Are you looking to re-examine your marketing strategies in HubSpot?
Who Do We Want to Actively Guide Down the Funnel?
When it comes to figuring out who should be a marketing contact, it’s all about auditing your marketing process and asking yourself:
- How are we going to identify the people who have actively indicated that they do want to hear from us?
- Who do we want to actively guide down the funnel?
- Who will receive value from our marketing communications?
To identify these contacts, you need to closely examine how you’re communicating with your audience in every stage of the Buyer's Journey.
In this article we will take a look at some best practices for identifying and using marketing contacts effectively.
The best way to use marketing contacts in HubSpot will depend on your specific business goals and marketing strategies according to the different stages in the Buyer’s Journey.
So, who should you prioritize to be a marketing contact?
First, you should aim to categorize all current and future contacts in your database under a Lifecycle stage and thus, a Buyer's Journey Stage.
- Awareness Stage: The buyer becomes aware that they have a problem.They may be looking for information to clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem. When setting lifecycle stages, subscribers and leads (a contact that has converted on your website) should be part of this stage.
- Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and considers different options to solve it. They research and understand the available solutions. When establishing lifecycle stages, it is important to set MQLs (a contact that your marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team) and SQLs (contact or company that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer), in this stage.
- Decision Stage: The buyer decides on the right provider to find a solution to their problem. Their goal now is to make a final purchase decision. In this stage, the lifecycle stages included are opportunities (a contact that is associated with a deal) and customers (a contact with a closed deal).
Making this a distinction within your available contacts is a key first step, as it will let you align your marketing efforts and marketing contacts usage according to your main objective. For example, if your objective is short term sales, then it would probably make sense to use your time and marketing contacts tier to generate and target contacts on the decision and consideration stages.
What Benefits Will You Bring to Your Marketing Contacts?
Once you have identified these contacts… It all depends on which Buyer’s Journey stage you're targeting.
- Awareness: If your goal is to drive subscribers or visitors to consider your company, you should set subscribers, leads and marketing qualified leads as marketing contacts. This way you can then generate nurturing email campaigns and top of the funnel audiences in order to create TOFU to BOFU ad campaigns.
TIP: in this stage your marketing contacts should receive as much information about your company and products as possible so they visit your website and content.
- Consideration: If your goal is to drive MQLs into becoming SQLs consider email campaigns plus downloadable content offers with follow-up emails after form submissions and automated workflows to set contacts as marketing ones, allowing you to enhance the personalization of your communication and build stronger relationships with your marketing contacts.
TIP: provide content offers comparing your company to your competition, show awards and testimonials, promote webinars and more!
- Decision: Are you ready to turn your opportunities into customers? Provide your marketing contacts Case Studies via email campaigns, product/service DEMOs and ebooks about pricing comparisons.
Now let's get technical...
Do You Know Which Are the 2 Most Important Ways of Setting Contacts as Marketing Contacts?
- Forms: When you create a form, by default, contacts who submit the form are automatically set as marketing. Any contact that submits the form, including existing non-marketing contacts, will be set as marketing. This setting is turned on by default for all forms, but you can update the setting for each individual form.
- Workflows: In accounts with a Professional or Enterprise subscription, you can automatically set contacts as marketing via workflows based on their property values.
Is it Time to Look Into Your Marketing Strategies Again?
We know there are numerous valid reasons to have contacts in your CRM that cannot be targeted with marketing efforts, such as bounced emails, unsubscribed individuals, partners, sales contacts, and single customer service tickets, to name a few.
As the rest of your organization increases your customer database, you should not be stuck with paying for those contacts.
Make sure you follow the steps above for each Buyer Journey stage and you will be able to effectively target only those contacts who YOU chose as marketing ones.