6 Ways to Generate Leads With HubSpot
Quality content is key to an effective inbound marketing strategy. It must speak directly to consumers and answer their questions about the specific products and services they seek. It must hold value. This will attract and help convert visitors into leads, and ultimately customers.
In order to create such content, it’s critical you identify and understand exactly who these potential prospects are, what they’re looking for, and how to get in touch with them, to best nurture them along The Buyer’s Journey.
Yeah, sure, you can buy a bunch of contacts from a fishy service, but really, your business deserves better than a list of random people with absolutely no interest in your offering, anyway. (They'll also be wondering how you got their contact information in the first place.)
Besides, those dead ends are more expensive than they’re worth—especially when you could be generating legitimate leads on your own!
How can you get people to give you their contact information to generate those leads?
Well, it takes a little work, but generating leads is definitely something that any business can manage, especially if they’re using tools available through inbound marketing and sales platform HubSpot.
Here are six ways businesses can generate leads via HubSpot:
1. Forms
A form is that magic place where a stranger becomes a lead, so it's only appropriate that HubSpot's form-building tools are first on our list.
Because of a form's critical role in inbound lead generation, it's equally important for your forms to be specifically built to collect the information required to adequately nurture the lead, without asking too much of them that the value of the requested information outweighs that of the offer. And since every business and offer differs, there is no simple form template that will work for every business.
While there are other programs out there on which you can build forms, HubSpot's Form tools help you easily and extensively personalize them to fit your unique needs. The tool comes with dozens of fields ready to go, and the option to create your own fields specific to the kind of information you want to collect. So whether you just want to know a visitor's name and email address or their favorite dinosaur, HubSpot will help you collect it.
Beyond the actual construction of the form, HubSpot automatically uploads new contacts directly to your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) so that they can be easily and immediately managed.
2. Landing Pages
Your landing pages will host most of the contact forms offering visitors additional content, such as an eBook or free demo, and transforming them into leads, so their performance is just as important as your forms.
Luckily, HubSpot also offers tools to easily create attractive and effective landing pages. User-friendly editing capabilities enable you to create the look and feel of the page, and import the form you'd like the visitor to see. HubSpot also offers personalization tools that can display different landing pages to different visitors. Even without collecting any information, you can display various landing pages according to such factors as the visitor's location, or type of device.
3. Calls-to-Action
If a form is the place on a landing page where strangers become leads, then a call-to-action (CTA) is the road that most of those strangers will take to get there. Your CTAs are how most of your website visitors will be brought to your landing pages to fill out a form and collect content offers.
But your visitors will never see the content offer or fill out the form if they aren’t enticed by your call-to-action!
So, even though there are many programs you can use to create CTAs, they are way too important for your inbound lead generation to use a program that doesn’t offer you the tools to optimize them for the greatest impact.
HubSpot’s CTA-building tool enables you to build customized CTAs that can be easily inserted onto any webpage or email built on HubSpot, or embedded into webpages or emails hosted elsewhere. And much like your HubSpot landing pages, your CTAs can be easily customized for different visitors—even those who are visiting your website for the first time!
4. Blogging
As we mentioned earlier, your blog content is how many visitors will arrive at your website and where they will be presented with the CTA, leading to the landing page, where they will fill out the form to become a lead. But a visitor won't set out on that journey if they aren't pleased with your blog content. Put yourself in your visitor's shoes. Would you click on a CTA if the blog post you were reading wasn't giving you a good experience? We didn't think so.
HubSpot's blogging tools give you everything you need to create attractive blog posts that will delight visitors and encourage them to become leads.
With the blog editor, you can easily write your blog content and review how it will look when published. With mobile-friendly content becoming increasingly important, the Preview tool shows you what your published blog post will look like when viewed on different devices, too, such as desktops, tablets and smartphones. This helps ensure your visitors have a pleasant user experience, regardless of exactly how they're viewing your blog. These blog editing tools also enable you to easily include images, embed URLs and code, and insert CTAs, among other features.
5. Live Chats
The benefits of live chats extend beyond simply giving your website visitors the opportunity to get quick answers to their questions and adding a human touch to their user experience. They also provide an excellent opportunity to generate a lead.
A visitor initiating a chat is demonstrating at least enough interest in your business that they are willing to give you the chance to answer their question, rather than simply leaving and going elsewhere. And by requesting some basic contact information, you’ve not only generated an authentic lead, but their chat will likely reveal valuable information—such as the products or services they’re interested in, or their stage in The Buyer's Journey, which can be used to better nurture the lead.
HubSpot’s Live Chat tool, part of their Sales Hub, helps you easily build the kind of chat experience you want for your visitors. Choose the look and feel of your chat, which visitors you want the chat displayed to, and which pages you’d like it visible on. And all chat information is automatically connected to HubSpot’s CRM, Sales and Marketing hubs!
6. Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook Lead Ads is a lead generation service provided by Facebook that can display your ad for a content offer to a targeted audience you select. When a Facebook user clicks on it, they are given the contact form, already populated with the information that Facebook has collected about that user. With HubSpot, you can integrate your account with Facebook Lead Ads to automatically import leads generated by those ads into your HubSpot CRM.
You can find this tool under the Marketing and Lead Capture tabs on your HubSpot account. From there, the Ads option will have you connect to your Facebook Ads or Facebook Business Manager account. Once connected, a Facebook window will open where you can create your Lead Ad campaign.
Once your campaign is launched, HubSpot will begin automatically importing collected information into you CRM. HubSpot's Add-ons will also let you create more specific audiences for your ads, displaying them for Facebook users who have visited your website before.
This way, HubSpot's tools makes it easier for you to take advantage of Facebook's audience and convert leads, even when those leads are not on your website.
Analysis is Key.
These HubSpot tools don't just share their user-friendliness in creating these features, but also the help they provide, even after they go live. The forms, the landing pages, the CTAs — none of these would be as useful as they could be if you weren't able to analyze their performance and their ability to get you the leads you need to grow your business.
With HubSpot's tools, you can always see how your pages, forms, CTAs, blogs, and ad campaigns are doing. Whether you want to know how many people have viewed your newest blog post, how frequently your CTA was clicked, or what devices were most frequently used to view your lead ad, HubSpot will provide you with helpful reports that you can use to optimize your inbound lead generation efforts.
