Using Hubspot: 3 Steps to Benchmarking and Improving Your Advertising
HubSpot has such a great set of tools, I decided to spend a little more time on it after mentioning their site in my article on social media benchmarks. That was about how to take a reading of your current advertising. It's like taking a road trip and measuring how much gas you use. Before you leave, you have to read the odometer and then read it again every time you stop for gas.
The difference is that a tank of gas costs less than a hundred bucks, and you have to have it. No gas = no trip. Advertising can cost thousands of dollars, and you don't have to have it.
Yes, that's marketing heresy. And a lot of my fellow copywriters are going to scream at me for saying it, but it's true. Many businesses are spending more on advertising than they need to. They're spending it in the wrong places. And most ad reps don't want you to track ROI because they're afraid you'll stop advertising with them.
That's enough of my ranting. Let's get into seeing how to use HubSpot to measure and improve. We'll use my favorite example: a hardware store owner, Mary the Mechanical Genius.
Mary has been in business for 16 years. Her revenues are good, she advertises every week in the local paper, and her website is accurate. It's about four years old and only has three pages, but everything's accurate.
The first thing Mary does today is get her copy of the Technorati giveaway, The Illustrated Guide to Creating Social Media Profiles. Mary knows it's time to get serious about using the "new media" and "today's technology" (don't you just love buzzwords?), because even though revenues are good, they aren't what they were two years ago.
Step 1, get your social media profiles in place. It will take you 35 to 45 minutes using The Illustrated Guide.
Step 2. Take benchmark readings of your online presence. This is where HubSpot comes in. Start with the Website Grader. Pick three of your competitors to be compared with. I recommend Mary choose one local competitor and two of the big names in her industry. In Canada, that would be Canadian Tire and Pro Hardware. In the U.S. it might be Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
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