Hubspot is a complex content marketing tool.
It takes a lot of learning. You’re bound to make some mistakes along the way.
To try to help you not make as many mistakes, I’m going to share the big stuff-ups I made when getting started with Hubspot.
This blog post will teach you what not to do and give you some actionable advice of what you should do.
Here’s the first mistake…
#1. Targeting too many buyer personas
How many buyer personas do you have?
When getting started with Hubspot, you’ll be tempted to start segmenting all your landing pages, emails and calls to action based on buyer personas.
Makes sense, right? You want your strategy to be as targeted as possible.
Wrong. This is a big mistake.
I went down this track when getting started at R&G Technologies. It really overcomplicated our whole setup and after a couple of weeks of trying to make it work, my Hubspot consultant recommended just focusing on the one persona.
It’s easy to get lost when setting up your inbound and content strategies in Hubspot. When getting started, you should focus your energy on nailing one persona. You’ve already got your hands full, so why overcomplicate things?
#2. Getting too complicated with lists
Are your lists complicated? Do you have lots of lists that you probably don’t need?
I had the same problem. I had 48 lists – one for each buyer persona, challenge and stage in the buyer’s journey. We had four buyer personas, four key challenges and three buyer’s journey stages.
That’s a lot of lists.
It’s too many.
As you can see above, there are so many lists. Focus primarily on one buyer persona to start with…
When getting started, you need to keep things simple; don’t overcomplicate lists. This advice comes from my Hubspot consultant and is related to the previous point. I recommend you only focus on one buyer persona and not so much on the key challenges.
Why? Because the reality is, your buyer persona is probably experiencing most of the challenges, so there’s no real need to segment at this stage unless you have hundreds of leads.
In the early days, you only needed seven lists:
- Buyer Persona #1 Awareness
- Buyer Persona #2 Consideration
- Buyer Persona #3 Decision
- Other Awareness
- Other Consideration
- Other Decision
- Weekly or Daily Email Update
I can hear your big sigh of relief.
This takes a lot of the complication out of your inbound and content strategies, right?
#3. Creating too many forms – keep them simple and only use 3 or 4
There are a number of ways you can create forms and push data into lists and workflows. A mistake lots of beginners make is they create different forms for every list.
So, using the example above, if we had seven lists, add in three different landing pages and you might think you need 19 different forms.
While yes, you can do this, it’s not best practice. As per the Hubspot best practice I was taught by my consultant, you only need four forms in that scenario:
- Awareness stage form
- Consideration stage form
- Decision stage form
- Email update form
Why?
Because you can use Hubspot forms to segment data and pass it automatically to lists and workflows.
Let’s explain this with an example I recently had.
To add new contacts to lists, use smart lists that pull new leads from a specific form, which also meet criteria based on contact property.
To add new contacts to workflows, you can pull in new leads from forms, based on which landing page they submitted them from. So, you only get the leads that are from specific pages.
Makes things easier, doesn’t it?
#4. Creating campaigns around core challenges
Does your strategy revolve around a core challenge or a buyer persona?
I previously was segmenting my whole strategy around what I called “four challenge channels” that our buyers were experiencing.
This was complicated because it meant our strategy had to be segmented around these challenges. Every challenge had to be segmented across every buyer persona. It was creating double the work.
Yes, it would mean the campaigns would be super-targeted and relevant, but when getting started it was confusing.
My Hubspot consultant suggested that I focus the campaign around buyer personas first, and then challenges.
This was a great idea and meant that we could focus on one persona first and foremost, and get that campaign out. Once we were comfortable with that process, we could start rolling out campaigns around other personas.
This relieved a lot of headaches. I can’t tell you how much this one piece of advice has helped us set up Hubspot effectively to drive new, targeted leads.
The reason why this is a good way to approach your strategy is because most of your buyer personas will be experiencing a number of challenges. It’s too targeted to focus on one – you actually miss out on a lot of extra value by ignoring the other challenges.
Provided you did your buyer persona research correctly, each customer in that segmented list should, in theory, have a number of challenges they are experiencing – not just one.
Once you are comfortable rolling out your first campaign around one persona, you can easily replicate it for other personas.
A practical example of this is what we’re doing at R&G Technologies. We are rolling out a campaign for not-for-profits now… and once that’s done, we’ll start the next campaign for professional services.
Follow best practices and avoid these mistakes
Learn from my mistakes and use best practices that are recommended by Hubspot consultants.
Hubspot consultants have the experience of working with thousands of companies; you can trust them to show you what works and what doesn’t.
Since we’re all human, it takes time to learn and master new marketing technologies.
Take the advice in this blog post, combined with the best practices, and avoid these common mistakes.
Over to you:
What mistakes do you see Hubspot users making? Have I missed any obvious ones?
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