Here's How You Will Know You Are On The Right Path!
Upwards of 167,000 businesses are using HubSpot to scale their marketing activities, showcasing the immense popularity of not just HubSpot marketing software, but also the marketing transformation happening across diverse companies. No longer are these businesses content with differing marketing activities happening in silos and a manual process to track marketing deliverables. In a world where data is fast becoming the new currency and a key driver of meaningful business outcomes, a platform like the Marketing Hub is giving businesses the benefit of not only a single source of truth for all their marketing data but also acting as the marketing nerve center of their business, from where all marketing activities can be implemented, monitored, and measured.
This is why you and many other marketers are using Marketing Hub and are at different stages of maturity when leveraging its potential. But here’s the million-dollar question? Are you doing it right? Two critical pillars for evaluating the ROI from Marketing Hub are Marketing ROI and TCO. But these need to be approached strategically.
A Strategic Approach To Marketing With Marketing Hub
According to Statista, the global customer relationship management software market size is all set to reach US$79.40bn in 2023. This is a huge number, but it doesn’t tell us whether businesses are getting the needed ROI. For that to happen, they must approach the implementation of marketing software with a long-term outlook and benchmark its use with clear, pre-determined deliverables.
This must be done by identifying the gaps and the cost of their existing marketing strategy and processes. For e.g., lack of productivity, high cost per lead, lower customer acquisition, and increased licensing cost are some weaknesses that can be identified in a marketing process. While adopting and leveraging software such as the Marketing Hub, its efficacy can be measured by its capacity to address these weaknesses.
Businesses and their marketing teams often forget why they deploy a marketing platform in the first place. They focus on getting the job done rather than measuring the platform's efficiency. As a result, ROI is forgotten, which can harm the marketing strategy over the long term.
Measuring Marketing Hub ROI
So how does one evaluate the ROI of the Marketing Hub? To do so, you must measure the tangibles rather than some subjective benefits that you “feel” the platform is bringing to the table.
Let’s take a look at the parameters that you must be measuring:
1. Closed Deals
According to a HubSpot survey of over 1000 sales professionals, 53% said close rates have remained stagnant, while 35% said the close rate has increased from 2021 to 2022. The Hub helps streamline sales pipelines and push the prospect through the sales funnel to turn the prospect into customers. In addition, leveraging the Hub enables you to automate specific time-consuming tasks and stay on top of the deal stages to speed up the sales pipeline.
The Hub also helps accelerate marketing activities and personalise them to turn a prospect into a qualified prospect. The sales team can then implement outreach efforts bolstered by automated data entry and other features to accelerate the sales cycle.
Has your business experienced an uptick in closed deals and a faster sales cycle? This is the question you must ask. Is your marketing and sales team experiencing the benefits listed above? Check the number of closed deals and the time to close a single deal. Compare it with the post-marketing Hub scenario. If there is an improvement, your ROI is on the right track.
2. Increase In Traffic
Between September 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021, HubSpot doubled its blog traffic. Now, it will be fair to say that not every website can double its traffic in a year, but an increase in traffic should be a key ROI measurement parameter when evaluating any marketing software. According to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing 2022 report, around 50% of the websites surveyed received less than or equal to 15,000 unique visitors per month. So, how is your website doing post-Marketing Hub implementation? Has the traffic increased, decreased or stagnated?
Early on in this blog, we talked about pre-determining deliverables that help you measure the ROI of your marketing software. ‘Traffic’ is a critical deliverable. If you have a target for the website traffic you want to achieve, say, six months after Marketing Hub deployment, measure your traffic after six months. If it has reached or surpassed the pre-set figure, then the Hub is delivering returns. Otherwise, you will need to take steps to optimise its use.
3. Increase In Leads
As someone who is an experienced hand in digital marketing, you will know that your performance is evaluated by the number of leads your marketing campaigns have been able to generate (among many other things). So why not assess Marketing Hub’s performance in the same manner?
You are using the Hub to make your life as a marketer easy, become more efficient, and generate more leads. Can you optimise the potential of features such as contact management, email marketing, marketing automation, lead monitoring and more to boost lead count? Don’t just focus on Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs); monitor Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Also, find out how soon does an MQL turn into an SQL? A better lead count than pre-marketing Hub days is a clear ROI pointer.
4. Better Customer Experience
This parameter can appear subjective but isn’t. According to McKinsey, improving customer experience can boost sales by 2% to 7 % and profitability by 1% to 2 %. You will realise whether you have improved customer experience by measuring customer retention and speed of customer acquisition and evaluating the costs of customer acquisition.
Features like customer journey reporting in HubSpot help you improve customer experience by defining goals, creating content paths, tracking customer journeys, and making necessary improvements.
Everything happens through HubSpot, but are you experiencing the benefits of Marketing Hub? It is important to note that an increase in MQL, an SQL, or even a Product Qualified Lead and Service Qualified Lead gives you a tangible idea about the customer experience delivered by your business.
5. Boost In Integrations
Why limit yourself to using the Marketing Hub alone? Instead, unlock its full potential by further integrating a wide collection of tools to grow your business, ROI, and profitability. Whether it's Gmail, Zoom, GoToWebinar, MailChimp, and others, you must be able to pick the integrations you think will benefit your business by further strengthening its marketing and sales activities. Have you seen a marked increase in integrations after Marketing Hub deployment? If yes, your ROI is on the right track.
6. Revenue Growth
Some companies have experienced a 600% revenue growth after HubSpot deployment. That is massive, and probably not everyone can achieve such growth. But your business’s revenue figures must be tracked after the deployment of Marketing Hub. If there is an increase, you must align those figures with the improvements the Hub brought to the table and their impact on business revenue. E.g., faster sales cycles and more closed deals directly impact business revenue.
7. Augmenting Marketing Efforts
Marketing Hub acts as your single source of marketing data. It helps you automate critical, repetitive marketing tasks and improve the efficiency of your marketing campaigns. It empowers and improves your marketing efforts, enabling you to realise tremendous marketing value.
Therefore, knowing whether your marketing team has become more productive after implementing the platform is essential. This can be gauged by comparing the number of marketing initiatives/campaigns before Hub deployment and the number after deployment. But a quantitative improvement is just half the battle won. Check whether the quality of the campaigns has improved as well, based on the outcomes.
8. Ease Of Use
There is no steep learning curve associated with this platform. The onboarding process is enough to get you started and the platform is such that you will keep improving your ability to use the various features, the more you use them.
And, if you do have some issues cropping up, the HubSpot customer service team is just a call/email away to address any issue. Or even better, a HubSpot solutions partner is an ideal go-to choice.
It is therefore important that you honestly review your ability to use HubSpot and achieve expected deliverables. If you find it difficult to use, you are probably not using this platform correctly. Pick a HubSpot solutions partner who can help you leverage the platform.
Measuring Marketing Hub TCO
Now that you have worked out the parameters for calculating HubSpot ROI, it is time to look at the TCO. The job of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is to support your marketing efforts and accelerate and improve marketing and sales outcomes. However, it plays another role.
1. Operational Efficiency And Cost Saving
If used correctly, it can result in operational efficiencies, leading to tremendous cost savings. Businesses that want to work with leaner marketing teams can benefit from marketing automation to work efficiently with smaller teams. This lowers operational expenses by a long way.
2. Consolidation
What’s more, if your marketing department is working in silos and looking for better collaboration by consolidating marketing activities and bringing it under one person or team, Marketing Hub acts as the ideal consolidator. Thus, marketing actions happen more seamlessly, driving improved budget control and efficiencies which also brings down costs. Also, it is available as a subscription-based model, wherein you only pay for the tools you will use, bringing down the TCO.
3. Time Saving
At the same time, it acts as a huge time saver. Where earlier, a lot of precious time was eaten up in repetitive mundane activities such as email creation, managing email send as a part of a long-running campaign, data collection and more, the use of Marketing Hub helps you leverage automation for such activities and thus save time. This platform also offers key insights into customer behavior and campaigns to deliver more value, such easily available intelligence also saves a lot of time, wherein you can execute the learning from marketing intelligence quickly and meaningfully. The question is, are you seeing your marketing man-hours delivering more value in the form of improved productivity? If yes, then you are essentially recovering the costs of using this tool.
More importantly, the fact that it is so easy to deploy and use means a short time to value. Marketers can start realising the benefits of Marketing Hub almost immediately upon use. It also drives better marketing and sales alignment (Marketing Hub + Sales Hub), which means your teams work in synergy to drive results.
All the benefits of Marketing Hub, together, deliver the kind of returns that keep lowering its TCO.
Optimising Marketing Hub ROI and TCO
If you have read through the various ROI parameters and how Marketing Hub reduces TCO and wondering why you aren’t experiencing these advantages, you must not be using this platform correctly. It is time to optimise.
It might be time to evaluate the settings and configurations of the Hub to see whether they have been done right or need some correction. Also, if you think there are team members who cannot use HubSpot right because they weren’t a part of the typically thorough HubSpot onboarding process, you can enlist the help of specific HubSpot training programs. This will help you and your team better understand and use certain features that you otherwise might not be using, thus limiting HubSpot's ROI.
It might be time to evaluate the settings and configurations of the Hub to see whether they have been done right or need some correction. Also, if you think there are team members who cannot use HubSpot right because they weren’t a part of the typically thorough HubSpot onboarding process, you can enlist the help of specific HubSpot training programs. This will help you and your team better understand and use certain features that you otherwise might not be using, thus limiting HubSpot's ROI.
To Conclude
If you are using Marketing Hub in 2024, know that you need to be more ROI-driven than ever before. As marketing budgets are cut and there is a focus on cost optimisation, Marketing Hub can empower your marketing efforts. But ensure you are leveraging its potential to the utmost by having one eye on the ROI and another on TCO.
Are you on the lookout for a HubSpot solutions partner who can help you make the most of your Marketing Hub? TransFunnel, a HubSpot accredited partner can do this and more for you. Connect with us
