Why You Need a HubSpot Onboarding Plan

Five Steps to Maximize Your CRM Adoption

Adopting a customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation platform such as HubSpot requires a significant investment of time and money for most edtech companies. Making the decision is the easy part. After you sign the contract, you have to onboard or upgrade to a new platform. This HubSpot onboarding process may seem daunting, but with the proper plan in place, you can enjoy a smooth transition.

This transition requires integration with all aspects of your marketing efforts, so it’s no small feat. We understand this extensive process and have supported organizations that navigated it successfully. A CRM adoption and integration can be daunting, but if you follow CB&A’s plan to a T, your team can drive positive business results quickly and efficiently.

Assign Roles and Responsibilities

The first step is to determine roles and responsibilities within your organization. This will define the onboarding process and allow it to flow more smoothly. Once you have assembled a transition team, assigning one member to be the Point-of-Contact (POC) will simplify the communication process between your team and HubSpot tech support.

The POC’s role is to keep the project on schedule, advise employees on how to best utilize the CRM and work with their HubSpot liaisons to facilitate a productive partnership. It’s important to establish responsibilities within your team for various HubSpot onboarding components.

Ultimately, the deployment process is what you make of it – ideally, you’ll work hard to learn all the ins and outs of the software. It’s important for your team to practice the platform with both hands-on learning and training videos. The HubSpot Academy features a vast library of courses that cover every aspect of the platform and marketing best practices. Start with the Inbound and Marketing Software certifications, training sessions that cover the “big picture” and provide value-add benefits for even the most experienced digital marketers.

In addition to the training, you can elicit the support of a HubSpot Agency partner on your CB&A team. We’ve been through the onboarding process and will strive to make the transition as painless as possible. Ask us anything­!

Establish SMART Goals for your EdTech Marketing campaign

Whether you’re implementing a new software tool or conducting an email marketing campaign, we agree with HubSpot’s recommendation to start the project with SMART goals.

Your HubSpot onboarding process is a great place to give SMART goals a chance. Before you start the transition, outline how you want to use HubSpot (big picture and down in the weeds), determine how you’ll measure its success (which KPIs are important to you), and set an attainable goal (e.g., increase site visits by 10%) that is relevant to your business. Then establish a timeline so you can assess how the campaign unfolded.

Next, devise a plan on how to accomplish your goals. This will be valuable in answering questions on the fly and verifying a positive result.

 

Create a HubSpot Onboarding Strategy

Outlining your strategy depends on which Hubspot marketing and sales option your organization selects: Free, Starter, Professional or Enterprise. Based on the package chosen, your team could have access to new capabilities for social, email, CMS, workflows, sequences, CTAs, forms and more. Each tool can be learned by using it, and watching the training videos will help you derive maximum benefit from HubSpot’s offerings.

It’s important to know how your team plans to leverage HubSpot from the get-go. Are you looking to generate more leads? Drive visitors through a sales funnel? Perhaps you simply want all your information in one location. We’re here to guide you down the right path to achieve your business objectives.

In the long run, an onboarding strategy will help your team implement inbound marketing through workflows, sequences, content clusters, lists and email, with all members on the same learning curve.

Execute your HubSpot Onboarding Technical Set-Up

Technical tasks that your team will have to work through include:

• Connecting your domain to HubSpot
• Adding HubSpot tracking code to your website
• Setting up Google UTM codes to best track your campaigns
• Excluding internal website traffic from your analytics
• Converting current website forms to HubSpot forms
• Importing contacts to the database
• Creating lists for different segments of your marketing effort
• Integrating HubSpot with other platforms such as Zapier, Slack, WordPress and more.

This part of the process will likely require collaboration with your IT department. HubSpot offers robust support services should you run into issues. Additionally, the CB&A team has dedicated consultants to reach out to if a client encounters an unusual challenge. The HubSpot crew is very responsive, and we’ve come to trust their judgment implicitly (not an easy feat!).

Connect Your Social Accounts

At the Professional level of Marketing Hub, you gain the ability to connect social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter to HubSpot. This provides a number of options to automate the promotion of HubSpot-posted content to these channels.

HubSpot social services go beyond simple automation posts: You can also manage all content directly from the HubSpot social portal. This includes scheduling and monitoring of brand pages and personal accounts for the thought leaders on your team. The upshot – from one handy dashboard, you can schedule posts, engage with followers and measure most of your social media activity.

On top of that, the “schedule in bulk” feature allows you to optimize post times and platforms, simplifying the scheduling process to save your team time each month. HubSpot also looks at audience insights and posts content at peak times of day to maximize reach. Basically, if you’re not leveraging the social media platform, you’re missing out!

Launch, Optimize and Continue to Learn

Once you have moved into HubSpot, #LaunchDay is when you flip the switch and begin using the CRM platform to automate your marketing. The hard work will pay off as your team exploits its ability to run effective inbound marketing campaigns.

After your organization is working inside HubSpot every day, the process moves from infancy to toddler stage. Your team will learn to optimize blogs, where to add Calls to Action to drive the most clicks, and how to build lists and workflows that simplify your workload.

Maximizing the ROI from your HubSpot investment requires constant monitoring, analyzing and optimizing your marketing strategy. Additionally, HubSpot continues to roll out new tools and perks. Pay attention to these offerings and look for ways to implement them into your strategy.

Ultimately, you want HubSpot to work for your business, not the other way around. A CRM platform is a fantastic tool and it’s important to seek support to ensure you’re leveraging it properly. Ask HubSpot, ask CB&A or see how we helped ViTAL transition from the free to a paid version of HubSpot.

Need help with your HubSpot onboarding? Want to take your inbound marketing to the next level? As a HubSpot Agency Partner, we are ready to help. All you have to do is reach out to our team.

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• How the Adoption Curve Impacts Your Education Marketing Strategy: Every education marketing strategy should take the adoption curve into account.