HubSpot is a powerhouse in the world of marketing, sales and customer relationship management, but did you know that it hides a treasure trove of features beyond the obvious ones? As a long-time HubSpot partner agency--not to mention a team full of HubSpot nerds--we put together our list of 10 lesser-known gems within HubSpot that can rock your martech world!

Note: we are test-driving HubSpot's newer AI tools and need more data and use cases before we include them in our list.

1. HubSpot's Prospecting Tools: Supercharge Your Sales Productivity

You can elevate your lead generation game with HubSpot's prospecting tools within Sales Hub. This feature was launched at INBOUND23, and the public beta has been one of our favorite sales tools since its release. We'll give you the shorthand: our top tools and strategies to streamline lead prospecting and conversion:

  1. Automated Generation of Prospect Lists and Real-time Prospect Monitoring: Gain insights into companies visiting your website and their on-site activities.

  2. Customized Views: Organize and prioritize prospects based on various filtering criteria, such as the number of user visits, page views, location, and company size.

  3. Automation for Timely Prospect Engagement: Set up automated notifications to alert your team when high-priority prospects interact with your website, ensuring prompt engagement.

  4. Automated Email Sequences: Enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your prospect outreach with this feature.

2. Smart Content Personalization: Tailor Your Messages

Personalization is key to getting prospects' attention. HubSpot's smart content personalization feature allows you to serve tailored content to different segments of your audience, increasing engagement and conversions.

Smart Content, also known as "dynamic" or "adaptive" content, pertains to the elements within a website, advertisement, or email that adapt according to the viewer's interests or prior actions. This dynamic approach tailors the experience to the individual visitor or reader in realtime. It involves considering various visitor attributes, including:

  • Location
  • Language
  • Device type
  • Referral source
  • Demographics

Smart content in HubSpot operates on a straightforward principle despite its potential complexity. It relies on the cookies stored in a visitor's web browser to recognize and personalize the experience for that visitor. Here's how it works:

  1. Identification of Visitors: When a visitor arrives on your website, HubSpot seeks to identify them. If there is no existing HubSpot cookie, the visitor is categorized as an "unknown contact."

  2. Determining Visitor Attributes: HubSpot analyzes the visitor's browser settings, including language preference, device type, and IP address to determine their location.

  3. Applying Smart Rules: If the visitor's attributes meet the criteria defined by smart rules, the smart content is displayed accordingly. If not, the default content you've specified will be shown.

  4. Existing Cookie Use: If the visitor's browser contains a cookie from your website, HubSpot uses it to identify the visitor and retrieves information from their respective contact record. After considering their device settings and IP address, HubSpot matches the visitor with the appropriate smart content based on the defined rules.

  5. Smart Content Creation: Presently, HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise users have the ability to create smart calls to action (CTAs), forms, and rich text modules on landing pages, website pages, or within emails.

HubSpot's Smart Content tool allows you to present this curated content to specific segments within blogs, website pages, email, and the design manager. Imagine a webpage that presents bottom of funnel content and a conversion form to return visitors who have a lead score just under a marketing qualified lead trigger while a new visitor is presented with an overview of your product and key selling features with an ungated content download to motivate them to learn more about your brand. Or a newsletter email that presented different stories and highlights depending upon their persona? These are just a few examples: the options are endless!

For more details, check out: HubSpot's Smart Content: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Here's a great lesson on Smart Content within HubSpot's Contextual Marketing course (it's free and takes a little under 30 minutes to complete). Note: Smart Content is available within specific Marketing Hub subscriptions.

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3. HubDB for Data Management: Simplify Database Management

HubDB is a robust yet underutilized feature that simplifies database management. It's ideal for creating dynamic web pages and programmable emails and storing data for easy access.

HubDB is a versatile tool enabling the creation of tables for organizing data in a structured format with rows, columns, and cells, akin to a spreadsheet. You have the flexibility to tailor the columns, rows, and configurations of a HubDB table to suit your specific requirements.

It's been around for years and it's not the shiny, new feature that everyone is talking about but it's a powerhouse tool for larger websites or resource centers. 

4. Content Strategy: Elevate Your SEO Game

Enhance your content strategy with HubSpot's SEO tools. This underrated feature provides valuable insights and recommendations to boost your website's search engine ranking. They include on-page SEO recommendations, keyword tracking, content strategy, pillar page tools, and backlink analysis.

We're a fan of the SEO tools for several reasons:

  • They provide actionable insights to enhance website content, making it more search engine-friendly.
  • They track keyword performance, enabling users to refine their content strategy.
  • They offer valuable backlink data to enhance a website's authority.
  • The built-in pillar page tool allows you to brainstorm and execute complex content strategies in a user-friendly environment
  • They're built into your marketing software: you don't need to log into another service and work between two systems.

HubSpot's SEO tools stand out for their user-friendly interface, making them accessible to both beginners and seasoned marketers. They are integral for boosting a website's search ranking and driving organic traffic.

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5. Meeting Scheduling: Streamline Appointments

HubSpot's meeting scheduling tool takes the hassle out of appointment scheduling.

Avoid the tedious email back-and-forth when scheduling meetings. HubSpot's meetings tool simplifies the process. Prospects can effortlessly schedule meetings with you or multiple team members.

This scheduler integrates with your existing apps and syncs with your HubSpot contacts database. As prospects book meetings, your database expands and remains updated. By reducing the hassle of appointment setting, you can free up time for more critical tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.

Add it to your email signature, conversion landing pages, share on social during prospecting activities, set up joint sales outreach calendars, and more. It syncs with your  Gmail and Outlook/Office 365-based calendars, allowing leads and clients to book meetings at their convenience.

6. Reporting Dashboards: Get Real-Time Insights

HubSpot's reporting dashboards provide real-time insights into your marketing and sales efforts. Many reports and dashboards are templated and are ready to use from day one, while your team can also customize them to track the metrics that matter most to your business. Whether you want insights into your lead funnel, revenue attribution figures, or customer journey mapping, the reporting tool has you covered. 

Your reporting timeframe--whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually--should be dedicated to in-depth analysis, not gathering information across multiple platforms. No one has time for that these days! 

Our agency builds many custom reports and dashboards: we've yet to have a request we can't find a solution to within HubSpot.

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7. Social Inbox: Centralize Your Social Media Management

We all know that you can use HubSpot's social media tool to schedule social media posts and connect ad accounts. One aspect of the tool most people are unaware of is the Social Inbox. You can monitor, engage, and respond to your audience from one unified platform.

The Inbox aggregates messages, comments, and engagement across multiple social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With real-time notifications and collaboration features, teams can efficiently respond to customer inquiries, comments, and messages. The Social Media Inbox streamlines communication, ensures quick responses, and simplifies social media management, making it an essential component for businesses aiming to maintain an active and engaged online presence. Forget the days when your Marketing department had to log into each social account throughout the day to monitor and respond to messages and trends.

We didn't make this a separate item, but HubSpot's social media tool also allows for fairly complex analysis and reporting. We use this frequently and it's another semi-hidden gem in the Marketing Hub.

8. Video Hosting: Enhance Visual Content

HubSpot's Video Hosting feature is a dynamic platform that simplifies the way you manage, host, and distribute video content. It serves as a central hub for all video assets, streamlining the user experience.

Users can upload, organize, and customize videos directly within HubSpot, making it easy to embed videos into websites, email campaigns, and landing pages. The tool also offers valuable analytics, providing insights into video performance.

By leveraging HubSpot Video Hosting, companies can enhance their marketing efforts, engage their audience more effectively, and seamlessly integrate video content into their inbound marketing strategy, ultimately driving growth and achieving marketing objectives.

9. Ticketing and Help Desk: Deliver Exceptional Customer Support

It's not a secret that HubSpot has a Service Hub. However, many people aren't aware that HubSpot has a customer service system that rivals Zen Desk that can be added to their existing CRM.

The Hub provides stellar customer support with HubSpot's ticketing and help desk tools. Streamline your support process and keep customers delighted.

Marketers will love the help desk and survey functions and how they help with organic website traffic, review metrics and improvements, and the happy customers that are essential to your organization's success.

10. Predictive Lead Scoring: Identify Hot Leads

HubSpot's predictive lead scoring uses machine learning to identify your hottest leads, helping your marketing and sales teams focus on prospects with the highest conversion potential.

The lead scoring system is a data-driven system that identifies and prioritizes potential leads based on their likelihood to convert into customers. It works by analyzing various factors, including a lead's behavior, engagement with content, and demographics.

HubSpot's algorithms assign each lead a numerical score, indicating their quality and readiness for sales engagement. We call it the MQL to SQL genie in a bottle. This helps sales and marketing teams focus their efforts on the most promising prospects, ultimately improving efficiency and driving higher conversion rates by ensuring the right attention is given to the right leads.

Unlock your HubSpot portal's full potential with the Whittington Consulting team – your trusted HubSpot experts. Whether you're starting fresh or need to supercharge an existing project, our expertise can transform your vision into reality. Let's connect: tell us about what you need.

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