It's no secret, the marketers who get ahead today are hyper-focused on the customer experience. Experience-driven marketing puts your customers at the center of everything you do as a marketer.
There's a good chance you've heard of HubSpot's flywheel model--attract, engage, and delight. Sound familiar? When focused on the customer experience, marketing attracts and feeds into sales. Sales engages and feeds into service. Service delights and feeds back into marketing. And all of this is only possible when the customer is at the center, managed by a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM).
Leveraging your CRM is the secret to experience-driven marketing. Experience-driven marketing isn't just a buzzword—it's your key for growth. Forrester's research found that companies who said they were focused on experience grew 40% faster and increased customer lifetime value by more than 60% versus those who weren't.
Very few marketers have all of their tools and tactics tightly integrated into a CRM—which often leads to disjointed customer experiences, siloed data, and an inability to know what's working. This is why we love HubSpot—their integrated Marketing and Sales Hubs plus website Content Management System are all part of their CRM.
HubSpot gives our team a unified view of the customer touch points, which allows us to create truly personalized experiences across all channels and to help us properly measure our success as marketers. How do we create these experiences? We analyze data to customize and fine tune messages by following three parallel paths to Customer Relationship Management Success.
A CRM Helps You Personalize Your Marketing Efforts
Rooting your marketing in a CRM also lets you create personalized experiences across every channel. Personalization continues to be the holy grail for delivering a great experience. In this hyper-competitive environment, it's harder than ever to win attention--and we all know the more you personalize, the greater your chances are of being noticed.
What does real personalization look like? Real personalization is when the content on your site changes, recommending content that your visitor hasn't read yet. Or, when that visitor has shown interest in one topic, you show them an offer that's related. Or, when you have CTAs for customers and different ones for prospects. Or, when the chatbot on your site remembers not only their name but who their sales rep is too. All of this is possible through CRM-driven marketing.
There Are Three Paths to CRM Success
- Segment--ensure prospects hear a message suited to their needs
- Contextualize--explain in clear terms why it's useful
- Personalize--make them feel valued, and even loved
1. Segment
The average consumer is bombarded by promotional messaging and sees anywhere between 5,000-1,000 advertisements per day. Think about the last time you were relaxing and browsing on your phone, maybe doing a bit of online shopping, checking in on social media, reading the news. How many irrelevant adverts did you see?
“Today only - 50% of all organic aloe vera & chili peanut butter cups!”
“Doors, doors, doors! Get your doors from Acme doors! Big doors, small prices!”
“Crypto, something or other.”
We bet this week alone you’ve closed down at least one web page because the advertising ruined the online experience for you. But there’s a bigger danger for marketers lurking in the internet shadows than angry prospects. Something much scarier… apathy!
When your consumer doesn’t feel like your messaging has direct relevance to their life at that moment, they’ll tune out. This is why a CRM is vital to modern marketing. If you don’t understand your customer, you can’t give them the content they need when they need it in a way that works for them.
But the good news is you already have the answer to the problem in your marketing arsenal--the data in your CRM. From that data, you can isolate specific groups of customers by wants, needs, and readiness to buy.
Let's dive into HubSpot's Marketing Hub. Here's how you can take action...
- Use HubSpot Lists to Segment Your Data
Lists are a great way to isolate segments of your database by any data point you hold. It can be focused on contact (who they are), company (where they work), or activity (what they’re doing) properties and they can even constantly update to suit changing data fields in real-time. In minutes, you can build a list of all contacts in the third month of their current contract - would they benefit from a useful upsell to complement their existing package?
How about targeting every prospect that’s visited your pricing web page more than once in the last 30 days by sending them a discount code? Obviously, the same messaging isn't going to work on both of those two groups. But with a small amount of thought, each will get messaging they’re likely to welcome because it solves a specific problem they have. - Create Manually Tracked Custom Behavioral Events
Manually tracked custom behavioral events enable you to define and track events that are unique to your business. Custom behavioral events can be tied to contact properties, which you can then use across HubSpot's tools. Manually tracked events use the analytics API, and require a developer to set up.
This is a tool available in HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise that allows you to track more advanced analytics on your website or from external third-party apps to gain richer context about the full customer journey. Want some help using this tool? Contact us.
2. Contextualize
Every buyer for every product must pass through the three key buying stages.
- Awareness
- Education
- Consideration
Depending on your product or service, those stages often vary. A thirsty person on a hot day will travel from Awareness to Decision about buying a cold drink faster than a project manager looking at new forecasting software for a global Software as a Service business. One is made in minutes, the other could be months. Although while the journey may change, one fundamental remains consistent throughout: consumers need specific buying stage-specific content before they can make a decision.
Think about it--before a project manager becomes aware your forecasting software even exists, they first need to either experience or recognize they have a problem: the pain caused by poor planning tools. Then, with a problem to solve, they will look for a solution which could be a number of options ranging from integrating a new tool right through outsourcing the entire problem.
How can you contextualize using HubSpot?
- Build Campaign Triggers That Are Linked To The Buyer's Journey
Consider the content below that was created for buyers at each stage of the journey. Triggering emails and messages for the prospect that are linked to where they find themselves in the buyer’s journey will ensure that content is relevant to their needs. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and ask yourself what they need at each stage of their journey to purchase.
- Awareness:
Blog: Why Project Managers never have enough hours in the day
- Education:
Guide: 10 ways to become a more effective Project Manager.
- Consideration:
Case Study: why company X chose our technology to solve their forecasting problem
By labeling prospects in your CRM depending on their customer journey, you can ensure they see suitable messaging for their journey. Like you’re probably unlikely to propose marriage on a first date, you also don’t want to bombard a prospect with technical data when they’ve only just discovered they have a problem. Keep sending well-timed, useful pieces of information like a small trail of breadcrumbs that draw the buyer in rather than forcing your product on them too soon.
By segmenting your audience, you can ensure they receive relevant, contextually relevant sales messaging to nurture prospects and improve convention rates. - Use HubSpot Smart Content to Contextualize your Messaging at Scale
HubSpot Smart content allows you to create different content based on a set of rules. Your emails, landing pages, and CTAs can display differently depending on what is known about a prospect or contact. For example, rather than taking time to manually send context-specific content to prospects, you can adapt your HubSpot pages to react to their needs instead. You can use the data in your CRM to show Awareness, Education, or Consideration related content depending on their needs. This allows you to tailor content to the stage of the buyers’ journey.
By understanding which prospects need to see your messaging, you reduce admin, boost conversion rates and drive more revenue with less effort.
3. Personalize
You can use HubSpot to personalize sales messaging on any standard or custom properties (the various data points you collect on contacts). But effective personalization doesn’t just mean greeting somebody through email by name. It may have been disruptive fifteen years ago, but the modern consumer is both tech and data-savvy. Modern personalization means sending relevant messaging in a timely fashion using the right language, tone, and subject matter.
Imagine this: receiving an email greeting you by name. Nice, but you’ve already had four others doing the same that morning alone. You can spot an automated email by now. But what about four weeks before the renewal for your company-wide HR software is up for review, you receive a timely message specific to your HR management problem?
The power of personalization can be shown by the following example: you’ve started a small business in the last 6 months and you receive a persuasive message from an invoice management software vendor on the perils of not completing your tax returns in time?
You want your prospects to feel a sense of serendipity. Ultimately we know it was effective CRM management because you created a HubSpot workflow to message either HR managers one month before their next renewal date or small business owners who’ve set up shop in the last year. But prospects will feel a connection with your brand because the message is aimed at their needs at the right time.
Where contextualizing ends and personalization starts can be a grey area, so it’s probably easier to think of it like this:
- Segmentation--To whom do we want to speak?
- Contextualization--What are we going to say?
- Personalization--How are we going to say it?
Contextualization ensures you don’t torpedo a conversion by going too hard too soon, but personalization ensures the prospect feels you’re speaking directly to them at the time they’re most likely to want to hear your message. Contextual communications should be personal without being too intensely personal that it comes across as overbearing. Clients want personalized information that feels helpful and offers value when they need it.
We've covered a lot here, but if you need more info or a little hand-holding, we're a HubSpot-certified agency with decades of experience, and we'd be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.
So if you...
- are interested in learning more about creating an amazing experience for your prospects and customers, or
- want to know how to get the most out of your HubSpot CRM,
And, if you're a DIY type, check out our HubSpot classes:
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