HubSpot is widely known as a digital marketing tool. It can help you curate marketing emails, send updates about your certification, and even build landing pages for your certification campaigns.
However, it’s much more powerful and versatile than many people realize. HubSpot can collect, organize, and disseminate information as the foundation of an analytical, data-driven approach to personalized customer experience for your certification organization.
More and more certification organizations are exploring selling different types of achievements to customers. In today’s revenue reporting landscape, this means you’ll need to rely on metrics like average lifetime customer value and net promoter score. Selling an initial certification, rating, or achievement to a customer is often just the beginning of their buyer journey. After that first purchase, the focus shifts to the next purchase — whether it’s joining a membership or a larger purchase of a related certification achievement.
Understanding the power of those segmented, targeted interactions with your customers, can provide tremendous value for the customer experience, which is what creates loyalty to your certification brand.
To achieve this tailored, targeted approach to the buyer’s journey you need to build a marketing strategy that incorporates a number of technology tactics. Most certification organizations understand the importance of using data to create a personalized customer experience (CX), mapped to Ideal Customer Profiles and Buyer Personas. But how do you match those profiles and personas to your real-world buyers? Moreover, how can your organization gather the right data, and leverage it effectively, to provide a consistent CX in different systems?
We’ve seen businesses rely on a number of different platforms. For instance, conversion data might exist within HubSpot, sales interactions could be held separately in a different CRM like Salesforce, and data collected throughout different websites and applications might exist within its own separate databases. If the data in these systems stays siloed, you’re not operating with a full, accurate picture, which can lead to less tailored processes — and more missed opportunities.
For example, imagine an interested lead comes to your website and creates an account. They explore further and see more of what you have to offer, ultimately finding something they like. However, they don’t complete the transaction. That’s a strong lead!
They have a clear interest, and the next step you want them to take is to complete that initial purchase. But without the whole picture — the account creation, the time spent on the site, the pages visited before and after putting your certification offering in their cart — you may not know this lead needs nurturing. Much less how to do it.
Each of these datapoints touches on different systems and different repositories, and without processes in place to pull that information together from those repositories, higher-quality leads may be going unnoticed. With more visibility, you can better identify customers ready to be nurtured to the next level, and have a better sense of what they’re looking for so you know how to position your brand to deliver it.
You may have a few questions at this point:
- How to solve for these disconnected systems?
- What platforms are involved in this process?
- How will the data sync between the systems?
- What do you do with the data once you have it?
- What data do you need to identify to know what next step is the best fit for this customer?
Let’s dig in.
Our Approach
HubSpot can act as a central hub for your certification business, integrating various tools and functionalities to streamline data tracking and management across different aspects of the customer journey.
Here's how HubSpot brings together disparate systems:
Website Analytics & Customer Engagement
- Website Tracking: HubSpot integrates seamlessly with many popular CMSes, along with Google Analytics, to track user behavior through website traffic, form submissions, page views, and other site interactions.
- Engagement Tracking: HubSpot also allows you to monitor customer engagement across different channels (email, social media, live chat). You can see how visitors interact with your content, track email opens and click-through rates, and understand how customers engage with your brand online.
Deal Tracking & Lead Tracking:
- CRM Integration: HubSpot is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system at its core. Leads and deals are housed within the CRM, allowing you to track their progress throughout the sales funnel.
- Lead Scoring: HubSpot also allows you to assign scores to leads based on their activity and engagement, using the data and information from above. This helps you prioritize leads with the highest potential for conversion.
- Deal Stages: You can define various deal stages within the CRM (e.g., qualification, proposal, negotiation) and track the progress of each deal towards closing, providing invaluable information for your revenue operations teams.
Campaign Conversion Tracking
- Campaign Creation & Management: HubSpot lets you to create and manage marketing campaigns across various channels like email, social media, and paid advertising, keeping your ROI and ROAS centrally located in the platform. Review performance, make optimizations, and understand how your potential customers are engaging with your efforts.
- UTM Parameters: HubSpot helps you generate UTM parameters (trackable codes) for your marketing campaigns. These codes allow you to see which specific campaigns are driving website traffic, leads, and ultimately, sales.
- Closed-Loop Reporting: By integrating website analytics, lead tracking, deal tracking, and campaign management, HubSpot provides a holistic view of your marketing efforts. You can see how campaigns generate website traffic, convert leads into deals, and ultimately contribute to revenue generation.
HubSpot Integrations Centralize Data Efforts
When all your customer data (website behavior, email engagement, deal stages, etc.) is housed–or transferred into–a single platform, you’ll eliminate the need to manage information across multiple disparate systems. HubSpot also provides real-time insights and comprehensive reporting across different areas, giving you a clearer picture of your customer journey and marketing effectiveness.
With consolidated data and insights, you can make data-driven decisions about marketing strategies, sales efforts, and the overall customer experience for your certification business.
In essence, HubSpot acts as a central nervous system, connecting the dots between website analytics, customer engagement, deal tracking, lead tracking, and campaign conversion tracking. Helping you gain a unified view of your customer journey, optimize your marketing and sales efforts, and ultimately drive business growth.
