How to Build a Data-Driven Content Strategy with HubSpot

Unleashing the Power of HubSpot to Power up Your Content Strategy

Developing content can feel like a never-ending job that you just do because the industry tells you it’s necessary. It’s supposed to drive all this traffic to your website, so, you spend valuable time finding good topics that will resonate with your customers, outlining what the content should cover and finding high-quality writers to draft the content.

The challenge with content marketing is, it’s hard to get it just right. To win with content, you need a highly strategic plan and tools that offer optimization insights to help you turn that content into traffic and lead generators.

That’s where HubSpot comes in. Its automation tools make it easier to generate high-quality content outlines that turn your content from good to great. Meanwhile, HubSpot will also be in the background collecting data to attribute leads and sales directly to your content marketing efforts, showing you what’s working, where you can improve and offering clear attribution to your leadership team.

HubSpot Content Strategy Tools

To understand thevalue HubSpot offers your content strategy, you must first get acquainted with the tools it offers. Here’s a look at what makes Marketing Hub an asset to content marketing strategy.

1. Content Creation and Management Tools

As you build your content strategy, you should organize it by topic. Search engines favor content that is well organized and makes it easier for the reader to learn more about a given topic. By connecting HubSpot to Google's Search Console and using the Topic Cluster tool, you can discover topics that are a good fit for your audience.

The system offers topic suggestions alongside competition, relevance and popularity. You can use those suggestions to create new content and frame existing content based on your company’s most relevant core topics.

2. Content Creation And Management Tools

Once you’ve drafted content based on the insights HubSpot offers, you can use the "optimize" feature to find additional tips and insights for ranking. You’ll learn whether you’ve overused keywords, are missing image tags or have keyword opportunities to make the content resonate better with your audience and search engines.

While SEO is an important element of a successful content marketing plan, it isn’t the only element. Distributing the content to your audience via email and social media can also help you get the most from the effort you put into that content. HubSpot’s content distribution tools ensure that the final element of releasing new content isn’t missed. For example, we recommend amplifying the reach of your blog posts using HubSpot's automated publishing options - this makes it easy to post content regularly and allows you to monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations, and track engagement automatically,

3. Lead Generation and Nurturing Functionalities

Having content that generates leads is just one aspect of developing a strategy that results in measurable business results. You also need a good way to nurture the leads coming in from your content. By creating a nurturing campaign using email workflows, you can continue to engage your leads, stay top of mind with your audience and continue to provide them with the content they need to move closer to becoming a customer.

With HubSpot's Marketing Hub, you can create CTAs to capture leads, nurture those leads with email workflows, and attribute revenue to the contacts you nurtured into customers. Having these valuable tools in one place amplifies and simplifies your efforts to help you do more with less.

4. Performance Tracking and Analytics

Once you find traction with your content strategy, you need to measure its effectiveness to prove its value and return on investment (ROI).

HubSpot offers estimations for website traffic and lead generation from a topic to help you prioritize the highest-value content to develop. Then it offers clear insights into which pieces of content are generating leads and sales for your business. HubSpot's tools include tactic-specific analytics, such as email performance and workflow enrollments.

With Marketing Hub, you can easily attribute leads to the content you’re developing. HubSpot follows those leads through every step of the sales cycle, allowing you to attribute new business from those leads back to your content. This will delight your executive team becasue you are now creating real business value and speaking in the terms they use, like opportunities created and revenue attribution. You can also create a executive dashboard within HubSpot, that will, at a glance, provide your executives the metrics most meaningful to them.

Steps to Revamp Your Content Strategy with HubSpot

With this data at your fingertips, you'll see where your content strategy needs adjustment. But you still might be unclear as to what that means. Here’s a step-by-step look at how to revamp your content strategy to start seeing better results.

Step 1: Defining Your Goals and Target Audience

Before you can develop an outstanding content strategy, you need to take a step back and first define your goals and outline your target audience. While you might know your audience with incredible clarity, spending some time explaining who they are, what they are looking for, and the challenges and pain points they face along the way will help you speak more directly to them.

No strategy is complete without goals. If your content marketing strategy goals are misaligned with overarching business goals, you’ll struggle to show the value you brought to the business through your efforts.

Take some time to review business objectives with leadership and align on what aspects of those objectives marketing is responsible for. Then integrate them into your content marketing strategy.

Step 2: Leveraging HubSpot's Content Creation and Management Tools

Using HubSpot for content strategy has many outstanding benefits.

• View content through the lens of your target audience and search engines.
• Write content for website visitors while optimizing it for SEO.
• Organize content by topic for improved user experience and greater SEO value.
• Prioritize content based on potential business impacts.
• Prove the value of content by tracking lead generation through to business results.

Ultimately, you can think you have great content ideas, but may produce content that no one reads because it doesn’t align with how your target audience is seeking answers to their greatest challenges. HubSpot helps you develop on-target content while matching searchers’ intent to deliver the right content for each step of the buyer journey. This helps you to build a winning strategy that delivers results.

Step 3: Optimizing Content for SEO and Distribution

After creating great content and not ranking for SEO, you might feel tempted to just forget about pleasing search engines at all. But the reality is, getting your SEO strategy right has the power to deliver scaleable results by driving organic traffic to your website.

This isn’t just any traffic that you’ll start seeing. It’s traffic from your target audience during a crucial moment in their search for answers to their challenges and pain points.

Developing content also has a huge monetary upside. Unlike with paid ads, once you've spent the time and money to develop and publish a piece of content, you don't need to spend another dime - that means that all organic traffic you generate from there is cost-free, leading to a low cost-per-lead and reduced customer acquisition costs.

So, while it might feel like a long game to win at SEO, the right tools can make all the difference. As you dive into HubSpot’s content marketing tools you might find that with greater insights, you can begin ranking and experiencing greater value from your content.

Combine that with HubSpot’s content distribution capabilities that automate the process to save your team time, and you have a winning content marketing engine that leaves you more time to analyze results and strategize ways to improve and grow your business in meaningful ways.

Step 4: Generating and Nurturing Leads with HubSpot

Taking time to consider what happens after a user interacts with your content and shares their information to learn more is an important next step. No content marketing strategy is complete without a plan to nurture the leads that you develop through various marketing channels.

HubSpot helps sales teams prioritize their leads through lead scoring. With an effective lead scoring system, you can differentiate between what makes a marketing-qualified lead versus a sales-qualified lead. After all, just becasue someone downloaded your eBook does not necessarily mean they are ready to buy. HubSpot allows you to automatically place those leads into a nurture series, based on their score, to move them towards the next step.

Meanwhile, HubSpot’s time-saving automations will update the prospect’s lead score based on their interactions with your lead nurture series and content. And when the lead is ready, the system automatically alerts sales that it’s time for an interaction.

As you develop your content, you'll need to consider what lead magnets or calls to action will be most effective for your website visitors based on their interests and the content that brought them to your website. That way, you ensure your content isn’t just driving traffic, but leading to valuable conversions.

Step 5: Tracking Performance and Iterating

Finally, you need a plan for how to track your content’s performance. HubSpot will tell you more than just how many hits a piece of content received. It will also tell you how many leads it generated and whether those leads turned into business. Gone are the days of reporting only on impressions or traffic generation.  You can now present metrics, like revenue attribution, that mean the most to your leadership team.

From there, you can adapt and optimize your content based on what’s resonating best with your audience. Each piece of content you develop will get better at meeting your customer’s needs and driving business results.

Perhaps you’ll discover that one lead magnet performs far better than another in driving leads for your business. With that information, you can update the calls to action within your content to unlock your strongest options.

The Tools to Go from Struggling to Winning with Content Marketing

Content marketing is impactful with the right strategy. If you aren’t seeing results despite developing great content, the issue might lie in the strategy and not the content. The right tools can make all the difference. Start maximizing your marketing technology stack now by taking advantage of HubSpot’s content marketing tools.

Not sure where to start with HubSpot and optimizing your content?

Our experts at Diaz & Cooper, HubSpot Platinum Solutions partners, can guide you in analyzing the data and extracting actionable insights.

With a data-driven content marketing strategy, you can demonstrate the impact of your efforts to your CEO and CFO. By showcasing measurable results and the value of your investment, you'll gain their support and secure the resources needed to fuel your content marketing success.

Book a call with us, and we'll help you end the frustration to unlock the true potential of your content strategy with HubSpot.