Just 20% of leads are actually followed up by businesses. 

Often it’s a problem of capacity and alignment. Your sales team just doesn't have the time to sift through leads or the communication between your marketing, customer service and sales department has broken down. 

How your marketing team qualifies leads may be different from how your sales team qualifies leads and everyone is chasing different KPIs - they are working in silos, it’s an issue we frequently uncover when clients come to us. 

By reducing back-office admin, streamlining your in-house operations and nullifying manual activity, marketing automation will free up your sales, marketing and customer service teams, allowing them to do what they are good at, whilst ensuring cross-department alignment. 

The marketing automation software market is expected to grow to £8 billion over the course of the next 5 years, with HubSpot leading the way in this space.

HubSpot's marketing automation platform has been a game-changer for businesses, providing a wide range of tools that streamline marketing efforts and increase productivity. 

But what are the current marketing automation tools that can unlock your business potential? How can you use them and what does the product roadmap look like in terms of marketing automation? 

Let’s take a look. 

Marketing Automation and HubSpot 

HubSpot’s journey has revolved around developing key areas of marketing automation, but how can they be defined, and what are the real benefits using them presents for businesses?  

Workflows

Workflows enable businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, updating contact properties, and creating tasks. With workflows, businesses can create targeted campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time.

HubSpot's workflow automation tool is one of the most powerful automation tools available to businesses.

The time HubSpot's workflow frees up for businesses enables them to focus on more high-value tasks, such as creating content and developing marketing strategies.

Using simple automated trigger systems, HubSpot's marketing workflows can create personalised experiences for your customers. This is perhaps no better shown than in the email marketing tools, where  triggered workflows send targeted emails to customers based on their specific behaviours and preferences.

Workflows can also be used to nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel. By sending targeted messages to leads at different stages of the funnel, businesses can increase their chances of converting them into customers.

Lead Scoring 

Lead scoring is an essential component of any marketing strategy. 

It helps businesses identify their most valuable leads and prioritise their efforts accordingly. With lead scoring, businesses can assign a score to each lead based on their behaviour and engagement with their marketing efforts.

HubSpot’s lead scoring enables businesses to focus on the most promising leads and move them through the sales funnel more efficiently, decreasing the labourers activity that would usually fall to marketing or sales executives. 

By assigning a score to each lead, businesses can determine which leads are most likely to convert into customers. This helps businesses improve their sales productivity and close deals more quickly. 

It’s easy to use and customisable. Businesses can set up their own scoring criteria and adjust it as needed, allowing businesses to tailor their lead scoring to their specific needs and goals.

Automating the sales process 

One of the most powerful automation tools offered by HubSpot is the ability to automate actions based on specific deal or ticket stages. By setting up automation rules within the deal or ticket pipeline settings, businesses can automate a series of actions to take place when the record reaches a specific stage or status.

Businesses can create a task for the sales manager to follow up with a rep when a deal status changes to Closed. This ensures that no potential revenue opportunity falls through the cracks. Similarly, businesses can send an internal notification to the support team when a new ticket is created, ensuring that every customer inquiry is answered promptly.

Moreover, businesses can update the ticket status automatically when an email is sent to or received from a customer. This can reduce the amount of time that reps spend on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on more important customer-facing tasks.

Social scheduling

We don't have to tell you how important social media marketing is. With over 4 billion users online, social strategy must be timely, on-brand and consistent.

Social media marketers struggle to juggle all of these musts together, and can often end up lurching from social post to social post, scratching their heads and scrambling for the next post that will keep customers and prospects engaged. 

One of the most powerful features of the Social Inbox tool is its ability to create custom social media streams. Businesses can create streams based on specific criteria such as keywords, hashtags, or even specific social media accounts.

This enables businesses to monitor their social media presence more effectively and respond to relevant social media posts in a timely manner.

In addition to monitoring social media activity, the Social Inbox tool also provides businesses with a powerful publishing platform. Businesses can schedule and publish social media posts across multiple social media platforms, all from within the same platform.

This makes it easier for businesses to manage their social media presence and ensures that their social media activity remains consistent across all platforms.

Where next for HubSpot marketing automation ? 

As we’ve already mentioned, HubSpot is all in for marketing automation, and their future roadmap shows no sign of letting up. 

One of their more interesting plans involves video marketing. Video, an increasingly integral format for content marketers, and a format proven to be one of the most engaging, currently lacks automation within HubSpot. HubSpot plans to change things, assimilating viewers into a businesses automated workflows to ensure prospects who watch a video are accounted for in the lead nurture process. 

And finally

we know that HubSpot will continue to make waves with their constant marketing automation tool updates, if you would like to keep tabs on these, follow them here. 

Want to learn more about marketing automation and HubSpot?  Start your journey today.