If Your Marketing Agency Says You Don’t Need HubSpot, Watch Out.

HubSpot is easy to use, provides an all-in-one solution, and measures and improves marketing performance. How can that be a bad thing?

How your marketing is working shouldn’t be a mystery. It’s also important that your company is an active and heard contributor to your marketing efforts and performance. But sometimes, marketing agencies take the smoke-and-mirrors approach and aren’t eager to add other hands to the mix, even if they’re yours.

“Just leave everything to us. You don’t need an in-house CRM, and certainly not HubSpot.”

Okay, so they think you don’t need HubSpot. Do they offer an alternative? And how are they measuring performance? What are the metrics? How is your marketing really doing? And what happens to all your marketing efforts if you decide to cut ties with that agency?

It’s time to see what’s really behind the curtain. Let’s talk about why your marketing agency might not want to have all the advantages HubSpot has to offer, and then we’ll reveal exactly what those are and why implementing HubSpot is probably one of the smartest business decisions you’ll ever make. 

Your agency doesn’t know anything about HubSpot.

We all know people who bad-mouth things they really don’t know anything about. But fear of the unknown has no place in business and certainly not in marketing. The spoils go to the brave, and much of marketing is bold experimentation. 

The fact that your agency doesn’t keep up with the latest and greatest in the world of CRM and doesn’t know much about the CRM that’s rated number one by much of the world speaks volumes. Are these the people you want to have exclusive control over your marketing?

Your agency isn’t measuring the right things and is hiding poor performance.

Agencies are valuable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their creative prowess. Their staff is full of art directors, copywriters, web designers, etc., that create brilliant marketing that works when it’s executed properly. 

Marketing agencies are also good at spotting marketing trends and the next big thing in web design. 

But sometimes, oh yes, sometimes, they fall short when it comes to execution. Many agencies have a formulaic approach to marketing. But one size doesn’t fit all. While it’s conventional wisdom that emails sent in the morning get the most engagement, does that work for your unique business? 

Do you know how your marketing is really performing? Here’s what your agency should be providing and what metrics they should be measuring, all of which are easily found in HubSpot.

Is your agency providing you with these key metrics?

Don’t be shocked if you haven’t been receiving reports on these metrics. After all, they are true measures of performance. If your marketing isn’t really performing at the level you hoped for, there are two possible scenarios: Your agency is hiding information from you, or they aren’t measuring these vital metrics at all. 

Qualified leads

How many opportunities are you missing because your agency doesn’t ferret out qualified leads from the rest or doesn’t really know what a quality lead is? You know your business best.

With HubSpot, you can assign the task of qualifying leads to an in-house team member and have them follow up personally. Your potential customers not only appreciate the authentic, personal approach but demand it. 

With HubSpot, you don’t have to leave your best leads on the table–you can turn them into lucrative and loyal customers. 

Amount of comments

There’s a lot of talk about engagement, and many agencies will point to the number of shares for a social media or blog post, but 59% of people share things without even reading them. How is that engagement?

What’s a better metric? Comments. They are the best indicator of quality engagement because someone who comments probably read the entire post or article and cared enough to comment on it. That is real engagement you can work with.

With HubSpot, once you’ve connected your social accounts, you can view and analyze their performance and know how well your organic efforts are performing. 

How much of your content is shared

Yes, the number of shares is still important, and you want to see who your unpaid brand ambassadors are. You’ll also see what type of content is more popular so you can tweak your content.

With HubSpot, you can up your content game and give them what they want and what they want to share. 

Your conversion rate

What is your conversion rate? You don’t know? That’s unfortunate. Knowing your conversion rate is essential. It’s the best way to compare and contrast the performance of your different advertising channels. 

Your conversion rate is an important metric to measure the performance of a marketing campaign, an ad group, or a single ad. It can be used to lower customer acquisition costs and increase revenue. 

With HubSpot, you can get the conversion rate from all deals created (opportunities) and won (new customers).

What’s your marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI can be difficult to calculate out in the wild, but it’s easy with HubSpot. There’s even a free calculator that can clue you in about your potential ROI when you use the platform. 

But let’s look at some real stats compiled from analyzing the data of more than 158,000 HubSpot customers. Here’s the average ROI for different metrics:

• 129% more inbound leads
• 113% more website traffic
• 109% deal close rate
• 36% more deals closed

Using the reports dashboard, you can see overall performance statistics such as visits, contacts, and customers so you can monitor your campaigns and know how every aspect of your marketing is performing.

With HubSpot's Analytics Tools, you can use actionable analytics (24/7) to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Mind your bounce rate

Ask your agency: “What percentage of people land on a page on my website and just leave without taking any action?” As they hem and haw, you can tell them that with HubSpot, a glance at the web analytics dashboard can give you everything you need.

If you don’t know the bounce rate, you can’t do anything about it. Equally important is the bounce rate per source. If you don’t know which page people are leaving, you can’t do anything to fix it. SEO goes out the window, and so do your leads and conversions.

With HubSpot, you can use bounce rates to tweak your marketing strategy and make your website work harder.

The bottom line when it comes to metrics

With Hubspot:

• You get complete, real-time visibility into your sales funnel on an easy-to-use dashboard
• You can track customer interactions automatically across social media and emails
• You can see all lead details in one place

With HubSpot, you’re not dependent on an agency to deliver the metrics they want to give you. HubSpot lets you pull reports on any metrics you want to examine at any time you want to see them. 

You get the information at your fingertips that make you an active participant in your marketing strategy and execution so you can get full value out of your agency and set yourself on a path for real growth.

Your agency may try to discourage you from using HubSpot because they don’t know how to use it. That’s really no excuse: HubSpot is intuitive and easy to use. 

Bring It All Under One Roof

It’s about control, but it’s about so much more than that. When you have everything under one roof and all of this information at your disposal, it’s a heady thing. You’ll start finding all sorts of new ways to become more efficient and more effective. 

To that end, you probably know, but possibly have been ignoring, the importance of having sales and marketing integration. That doesn’t mean weekly meetings (we all know how unproductive they are). What it means is that both teams have access to the same data and the same metrics so they can be on the same page to propel real growth.

Here are just a few reasons why it’s essential to have alignment between sales and marketing:

• You can keep your promises. Marketing has a campaign running that promises one thing, but the sales team can’t deliver. If you can’t meet your promises, how can your customers trust you? Once trust is gone, it’s difficult to get back.

• You can get deeper customer insights. Marketers aren’t on the front lines. It’s the sales team who works directly with customers day in and day out. This means they have valuable insight into customer needs and want and can often spot trends before anyone else. 

Your marketing team and marketing agency is desperate for this type of information so they can build better strategies and optimize communications to be more effective. 

• Optimize the sales process. Marketing and sales work in tandem, but they don’t work on the same parts of the process. If these teams aren’t working well together, opportunities are lost to bring prospects deeper into your funnel. That means lost customers and, in turn, lost revenue.

• Align goals. When the marketing goals and sales goals of your company are the same, that means everyone is working together. Without alignment, both teams are disjointed and unable to meet the needs of the other because they don’t share vital information.

Focus, direction, communication, and data sharing mark the difference between an ineffectual marketing and sales strategy and one that’s highly efficient. 

With Hubspot, alignment between sales and marketing becomes effortless.

But, Cries Your Agency, “We Don’t Know How to Use HubSpot!”

It’s time to cry a river or pull out the tiny violin. This is the lamest excuse of all. HubSpot is easy to use and easy to learn, and ThinkFuel can provide virtual HubSpot administrator services with full front-line support. 

It’s always good to have help in the beginning and ongoing support if you hit a snag, but you should know that HubSpot has a reputation for being very easy to use. It’s not only easy for users to navigate and use, but it is also incredibly easy to create. Content creation areas, such as landing pages, forms, and emails, all use drag and drop. Bulk-create and schedule social media content.

And did we mention there are tons of free tools? In fact, HubSpot has an awesome, comprehensive free edition that works across marketing, sales, and customer service. 

The benefits of virtual HubSpot administrative support

Have an issue? No technology is perfect, and things do go wrong here and there. Or maybe someone changed a setting, and you don’t know how to fix it. 

Instead, you can use your digits to dial ours or shoot out a quick email. We’ll respond quickly to solve issues, schedule training, or help you get to know that new module you’re excited to get going.

Expert help

Your IT team? They’re great, but they’re busy with other things like keeping everything up and running and strategizing your enterprise tech stack.

The keyword to note is “expert.” You probably don’t have (or want to hire at today’s sky-high salaries) a designated HubSpot administrator.

We offer personalized tech support that doesn’t send you to a knowledge base – we actually troubleshoot and solve your problem so you can get quickly back up and running your business. 

Proactive monitoring and optimization

Problems. No one likes them. It’s our job to find them before you even know it’s there. You’ll rarely place an urgent phone call to ThinkFuel (well, maybe to thank us for being so awesome) because we’re always looking behind the scenes to make sure everything is working as it should.

We use that expertise we talked about above to keep tabs on how everything is working to detect and solve any current problems and find potential issues before they can rear their ugly heads. 

Need training?

Sure, HubSpot is easy to use and intuitive, but everything has its nuances, and you want to get the very best out of the platform.

We empower HubSpot users with our expert training, which doesn’t mean putting them in a room with a bunch of videos.

We get everyone up to speed quickly with training that incorporates best-in-class retention practices, so they’ll not just know what to do but why and learn basic problem-solving that can save time and money. 

Implementation and task help

We never stop providing everything you need to implement and use HubSpot so your company can reach its full growth potential. 

When you use ThinkFuel’s Virtual HubSpot administrator services, we don’t stop at system and training solutions. We’re here to help you with any HubSpot task.

Have a question about launching email campaigns? Want to build some new workflows? Scratching your head over activity filters? With us in your corner, help is simply a call or email away.

Don’t Accept Excuses: Demand Results

We’ve certainly got nothing against marketing agencies (hello!), but far too many of them want to keep the backend work of marketing a mystery. They operate on a need-to-know basis when all you want is to know everything you possibly can to make intelligent, informed decisions about your brand and its growth. 

It’s time to empower yourself.

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t know how your marketing is really doing without the right CRM platform and the rich, actionable data it provides. 

Take that first smart step toward better marketing

Reach out to ThinkFuel today. We’ll have a great chat about the state of your marketing and how HubSpot and our administrative services can help you remove the guesswork, find hidden information and opportunities, and convert visitors into customers that drive explosive growth.