Everyone wants to find superior ways to reach their clients efficiently. While companies drive themselves mad trying to create the most incredible content or throw money at basic paid advertising, they often overlook that they already possess the secret ingredient to precision marketing: data.

However, just having this data isn’t enough if you don’t know how to utilize it properly. For data to be effective, it needs to be collected, stored, and harnessed to become valuable with minimal maintenance. 

For example, having all the names of anyone who visited your business’ website over the last eighteen months could be vital information.  However, isn’t it more important to identify which of your potential customers was just browsing, deeply interested in your product, or ready to buy?

By better understanding your data, you can ensure the right messaging gets to the right people at the right time without labor-intensive or prospect-annoying processes. 

Luckily, knowing how you utilize this data has made it more accessible than ever. You can turn your data into a marketing goldmine by implementing a CRM system and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

What’s a CRM?

A CRM is a system that holds the data of your customers. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as powerful as a constantly evolving AI single source of truth. When used correctly, a CRM can drive more revenue and delight prospects at every stage of the buying journey.

CRM is more than just a digital filing cabinet; It’s a way to access, understand, and effectively monetize your customer data.

CRMs Will Make The Most Out of Your Data

The marketers who get ahead today are hyper-focused on the customer experience. Experience-driven marketing puts your customers at the center of everything you do as a marketer.

When focused on the customer experience, marketing attracts and feeds into sales. Sales engage and feed into service. Service delights and feeds back into marketing. And all of this is only possible when the customer is at the center, managed by a CRM.

Leveraging your CRM is the secret to experience-driven marketing. Experience-driven marketing isn't just a buzzword -- it's your secret to growth. Forrester Research found that companies who said they are focused on experience grew 40% faster and increased customer lifetime value by more than 60%.

Very few marketers have their tools and tactics tightly integrated into a CRM, often leading to disjointed customer experiences, siloed data, and an inability to know what's working.

This is why we're investing so much effort in tightly integrating HubSpot's Marketing Hub with the CRM - to give your team a unified view of the customer experience, which allows you to create truly personalized experiences across all channels and to help you correctly measure your success as a marketer.

A CRM Helps You Personalize Your Marketing Offers

Rooting your marketing in a CRM also lets you create personalized experiences across every channel. Personalization continues to be the holy grail for delivering a great experience. In the hyper-competitive marketing landscape, winning your customers' attention is more challenging than ever. The more you personalize, the greater your chances of being noticed.

Real personalization is when the content on your site changes to be tailored for your customer, such as recommending content that your visitor hasn't read yet, showing products related to the item they’re looking for, or displaying different CTA depending on the customer’s number of visits. All of this is possible through CRM-driven marketing.

The three paths to CRM success:

With each action that uses a CRM system, it’s important to make sure your content has a clear intent for what customers you’re targeting with your specific marketing message. All of your marketing strategies should satisfy at least one of the below stages of CRM marketing:

• Contextualise - explain in clear terms why it's useful
• Personalise - make them feel valued and loved
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• Segment

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The average consumer is bombarded by promotional messaging and sees anywhere between 5000-1000 advertisements per day.

Think about the last time you were browsing on your phone, shopping online, checking in on social media, or reading the news. How many irrelevant adverts did you see? 

“Today only - 50% of all organic aloe vera & chili peanut butter cups!”

“Door, doors, doors! Get your doors from Acme doors! Big doors, small prices!”

“Crypto, something or other.”

We bet you’ve closed at least one web page this week because the advertising ruined your online experience. But there’s a more significant danger for marketers lurking in the internet shadows than angry prospects… Apathy!

When your consumer doesn’t feel like your messaging directly relates to their life at that moment, they’ll tune out. This is why a CRM is vital to modern marketing. If you don’t understand your customers, you can’t give them the content they need when they need it in a way that works for them.

But the good news is you already have the answer to the problem in your marketing arsenal - the data in your CRM. From that data, you can isolate specific groups of customers by wants, needs, and readiness to buy. 

Contextualize

To have your customers connect to your messaging, they first need to understand their own issues. By crafting your content to identify how your product can solve their problems, they will see the logic and develop a deeper connection with the marketing content.

For example, before a Project Manager becomes aware your forecasting software even exists, they first need to either experience or recognize they have a problem: the pain caused by poor planning tools. Then, with a problem to solve, they will look for a solution - from integrating a new tool right to outsourcing the entire problem. 

If you properly use your content to single out your consumer’s problem and provide an effective solution, your customers will be more inclined to place greater value on your product.

Personalize

Effective personalization doesn’t just mean greeting somebody through email by name. Modern personalization means sending relevant messaging promptly using the right language, tone, and subject matter. 

The power of personalization can be shown by the following example: You’ve started a small business in the last 6 months and receive a persuasive message from an invoice management software vendor on the perils of not completing your tax returns in time.

You want your prospects to feel a sense of serendipity. Ultimately, we know it was effective CRM management because you created a HubSpot workflow to message either HR managers one month before their next renewal date or small business owners who’ve set up shop in the last year. However, prospects will feel connected with your brand because the message is aimed at their needs at the right time.

Where contextualizing ends and personalization starts can be a grey area, so here’s an easy line to consider. Contextualization focuses on what you are going to say, while personalization emphasizes how you will say it.

Contextualization ensures you don’t torpedo a conversion by going too hard too soon, while personalization ensures the prospect feels you’re speaking directly to them when they’re most likely to want to hear your message.

How To Use HubSpot Marketing Hub for your CRM

Use HubSpot lists to segment your database

Lists are a great way to isolate segments of your database to identify specific customers you want to target.

By using this list as a jumping-off point, you can launch specific CRM actions, such as building a list of all contacts in the third month of their current contract or targeting every prospect that’s visited your pricing web page more than once in the last 30 days by sending them a discount code.

The more detailed your list is, the more precise you can make your CRM advertisements.

Create manually tracked custom behavioral events

Manually tracked custom behavioral events enable you to define and track events unique to your business. Custom behavioral events can be tied to contact properties, which you can use across HubSpot's tools. Manually tracked events use the analytics API and require a developer to set it up.

This tool in HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise allows you to track more advanced analytics on your website or from external third-party apps to gain richer context about the full customer journey. 

Learn how this tool works in this article>>

Build Campaign triggers linked to the Buyer's Journey using HubSpot

Consider the below stages of the Buyer’s Journey. Think of what kind of customers would best connect with each stage:

• Awareness: 

• Knowing about your product. 

• Consideration:

• Contemplating the benefits of your product.

• Decision: 

• Deciding on whether or not to buy your product.
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By labeling prospects in your CRM depending on their customer journey, you can ensure they see suitable messaging for their journey. Like how you probably wouldn’t propose marriage on a first date, you don’t want to bombard a prospect with technical data when they’ve only just discovered they have a problem. Keep sending well-timed, useful information like a small trail of breadcrumbs that draw the buyer in rather than forcing your product on them too soon.

By segmenting your audience, you can ensure they receive relevant, contextually relevant sales messaging to nurture prospects and improve convention rates.

Use HubSpot Smart Content to Contextualize your Messaging

HubSpot Smart content allows you to create different content based on a set of rules. Your emails, landing pages, and CTAs can display differently depending on what is known about a prospect or contact. 

For example, rather than taking time to send context-specific content to prospects manually, you can adapt your HubSpot pages to react to their needs instead. You can use the data in your CRM to show Awareness, Consideration, or Decision-related content depending on their needs, allowing you to tailor content to the stage of the buyers’ journey.

By understanding which prospects need to see your messaging, you reduce admin, boost conversion rates, and drive more revenue with less effort.

Use Custom Properties to Gather Company-Specific Information on your Leads

HubSpot, which comes ready-packed with a host of data points you can collect on each prospect. Ranging from name and address right through to how many emails they’ve opened, HubSpot can help you build a better understanding of both groups and individuals. 

with custom properties, you can build bespoke data points specific to your needs to make your customer information easier to understand and better organized. 

Your CRM is your growth engine

As long as you keep your CRM data organized and easy to access, you’ll be able to drive more sales and delight more customers. 

Segmenting your audience means you can narrow down exactly which groups of prospects you want to target to ensure you get the right message.

Contextualizing your messaging by matching it to a specific point in your prospect’s journey allows you to boost funnel conversions at every stage.

Personalizing your messaging means treating your prospects as real people so they trust and respect your brand. So show your prospects they matter by understanding their pain points and providing helpful information and solutions to their problems when needed.

How to Optimize the Timing of Your CRM Tactics

Just like how your CRM data is packed with useful demographic data that you can use to deliver your messaging perfectly, it’s also important to consider when sending out your personalized marketing messages.

Here are a few indicators you can use to help optimize your CRM timing:

When to Use CRM Tactics

• Use page tracking to provide individual recommendations

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• By knowing which pages a contact has visited you will be able to offer specific recommendations to contacts that are tailored to their needs. Think of this like remarketing for emails.
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• Use deal stages to trigger customized bots on pages to help drive sales
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• Use deal stages to trigger a bot to appear to prospects who are in a specific deal stage. 

• Having a bot that is tailored to the stages of the buyer's journey you can answer questions that buyers need at the right time.
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• Use known dates to trigger personal messaging
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• Send out a birthday email, anniversary mail, or even a mail about a customer's renewal date. These timely messages will help you engage with prospects and customers using the information you've gathered.
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• Use workflows to delay actions until a contact responds/performs an action

• In workflows, you can delay actions until a contact has completed an action, like visiting a web page or completing a form. The advantage of this is that you can wait till a buyer is engaged with you before you send them an email. This will allow you to align with buyers in real-time. 
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Turn your entire CRM into a marketing machine by sending the right message to the right people at the right time.

How Gorilla Marketing Can Help You Take Advantage of HubSpot’s CRM Abilities

Applying any or all of these ideas will undoubtedly drive more revenue through your business in a sustainable, cost-effective way. You can build profoundly personal and contextual campaigns at scale using the simple but powerful and effective toolset from HubSpot.

At Gorilla Marketing, we can help you specialize your HubSpot Marketing Hub to utilize its CRM abilities effectively to your advantage.

If you want to learn more about how we can take your CRM marketing to the next level, contact us at Gorilla Marketing or visit our homepage for more information.