website. There are so many useful plugins – did we cover your favorite? Visit our SEO & PPC blog for more marketing tips and subscribe to our newsletter for fresh insights.

One of the modern miracles of tech’s omnipresence in our day-to-day lives is the increasing granularity at which marketers can connect with their audiences. We’re speaking, of course, about location data, geo-targeting, and geo-filters which afford marketers the ability to reach a specified audience based on their location.

We’ve all seen these tactics in action before, whether it be plugging in the ubiquitous “best restaurants near me” search query, or simply getting served paid search ads for hotels and restaurants within a specified radius within the very same search results. There is, however, a methodology that small and mid-sized brick-and-mortar businesses can use to take location-based visibility even further. It’s called geofencing.

What Is Geofencing?

Geofencing is a method of establishing invisible geographic boundaries with GPS or RFID (i.e. radio frequency identification).

A business can therefore section off a specified geographic area to only communicate with devices existing within that space. Talk about granularity.

Why Geofencing?

For marketers, geofencing offers an abundance of opportunities to engage an audience that is more likely to convert based on locational convenience. Businesses can serve enticing marketing collateral and ads when a person crosses a virtual threshold.

In addition, brands and agencies alike can pull valuable data like consumer mindsets, sales journeys, and overall data analytics from these activations.

Marketers can glean important insights on customer behavior, furthering the targeting capabilities to drive future sales.

Examples of Geofencing in Action:

• A restaurant sets up a geo-fence in a 2-mile radius surrounding their location offering a complimentary appetizer during slower-than-normal business days of the week.
• An auto dealer (notorious for geofencing by the way) hits you with a significantly lowered interest rate on a comparable vehicle to that you’ve just test driven at a competitor’s dealership.

The idea is to serve messages at the ‘right place and time’ to help drive sales – and it can be very effective.

How Do Geofencing and Geotargeting Differ?

Some marketers use these terms interchangeably; after all, they are quite similar. If you’re looking to target any person in a specific area, then geofencing would be your desired strategy.

If you’re looking to target a specific person in a specific area, geotargeting would make more sense.

Geotargeting vs. Geofencing – The Difference in Action:

Geofencing

• Serving messages to concertgoers at a specific event by using the venue to define the location parameters
• Serving promotional ads to students about deals and discounts at nearby retail shops or restaurants within their university’s town

Geotargeting

• Serving ads to women between the ages of 35-55 within a mile radius of a local boutique

Getting Started with Geofencing

Let’s take a deeper dive into the process required to build a geofence within Google Ads and Facebook – our two favorite platforms for enacting this type of activation.

Setting Up Mobile Google Geofencing Ads

1. First, select the campaign you’d like to adjust and go to the campaign settings. You can geofence on search, display, and YouTube campaigns in Google Ads. You’ll then want to break your location down specifically into the following schema: country > state > city > DMA > metro > zip code > radius.
2. Once this is complete, establish your options within the campaign. These include:

• All countries and territories
• US and Canada
• US
• “Enter Another Location” which will allow you to get more granular with your location targeting (i.e. 20-mile radius of your business, 30-mile radius, etc.).

3. For a local Google geofence, you’ll want to use the last option. From here, you can add or exclude additional geographical parameters based on the target audience at hand. You can even boil it down to kilometers vs. miles to further tighten the targeting parameters.

Pro Tip – Navigate to your campaign settings to ensure that your targeting is set to include users in your specified area only. The default setting targets users who are in, or show interest in your targeted locations, which can include users who are not physically in your desired area.

Setting Up Mobile Geofencing Ads in Facebook

1. Navigate to the audiences dashboard and select the desired targeting location to include/exclude if necessary. If you wish to drill this down to a very specified area, begin by selecting the area you’d like to target, then choose to “drop pin” on the exact location (like a university, downtown district, or office park) that meets your desired parameter.
2. From there, simply select the radius to target that exact location (this can be as granular as a mile and even smaller if needed). You can also exclude radiuses surrounding your desired targeting location by dropping exclusive pins around your geographic parameters to get an even tighter radius.

Test different criteria, like promotion types, days of the week, and time of day to see what really drives sales.

For brick-and-mortar stores, geofencing can be a significant revenue driver, and for larger brands, geofencing can be a great supplement to a more global strategy. Either way, geofencing ads allow marketers to get closer to their customers than ever before – and more importantly, capitalize on convenience to drive more sales.

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