HubSpot Marketing Starter: how to get the most out of it

It is an exciting, yet overwhelming time.

You just signed up for HubSpot Marketing Starter and it is time for you to get that marketing machine rolling for your company. You have so many new tools to play within Marketing Starter, and HubSpot looks pretty simple to use. However, the initial questions start kicking in.

“Where do I start?”

“How do I know I am doing this correctly?”

After working with tons of businesses onboarding to or using Marketing Starter, this can be pretty daunting. There is a lot to do —sending out emails, capturing new contacts from your website, and even creating some new landing pages.

You’re on a new platform that looks easy to use but there is a lot to learn and you want to make sure that you are setting yourself and your team up for success.

This article will go into how you can make sure you are getting the most out of HubSpot Marketing Starter.

Before we do that, let’s first look at what you get with HubSpot Marketing Starter.

What is included in HubSpot Marketing Starter

The first thing to make sure you understand what HubSpot marketing starter will get you and what the limitations are. 

This will help you determine if this is the right tier to actually execute your digital marketing and sales strategy or if you will need to look elsewhere for certain features. Reviewing what is included and what is not, below, can help you do so.

Furthermore, determine what your goals are, who is responsible for what, and a timeline to accomplish your goals. Having a goal in mind and an outcome of using HubSpot in mind will help you understand what success looks like for you and the team.

Some of the highlights included in HubSpot Marketing Starter are:

• Email marketing
• Drag-and-drop landing pages
• List segmentation
• Forms
• Live chat/Bots
• Custom properties
• Reporting

What is not included:

• Blog/Content strategy
• Social media
• Marketing automation
• Smart content

With HubSpot Marketing Starter, you will be really able to start focusing on capturing more qualified leads on your website thanks to landing pages and forms and be able to send more personalized emails to your database with list segmentation.

You’ll also be able to create custom reports to understand what is currently working and what needs more work.

If you are looking to dive deeper into content creation and marketing automation to nurture contacts in HubSpot, however, then it might be work checking out a higher tier.

Ways to get the most out of HubSpot Marketing Starter

If you have determined that Marketing Starter is right for what your company is trying to do or you have already been using Starter and have no intentions of upgrading, then the next step is to make sure you are being smart about how you approach using your portal. 

Keep in mind that since Marketing Starter is the base marketing tier in HubSpot, many of the tips for what you should do in this tier are true for all other marketing tiers in HubSpot as well. And, since Starter is the base tier, I can assume that you are new (or newish) to HubSpot so a lot of these tips will be fairly introductory.

Below are eight ways you can ensure you are getting the most out of your HubSpot Marketing Starter Hub.

1. Educate yourself on the platform

Speaking of educating yourself on the tools, another big thing you will want to do before getting too deep into your portal is to start training yourself and your team on HubSpot and the specific features you unlock with HubSpot Marketing Starter. 

HubSpot and the HubSpot Community do a great job at making sure if you need help, you can most likely find it. 

For new customers, there are onboarding programs with HubSpot, and with HubSpot partners that will help your team get up and running quickly by making sure you understand how to use the features available. These programs and partners can specifically focus on the Marketing Starter tier so the information directly pertains to you and your team.

HubSpot also has their academy which includes many courses and certifications. The best part about the academy is that you can use these materials to later onboard new members, and there are many different types of courses for specific tools, inbound marketing as a philosophy, and much more.

The HubSpot knowledge base is another area where you can find tons of articles that can help you figure out how to use HubSpot. If you run into an issue, there is most likely an article out there that will help you solve it.

2. Have a plan for email and lists

One of the biggest pros of HubSpot Marketing Starter is the ability to send emails and segment your contacts. 

With this in mind, before creating emails, start laying out the type of emails you will want to send in HubSpot. Are they newsletters, announcements, etc.? 

This will help you organize your email types and subscriptions.

With Starter, you won’t have features like email automation so all emails will need to be sent manually, or scheduled for a specific time. This is something that you will need to keep in mind.

On a related note, understand all the ways you will be segmenting your contacts. 

Of course, in Marketing Starter, you can use HubSpot’s data to further refine your segments, however, it is a good idea to have your segments laid out before inputting them into the platform so that you are not trying to group contacts that don’t make sense or treating all your contacts the same. 

Think about if you are going to segment contacts by the type of buyer they are, what type of information might be helpful for them, or even what industry they are in.

3. Analyze your contact data

Once you have your contacts in HubSpot or have migrated your contacts to the HubSpot CRM, you will want to start understanding what your contacts look like.

For example, in Marketing Starter, you can use HubSpot lists to identify contacts in a specific region or industry or see how many contacts are customers versus leads.

Take note of any segmentation opportunities. Not only will this help you identify segments that you can send more catered information to, but it will also help you understand what the percentage of your contacts fall into each segment.

The more contacts you start getting from your website, the more you will be able to use engagement activities like “pages visited” or “forms submitted” to further understand the types of contacts you have and what they are interacting with. That way you won’t have to rely on the information you have put into the CRM, but rather information that contacts have told you.

With the information and lists mentioned above, you will also be able to better determine what your emailing lists should look like. Thay way you are sending emails with information that contacts want to read and have already told you they are interested in.

4. Have a plan for lead generation

You’ll also want to make sure that you have a plan for taking advantage of HubSpot Marketing Starter to capture leads on your website. It is not just adding a form to every page. You need to be strategic about when you’re using your forms, chats, and pop-ups, and where they are showing up.

HubSpot forms are to capture contacts on your website. These forms can be used on HubSpot website pages, landing pages, and also non-HubSpot pages using an embed code. 

Capturing contacts and their information is what allows you to do things like reach out to them when they are looking for help and to help educate them by sending them more targeted information about the problems they might have.

In HubSpot, you can easily drag, drop, and create new fields for the forms used on your site and even make changes to your follow-up. 

You want to think about the purpose of the form and where in the buyer’s journey this form is. This can help determine what type of questions you should be asking on a form. 

For forms farther along the journey, it is appropriate to ask for something like phone number or address if needed. 

From something more in the awareness phase, like signing up to get notified about new content, you will want to ask very high-level and minimal questions like email and name.

HubSpot Marketing Starter also gives you access to live chat or chatbots. 

These are great tools to help your visitors quickly get helpful information from a live team member, or have a bot direct them to the right place for frequently asked questions.

Contacts who interact with chat or a bot can give their information so that you are able to reach back out to them and further help them with any questions. This also leads to you discovering more leads through live chat for those looking to get in touch with your team.

Another big part of lead gen is using specific landing pages that are optimized for more targeted information. Marketing Starter gives you access to the drag-and-drop landing page template creator which makes it easy to create optimized landing pages for your website. This is extremely helpful for two reasons.

One, you are able to create pages that are hyper-focused on something specific like a premium content offer or promoting an event. This usually lends itself to higher engagement and conversion

If you did not have this, you would need to rely on a web developer, and your current web platform to create and host any webpage you might need. 

6. Customize your email templates

You will also have access to HubSpot’s marketing email tools with Marketing Starter. Just like the landing pages, you will have access to the drag and drop email editor makes it super easy to create the email template you want to create without any development help. 

The drag and drop editor also allows you to customize, and save templates for future or repeatable use. Create email templates using the drag and drop editors for all types of emails you will be sending so that when it comes time to create an email, you can start from a template and just input your content.

HubSpot’s email tools will also help you understand how your email marketing is performing, and how you can use that information to continuously clean your HubSpot portal.

The email analysis and health tab can help you see how many contacts are bouncing, your average open and click rate, and overall email engagement per email. 

For cleaning “bad” or unenegaged contacts in your portal, HubSpot allows you to make a list of all contacts that have bounced so that you can remove them from your account. You can also choose not to send any emails to contact who have not engaged with your emails to show more accurate email metrics.

7. Create reports

As mentioned in the strategy portion, you will want to identify your goals and desired outcomes before using HubSpot. 

HubSpot Marketing Starter allows you to see reports on a lot of your activity in HubSpot like how many visitors you are getting on your site, the percentage you are turning into leads, and which pages are converting the most leads. 

This helps you better identify how affective your lead nurturing strategy mentioned above is. It will also help identify which part specifically is not working.

For example, if you are getting a lot of traffic on a page but your traffic to lead conversion is low, this could be a flag to make sure your landing page and content is well optimized.

You are also able to create custom reports like which contacts in specific industries are converting on which landing pages, or which set of contacts are engaging the most with your emails.

With Starter, you can also get into content ROI reporting. This is extremely useful to understand which pieces of content are converting the most leads and customers. This also allows you to attach a dollar amount to the work you are putting into creating content.

8. Evaluate how you can scale

Finally, you will want to understand if you will be able to grow with HubSpot Marketing Starter.

I know it might be early, but one of the benefits of using any tier of HubSpot is it will grow with you. You will want to determine whether or not Starter will continue to be right for you and if you will be able to use this for a long time. If not, identify if there a specific point you will need to upgrade to a tier that supports things like blogging, or marketing automation.

The good news is, if you need to upgrade, your portal will remain pretty much the same. You will just see more features unlocked that you will be able to take advantage of.

Growing with HubSpot Marketing Starter

HubSpot Marketing Starter unlocks a lot of marketing tools that can really help your team get up and running. You will finally unlock the ability to start emailing, better understand your audience and, start turning leads into customers.

For help on onboarding, or making sure that your team is following what is above, there is HubSpot training that can help with that.