So if your once beloved instance has now become a place of anxiety and confusion, fear not, we’ve got a few steps to get things back on track!

Assess Who Has Access

We get it. When you first got your HubSpot instance it was the shiny new toy and everyone wanted to play with it. Over the years, especially in large enterprise organizations, the list of users with HubSpot access and unlimited permissions can grow quite large. On top of possibly paying for seats for individuals who may not even use the tool, widespread access means little oversight over things like data imports, property creation, or asset creation and usage.

Take a look at who all has access, and the last time they logged in, to see if they really need to be in there. Set team level permissions to ensure users have what they need but don’t cause chaos for other teams in other areas of the instance they might not be as familiar with.

Clean Up Those Contacts

Picture this: you open your contact list, and out jumps a monstrous mess of duplicate entries, fake email addresses, and outdated information. Sound familiar? Well, you’re not alone! Contact integrity is one of the biggest clean-up issues we see when joining an existing HubSpot instance.

First, tackle any duplicate records. They mess up your analytics, can make your emails look unprofessional, and generally cause chaos. A CSV file will be the best way to get eyes on just how many there are. Most can likely be merged but if you come across incorrect information, the best bet is to manually update or remove. (Pro Tip: there are some tools out there you can run your lists through to scrape the web for the most up to date information).

Then segment your contacts based on various criteria like engagement, lead status, or buyer personas. This will help you identify inactive or irrelevant contacts that can be safely removed from your instance.

Don’t panic over a seemingly drastic reduction in contact records. Remember quality over quantity. Plus you might even find some cost savings from HubSpot themselves if you move down in contact tiers.

Organize Your Properties

Your HubSpot instance is only as good as your properties. If they’re a mess, your entire marketing strategy will suffer. Take some time to organize your properties and make sure they’re consistent across your entire instance. This means getting rid of any redundant properties and making sure everything is labeled clearly and accurately.

Doing a similar exercise as with Contacts with a bulk export is a great place to start and will give you an idea of how properties are being used today as well as bring those duplicates/ similar properties to light. (Pro Tip: If you’ve found the main culprit of similar properties to be tied to form creation and you’re a subscriber to Service Hub, you may even find some of those work better as properties within the Survey tool which categorizes and records form responses differently.)

Take a Look at Your Assets

Chances are your instance is home to a plethora of outdated email templates, forgotten ebooks, abandoned blog posts, and forsaken landing pages. Sweep away those cobwebs by removing any outdated or irrelevant pieces and make sure your remaining content is properly categorized and tagged for easy retrieval. A clean and well-organized content library will save you time and boost your content creation efforts.

Untangle Your Workflows

In the darkest corners of your HubSpot instance likely lurks a mass of outdated workflows. While once helpful, they now chug along in the background, causing confusion or even negatively impacting your marketing campaigns.

Take a deep dive to identify the obsolete workflows and remove them. Then, you can spend time revamping the remaining workflows into lean, mean, lead-generating machines! Don’t forget to update them with any new properties or assets you might have changed.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Cleaning up your HubSpot instance can be a daunting task, especially if you’re dealing with a large database. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from your team or even a HubSpot consultant (I think we may know someone…) Sometimes an outside perspective can help you see things in a new light and come up with a better strategy.

Keep it Clean

Once you’ve cleaned up your HubSpot instance, it’s important to keep it that way. This means setting up regular maintenance tasks, like deleting outdated content, merging contacts, and organizing your properties.

It’s also a good idea to assign someone on your team to be the HubSpot clean-up person who can be in charge of making sure everything stays organized and up-to-date.

We know cleaning up your HubSpot instance may seem like a daunting task, but it’s well worth the effort. A clean and organized HubSpot instance will help your team work more efficiently, make your marketing strategy more effective, and ultimately lead to better results. Good luck!

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What Tools Are Out There for Marketers?

Copy Creation – Whether you’re looking for help to create content for a website, SEO-focused blogs, ads, or social media posts, tools like ChatGPT and Copy.AI can be used to give you a leg up. Part of the magic here lies in knowing what to search for and what tools to use for what purpose, but just give one of these platforms a whirl at a certain topic and you’ll be amazed at what they come up with! Like any AI tool, what’s returned to you won’t be perfect. We find these tools most useful for doing general research on a topic or providing a basic outline for how you might want to structure your content. Regardless it’s a great starting point!

Visual Assets – From brand graphics to ads, to infographics, or even jazzing up a Power Point presentation, there’s a plethora of AI out there to help you create something beautiful! Like any AI, the response is only as smart as the prompt, so knowing when to be specific, and when to loosen the reins for a little more bot-powered creative freedom can go a long way. These AI tools can take a bit of playing with to find your right vibe and balance but it’s easy to lose track of time playing with them. One thing to note, if hoping to use AI to build a brand from scratch, AI created images can’t be copywritten, so best to always use them as a starting point vs. the final product. Regardless, AI design tools worth checking out are Designs.AI, Adobe Sensei, and Uizard.

Video – While video has long been one of the most costly forms of media, AI brings it back into reality for many organizations. That’s right AI can help you create video! This is one where you might need to use a few different tools if you want to go full soup to nuts on an entirely AI created video, but scripts, graphics and even person-centered content through creation of avatars is possible! That said, a lot of these tools still require a fair amount of work to set up, so it’s not likely you’ll want to go full AI for every video, but as with anything, it definitely creates a good launch point before you need that human touch, and opens a lot of doors for the creation of interactive content that might have previously been limited to words on a page or static graphics. Some awesome AI video generators to check out are Pictory, FlexClip, and Synthesia.

Code – This one bridges the gap between marketers and developers but hey, content is content! Tools specializing in multiple environments and multiple languages are popping up everywhere allowing dev teams to move faster and more efficiently. The tools get their power from public code repositories such as GitHub to construct the requested code, but as anyone who’s ever attempted to code knows, we can’t outsmart the computers (no matter how hard we try) and you get exactly what you ask for, so this one is best left up to folks with at least intermediate human coding abilities. Tools worth checking out are OpenAICodex or AskCodi.

Where Things Could Fall Short

This all sounds pretty amazing right? We get it! With so many tools and so many possible use cases, it’s hard not to feel like a kid in a candy store dreaming of all the AI-powered possibilities! But there are a couple pitfalls to look out for as you enter this brave new world…

The first being, not using AI at all. It might feel overwhelming knowing where to start or trusting some of your content needs to a (very intelligent) group of robots, but the risk of not utilizing the tools at our fingertips is even greater. The doors generative AI tools can open up for marketers are vast, as is the scalability it can create on your team. It can allow you to run faster, be more engaging and reach more people than ever before if you use it correctly. So even if you think about sitting it out, you can be assumed your competitors won’t!

Alternatively, over-reliance on generative AI tools could be even more dangerous. With so many diverse and powerful tools, it’s easy to think you could scale down human teams and replace their job duties with tech, but remember AI is not human. Responses from any tool are only as smart as the questions or prompts asked of it, and results are never perfect. While you can and should, use these tools to catapult productivity and abilities of your team, AI generated outputs still require that human touch to ensure accuracy and authenticity.

So if you’re looking to scale your team and test out some marketing avenues you might have been hesitant to try up until now, throw yourself into some of the free trials out there and test out some tools! Even if you don’t even up using them right now, we promise you’ll have fun exploring and brainstorming the possibilities!

Also now is probably the time to tell you this article was written by AI. Just Kidding!

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First off, marketing automation is the use of technology to streamline and, you guessed it, automate repetitive marketing tasks. It can be used to manage a variety of marketing activities, including email marketing, social media marketing, lead generation, and customer segmentation. The goal of marketing automation is to increase efficiency and effectiveness and reduce the amount of manual work required for marketing activities, freeing up your human team to do what they do best (whatever that is!). A single word comes to mind…SCALE.

1. Say Goodbye to Manual Labor – Gone are the days of manual data entry and endless email sending. With marketing automation, all your tedious tasks are taken care of with just a few clicks. This leaves you more time to focus on more strategic marketing activities, such as developing new campaigns and analyzing data.

2. Better Customer Engagement – Another benefit of marketing automation is the ability to personalize and target marketing efforts. With marketing automation software, businesses can segment their customer base and create personalized campaigns for each segment. This allows businesses to send the right message to the right audience at the right time, all while making their customers feel like valued VIPs, win, win!

3. Increased Productivity – Marketing automation streamlines your processes, freeing up valuable time and resources that can be redirected towards other important tasks. With manual marketing, it can be difficult to handle an increase in leads or customer demand. Marketing automation allows businesses to scale their marketing efforts to meet this demand, without the need to increase staff or resources.

4. Generate (and Nurture) Leads – Lead generation is another area where marketing automation can be transformational. Marketing automation software can be used to track leads through the sales funnel and trigger specific actions based on the lead’s behavior. For example, if a lead visits a pricing page on a website, the system can automatically send them an email with a special offer, or compelling mid-funnel content. This type of lead nurturing helps convert leads into customers more effectively, while protecting the time of sales teams.

5. Bridge the Gap – What about those pesky sales and marketing silos? With marketing automation, you can break down the barriers and bring the two teams together. No more fighting over leads and who gets the credit (or blame for unqualified leads). Marketing automation ensures a smooth handover of leads from marketing to sales and makes sure that both teams are on the same page.

6. Better ROI – With marketing automation, you can track your results in real-time and make data-driven decisions that will increase your return on investment and help inform future campaigns and marketing efforts. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a good ROI?

While all of this probably sounds pretty amazing, it’s important to keep in mind that marketing automation doesn’t replace the need for a human touch. While automation can handle repetitive tasks, it can’t replace the creativity, strategy, and emotional connection that human marketers provide. Marketing automation is a tool that can be used to enhance and support the work of human marketers, not replace them.

Additionally, implementing marketing automation does involve upfront capital and time investment (though well worth it in the long run!) Most platforms today will provide a major lift with their out of the box functionality, but there is definitely a learning curve so working with an outside implementation team can help speed up the process and create functionality and processes you might not even realize are possible!

At the end of the day, marketing automation can completely transform your business through freeing up your sales and marketing teams and creating processes for scale. If you’re interested in implementing a customized automation strategy for your business, give us a call!

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While these are all things to keep in mind, most times a rebrand (done right) will do way more good than harm.

Before we talk about things to consider let’s chat about the different types of rebrand a company can go through.

• A Brand Refresh – this is exactly what it sounds like, a refresh vs a re-do. Usually in these instances a company wants to keep their name, logo, and main colors in-tact but desires a bit of a facelift for marketing materials to modernize the brand. This can also include an update of brand messaging to be more clearly understood by the desired audience, but the core concept of the business and their mission remain the same.
• A Traditional Rebrand – A bit more involved, this type of rebrand usually incorporates a completely new or drastic change to the logo and all LTF (Look/Tone/Feel) elements of the brand. More often than not, brand messaging, mission statements or core values are visited and changed in this process as well to ensure cohesion throughout the brand. This is a large undertaking but is great for companies who have been around a long time and need to revamp their identity to reflect who they are today vs. who they were when the company started (a lot can change in 100 years!) or for companies who have had a fair amount of change in their initial service offerings and need to tweak the name or logo to embody that.
• New Name Who This – This is the most intense type of rebrand and is usually reserved for a company that needs to completely change their name due to a total change in service offerings, bad press, or in the case of a merger or acquisition. Along with a new name usually comes a new logo, color palate, messaging, and web address – basically an entirely new identity.

So what are the things an organization should consider before undergoing any type of brand update?

Is the organization being held back by the current visual brand or brand message? Meaning, will an update to the brand change the public perception of the company and allow them to expand their audience base, geographical footprint, and market share? If you’re a company that promotes tech as one of your core differentiators but you’re pushing a logo from 1940 or a website from 2005, you might have a hard time finding a foothold with new customers until you make a change.

Will this cause brand confusion about what the company currently offers or cause the company to be confused with another company? Very few companies find their success by actively being confused for another company. While certain things like aligning colors to industry norms can be beneficial (think the reds, greens, and yellows of most construction companies) aligning too closely on brand elements (or going too out there for the industry) can actually do more harm and create brand confusion – which best case creates annoying conversations for your sales team, and worst case means a split customer base and lost revenue potential.

Will the new brand alienate current customers? This one is more about how the rebrand is done but think about the values / what would engage your current audience (if that’s the audience you want to keep and grow). If your core audience is individuals 65+ going super modern with a logo, a tech-savvy website, or only using imagery of 20-somethings isn’t going to resonate. This doesn’t mean not to do it, it just means to think about the implications before getting too excited about that super abstract logo design.

What are the cost implications? While degrees will vary, any type of rebrand will require an update to both public facing and internal marketing materials, which means labor and cash. Think about every item that will have to be updated and replaced given the level of rebrand you’re considering. On a small scale this may be a new face for your website, a couple printables, and business cards, but on a large scale this could mean new building signage (exterior and interior) and printed materials for 10’s or hundreds of offices/locations, new uniforms or swag for every employee, new advertising and video assets, etc. Aside from pure capital investment, a lot of man hours are required for such an undertaking, so be sure your internal team has the bandwidth to take on a project of this magnitude and see it through.

How will you measure success at the end of this? If there is no quantifiable measure of success come the end of the re-brand, it may be hard to not only get internal buy in on the project, but also to give direction to your marketing team or partner. The end result should drive the efforts of the rebrand, so if you can’t put your finger on what success would look like (be it increased revenue in a certain segment, more leads for a specific offering, etc) you might want to give the concept a second thought.

At the end of the day, rebranding a company is not something that should be taken lightly or entered into on gut feel alone, however, if the positives (and business goals) support it, it can be an exhilarating undertaking and just the thing to push an organization to the next level of success!

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First things first is to make a plan. A plan to understand, to organize, to create, execute, and measure. But why is a plan important, isn’t social media supposed to be sporadic? Well, yes and no. The aspect of timeliness with social media is extremely important (especially in regards to taking advantage of the algorithms of some of the platforms) but if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve on social, who you’re trying to get in front of, or what type of public face you’re trying to give your organization, you’re going to be shooting (or posting) in the dark.

Know what you are trying to achieve with social – What would success look like here? This sets the foundation for your entire social strategy so think about what’s important. Sure, followers and likes are nice but are they helping grow your organization? It’s hard to show ROI on page growth but much easier on click throughs of content or actual conversations on your site.

It’s important to note though that you can have different measures of success for different channels – For instance LinkedIn might be about increasing job applicants, Facebook for increasing attendance for events or leads for specific service offerings, and Instagram (or Snapchat or TikTok) for brand awareness, while Twitter is often used by many organizations as a customer service communications tool.

Understand your audience – Who are you talking to? Who is following you now, is that who you want to be following you? How old are they, where are they located, what industries do they work in, what are they interested in, what is their income? All of these data points can shed light on what type of content will engage them and call them to action.

In terms of mining the data, plenty of tools out there offer insight. Some to check out  are Hootsuite, Google, and Brandwatch.

Do some research on what the industry is doing – This is a time where some light social stalking is encouraged! Are there any competitors who are doing it well (or not) that you can learn from? Aside from giving you ideas about content and industry norms, it can also point out some glaring holes of opportunity you can capitalize on. Maybe there is an entire channel being ignored, or no one is capitalizing on video content, or providing a great customer support experience…whatever it may be, there is often low hanging fruit that can be easier than trying to take bones (followers) from some of the big dogs!

Do an audit of your own channels – If you’ve previously been active on social, what have you done historically that worked or didn’t work? Were there particular types of content or times of the day that seemed to drive higher engagement? Was there a type of content that was tried that totally flopped and most importantly, is your audience even active on this platform?

Also take a look at the way your profiles themselves are set up. There are likely opportunities to update main/cover photos and company information. Additionally, many platforms have offerings to enhance your profile such as enabling Messenger on Facebook to support customer questions or turning on and filling out the Workplace Module on LinkedIn.

Understand what channels will contribute to success – Remember that different channels can have different purposes and measures of success. Pick which channels will help you achieve your overarching goals and then figure out your main strategy / purpose for each to always come back to when designing content for that channel. Also remember that you don’t have to be on every platform – it’s better to pick 2 or 3 and execute a kick-ass strategy than to try to be everywhere with watered down content and an inconsistent posting cadence. If you can’t think of a reason to be on a specific channel (or you know you couldn’t execute on it well) you don’t need to be there.

Get inspired – Are there any brands out there regardless of industry that resonate? What brands do you and your team follow and enjoy following? Why, what draws you in? Is it the visual identity, the tone of voice used, the inspirational nature of the posts, the irreverent and hilarious captions, or the timely response to current events? Take note of what (and why) this engages you and how you could transition those concepts to your own channels.

Define your content pillars & create your content calendar – Based on your goals, what are the main content buckets that you will create content for? These should directly tie back to your main goals for social (be it lead gen, web traffic, hiring needs, whatever!) Examples of buckets could include, Thought Leadership, How To Videos, Company Culture, Employee Spotlight, Client Testimonials, Event Promotions, etc. Remember though that no one wants to be a lead, so make sure your content buckets provide value vs. just promoting goods or services. A good rule of thumb is the 80-20 rule – where 80% of your posts should educate, inform or entertain your audience, while 20% can more directly promote the brand itself.

Once you have defined what type of content you will be sharing, you need to define when and where you will be sharing it. Having a schedule for what time of day specific types of content will be posted to what channel will help hold you accountable to actually posting when you say you will (and not posting too much or too little) but will also help you understand patterns of engagement.

Create the content – But make it interesting and stock pile it! It’s go time to start actually creating your content. Brand standards should dictate general look/tone/feel of your content and some visual templates for things like testimonies, employee spotlights or quotes can go a long way in contributing to a cohesive, consistent look but be careful to keep things interesting! If you find yourself creating something thinking “I don’t like this” or “eh, who cares” it probably won’t inspire your audience either. Keep things fresh by frequently gathering new assets (new photos, videos, etc) and keep your channels in mind! No one expects to see a professional broadcast spot on TikTok just like an in-depth whitepaper might not land on Instagram.

When creating content it’s also a good idea to create a bank of content for each bucket so you’re not constantly scrambling figuring out what to post or having to go to your team every single day to ask for new graphics or videos!

Compile your tools – Get yourself set up with scheduling and social listening tools. Scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social or even HubSpot’s marketing platform allow you to schedule posts in advance (and track metrics) to help your team get ahead of the ball vs. needing to post natively to multiple platforms multiple times per day. There may be some limitations within some tools, but they should allow you to get about 75% of your content posted! Don’t forget that real time engagement with customers and response to current events still needs to remain top of mind though, and that some platforms (such as TikTok) fluctuate trends so frequently that it may be hard to plan in advance.

Other tools to consider looking into include social listening tools to keep an eye on what topics are trending and what people are saying about your competitors. Top platforms include Falcoln.io, Buffer, and again, social giant Hootsuite.

Measure and adjust – Go forth and post…and then analyze and pivot if needed! Social media is not an exact science, and it’s hard to tell what people will be interested in 5 months from now or what new channel people may flock to next year, but you can understand how they interact with the content you are putting forth and make adjustments to the content itself, the channels you are utilizing, the times you are posting or even the audience you are trying to attract to ensure you are hitting those goals to make social the most valuable tool it can be for your business!

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