Onboard with HubSpot using a HubSpot agency

How long does it take to onboard with HubSpot?

This depends on a number of factors and is entirely subject to what you had in place before deciding to use HubSpot for...

But, depending on where you're starting from, it is entirely possible to onboard with HubSpot within 90 days of signing up, particularly if you lean on the services of a HubSpot agency.

Obviously, choosing a HubSpot agency is a big decision (just like any decision to outsource any of your sales or marketing services) but using a HubSpot agency does make sense for some companies, because they have the expertise to not only get you set up and using the platform quickly, but they can provide on-going support to your team.

If you've never used HubSpot or marketing automation before it can be a little challenging to get to know how everything works, and how different integrations can work and improve your overall sales and marketing activity.

In this blog, we will run you through a typical onboarding process that a good HubSpot agency should use to get you started.

By the way. We recently ran a webinar with HubSpot on with topic of "going online & remote with HubSpot" so it might be worth having a listen to that as well.

HubSpot admin and initial set-up

The first stage of onboarding is to set up your users on your HubSpot portal and grant the necessary access rights to the team who will be using the platform. This is usually a pretty quick job and won't take up too much time to get going.

You would then need to install the HubSpot tracking code on your website, this is so the reporting function on the platform can start to pull through the metrics from your website that you'll be using to measure the success of your campaign.

Chances are, you already have a number of leads or contacts set up on a CRM, like Salesforce for instance, or you at least have a list of them somewhere. Importing this list of companies, contacts and deals (or syncing your current CRM to HubSpot) is the next job and depending what you already have in place, could take a couple of hours.

If you're not sure whether you need a CRM migration partner this blog will answer that question.

But your HubSpot agency can help you every step of the way.

Scheduling onboarding meetings is also an important early step here, setting time aside to workshop your strategy, content and buyer persona development or training is something you should definitely talk to your HubSpot agency about.

Another part of the initial set-up admin is documenting your lead hand-off process between sales and marketing. This is so everyone is on the same page about when a lead is handed over from marketing to the sales team, and what the lead nurture steps are along the way.

As a note, we'd definitely recommend getting a working group together at this stage to define the process, especially if you've never done it before.

Then you can start to think about migrating your landing pages (which will be carried out by HubSpot) but at this stage you might want to think about holding off on this if you're going through a website redevelopment.

Setting up HubSpot Marketing

Now that you've got the initial set-up completed, it's time to talk to your HubSpot agency about getting started with your Inbound Marketing.

One of the most important first steps here is to input your buyer personas, as these are going to guide pretty much everything you do with your inbound marketing from this point.

If you don't have buyer personas, your HubSpot agency can (or should be able to) carry out buyer persona workshops with you to create these important documents.

After this, your HubSpot agency will work with you to set-up your list segmentations and segment information by (persona, industry, lead assignment rules etc) and then will help you set up custom reporting for lead metrics.

These metrics will include things like click-through rate, conversion rate, time to customer conversion and cost per customer and will be used as a guide for the effectiveness of your inbound marketing content, the effectiveness of your CTAs and to give you a better idea how long your sales cycle is (or identify bottlenecks in the process).

You may also need to set up your lead scoring for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). This is the information you will use to assign points to leads as they are nurtured by marketing before being passed to sales after reaching a pre-agreed score.

At this stage you will replace all your website's forms or change your tracking with "collected forms" that are being used to capture lead details. You might need the help of a developer here to style your forms to match your website, but your HubSpot agency can help with this.

Getting these stages right now will save a lot of time later on and will help you keep your inbound marketing campaigns on track.

Setting up your campaigns and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) content

Now you're ready to get into the meat of your Inbound Marketing set-up and look at the content you'll be using to earn your prospect's information and nurture them through the lead process.

Start by identifying any High Value Content you have that you can "gate" behind a form and ask people to give you their information for access to download the content.

But, be 100% sure that the content is high value enough for someone to be willing to give you their email. Blogs, case studies or short videos are not content to be considered gating behind a form.

Detailed guides or industry reports on the other hand, should definitely be considered for this.

Creating your Thank-You pages, conversion tracking, setting up campaigns for your BOFU content offers and setting up Thank You emails should also be done at this stage.

Finally, add or create lead flows for your BOFU content on your existing blog posts (if you have any) and CTAs to your BOFU content to your existing blogs to encourage people to download them.

It's worth mentioning, that while videos might not be a content asset you should prioritise for a form, working with your HubSpot agency on video content is definitely something to work on for both marketing and sales.

Here is a blog on a few essential sales and marketing videos your team should look to create.

On-going content and reporting

With your initial BOFU campaigns sorted, you now need to focus on your on-going content strategy and start to focus on your reporting.

Initially you want to set-up your monthly reporting. This includes creating any dashboards you need to show the metrics you've decided to focus on so you have this in place.

Keep in mind that this is just the initial set-up and chances are you are going to come back to this and refine your reporting dashboards over time. In fact, we guarantee you will and it is something we always recommend as a HubSpot agency.

When it comes to your ongoing content strategy, you should be looking to create a content cluster for your top 3-5 content topics that you'll be focussing on in the next few months.

We have more information about content and topic clusters in this blog, but you should start to identify your pillar page topics and surrounding content clusters at this stage.

Ensure you are taking into account SEO and focusing the content on answering the key questions your prospects and customers are asking and, importantly, searching for answers on Google.

Onboarded with HubSpot

And there you have it.

It's a lot to get through but using ourselves as an example, we can typically get a new client through this process (which is based on using Pro or Enterprise level) in roughly 90 days and have them up and running and getting the most out of their HubSpot platform.

If your requirements are smaller it takes less time and we have been able to get clients up and running in a few days based on what they needed.

One thing we didn't mention above is that you should ask your HubSpot agency about team training so that, overtime, you can reduce your reliance on a HubSpot agency to use the platform and start to manage your resource in-house.

Sound strange that a HubSpot agency would be prepping you for the day you'll no longer need them?

That's what they should be doing.