How Your Law Firm Can Get The Most Out of HubSpot: 35 Tips
HubSpot is a terrific tool that can make a huge impact on your law firm’s digital marketing. Our clients license the platform and then ask us to help them to use it effectively. Here are 35 tips for getting the most benefits from your law firm’s HubSpot investment.
Why HubSpot?
Having a robust CRM system is essential for legal marketing and one of the simplest investments a firm can make in order to set itself apart from the competition. We’ve worked with many law firms and legal companies and have seen how an investment in HubSpot revolutionized their business development efforts. With HubSpot, legal marketers can host a large list of contacts, send emails, post on social media, track sales meetings and emails, build out landing pages and pop-up forms, track their ads, analyze their efforts, and so much more. No other CRM system on the market offers such robust capabilities and customizable plans.
As a HubSpot Gold Partner, we’ve seen firsthand how HubSpot has revolutionized so many firms’ marketing efforts. These 35 tips should help you see the value of HubSpot if you haven’t already or take your marketing to the next level if you’ve already purchased HubSpot.
1. Verify Real Email Addresses with Automated Follow-up Emails
Sometimes people don’t provide their real email addresses in forms. To ensure your list is valid, set up an automated response email (such as a “thank you”), and then see whether that email bounces. Then eliminate any that did. You can do this by creating a workflow that’s triggered by subscription enrollment.
2. Use Client Persona Questions on Forms
If you have client personas available, try using HubSpot’s form fields and workflows to automatically set a contact’s persona. Include qualifying questions like “What’s your biggest legal concern?” and then automatically assign them a client persona for future marketing.
3. Remove Navigation on Landing Pages
A good practice is to review landing pages and then eliminate any opportunities for the user to click off the page.
4. Direct to Thank You Pages Instead of Pop-ups
If someone takes the time to download your latest white paper or register for your newsletter, show them you appreciate it by taking them to a dedicated page instead of a simple pop-up. An added benefit is that you can use this page to provide additional resources or information.
5. Use Smart CTAs with Smart Content to Display More Relevant Messaging
Smart CTAs change based on who is viewing the item. You can set this up based on persona, lifecycle stage, or other factors you think matter. Make the most of this capability by taking the time to set up Smart CTA and content.
6. Make Sure Your CRM Systems Are Up to Date
CRM is great for managing relationships and contact information, but it can’t streamline your marketing efforts if you don’t set up workflows and ensure they’re working properly. For example, you can set up workflows to update contact information as you qualify leads automatically. The more work that can happen in the background without your staff’s manual effort, the better!
7. Use Branching Logic
Branching logic in workflows allows you to specify whether or not an action should trigger based on particular criteria being met. That means if a contact has already downloaded an ebook, you can set up a workflow to ensure that the contact is sent something new next time. This is key for lead nurturing sequences and can really improve overall lead quality.
8. Test Multiple CTAs
A robust digital experience offers more than just “Contact us” CTAs. Use different CTAs to move people through the sales cycle. But which ones are best? You’ll have to try a few and then check performance like views or conversions.
9. Optimize Messaging on Social Media Posts
HubSpot will allow you to analyze each individual post across social media platforms. This is the best way to see what works and what doesn’t.
10. Progressive Profiling Makes Actions More Relevant
Forms are incredibly important when it comes to lead nurturing. Using HubSpot’s helpful queued fields can ensure that any form fields a contact has already answered are being replaced with different ones. If someone has already filled out a certain form, HubSpot can automatically set it up so that the next time they land on the form they will submit different information.
11. Reporting
With the reporting add-on, you can easily build out custom reports or take a look at the templates HubSpot provides. These reports allow for a granular view of your marketing performance across channels. You can even customize your dashboard view so all your favorite reports are in one spot. Just go to the Reports tab and toggle to Dashboard.
12. Develop Personal and Team-wide Filters to Manage Contacts
Help your teams focus on the most important leads by filtering data in advance. You can use marketing lists and filter data within the sales contacts, companies, and deals views to make the best use of time and information.
13. Help People Book Appointments When it’s Convenient
The HubSpot meeting tool can facilitate scheduling meetings easily, eliminating back-and-forth emails. The HubSpot Meetings tool reads your calendar, identifies your availability, and allows prospects to choose a time.
14. Score Your Leads
HubSpot offers a lead scoring tool to make this process easier. By assigning values to behavior and other information contacts have provided, you can separate quality leads from people who aren’t as engaged.
15. Use Lead Flows for More On-page Conversions
HubSpot’s lead flows tool allows you to create content or other items that help visitors to convert at the right time. You can use certain triggers to determine when your pop-up, prompt, or form appears for a website viewer. For example; things like how long they have been on a page.
16. Monitor Competition
HubSpot is great for tracking your own keywords and conversions, but you can also check out what your competitors are doing. Use the “Competitor Reports” portal to understand metrics like keyword rankings, followers, etc.
17. Call Directly from CRM
You can use this strategy to have quick access to notes and also make sure the call is recorded.
18. Call Contacts at the Best Time
Research has shown that the best time to contact someone who filled out a form is within 5 minutes of them doing so. Get automatic alerts on form submissions and make sure your sales team contacts people right away.
19. Create Tasks for Users
Build out a list of tasks that need to be done right within your HubSpot CRM system. This can be really helpful to your business development team. Just got to the Sales tab and then Tasks. From there you can easily create tasks and assign them to users.
20. Merge Duplicate Contacts
Before you go on a deleting spree, try merging duplicate contacts. For example, combine contact information for people who have entered their personal email as well as their work email on different occasions.
21. A/B Test Emails
HubSpot allows you to automatically A/B test emails. Gone are the days when you have to manually send two different emails to your lists. Now you can do it with ease with the click of one button.
22. Enroll Contacts in Lists Using Workflows
Let’s say you want to create lists that are segmented. You can create a workflow where you set the trigger as whatever demographic you’d like to segment. This trigger will then automatically enroll contacts that meet that objective into a list.
23. Personalize Emails
Personalization has been proven to help improve conversion rates. Try adding personalization to email subject lines or in the copy of your email. You can do this by adding a personalization token. Try something like the user’s first name or company name.
24. Delete Unengaged Contacts
You should always try to re-engage users with a re-engagement campaign, but if all else fails, you can easily delete unengaged contacts. Just go to contacts and add a filter based on the last engagement date. From there, it’s easy to do a mass delete.
25. Improve Bounce Rate with Pop-Ups
You can improve your bounce rate by setting up pop-up forms that are based on exit intent. This will help move users down the marketing funnel and help you capture more leads.
26. Tracking URLs
Have you used UTM codes before? UTM codes are codes that you can put into URLs so that you can track what source your conversions come from. This is helpful as you leverage different channels or if you’re having more than one person promote a landing page. Got to Settings> Tracking Analytics> Tracking URLs.
27. Assign Contacts
You can easily assign contacts to members of your team who are working to convert leads and move them down the tunnel. Just go to Contacts, select any contacts you want to assign, and then hit the ‘Assign’ button in the top panel.
28. Email Drip Campaigns
We always recommend that firms make contact with users again after they’ve engaged with your firm, whether it be by subscribing, attending an event, or some other action. An email drip campaign is an automated series of emails sent over a longer span of time meant to slowly move users down the funnel over time. Go to Automation> Workflows, and create a Blank Workflow. You can set a trigger like having filled out a form and then set up the workflow so your series of marketing emails are sent over a span of time. Just make sure to add a time-lapse of some days between each send.
29. Email Reminders
You can send automatic email reminders to those with scheduled meetings. These can be set by selecting ‘send reminder emails to prospects who book meetings through this link.’ when editing a meeting.
30. Build Out a Social Media Calendar
You can schedule social media posts in advance even at the most optimal times by taking HubSpot’s suggestions based on your past posts. Then, you can toggle to the ‘Calendar’ view to easily see your month’s worth of social media posts.
31. Easily Track Campaigns
You can create campaigns by going to the Marketing tab and hitting Campaigns. From there, you can easily add any assets to the campaign in that tab or when you create or edit the asset. Add relevant social media posts, landing pages, ads, emails, tracking URLs, etc.
32. Upload Lists
You can easily upload lists from Excel/ Sheet/ Documents by hitting ‘Import Lists.’ Just make sure to verify that you’ve obtained this list with the users’ consent and you’re good to go.
33. Track Sales Emails
You can track sales emails you create outside of HubSpot’s platform with ease. You just need the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension installed. These emails will live under a contact’s Activity tab.
34. View Source Analysis
You can easily view which of your channels is bringing in the most contacts with the ‘new contacts by source’ report.
35. Schedule Blog Posts in Advance
You can schedule your blog posts in advance so it’s one less thing you have to worry about.
Takeaway:
HubSpot is an incredibly robust platform that can accelerate all of your digital marketing efforts. That being said, it can take time to learn all of the tips and tricks that will help you to make the most of your license.
As a Gold HubSpot Partner, we’re well versed in helping law firms and legal companies set up HubSpot and leverage the platform to its fullest capabilities. Contact us today for a free consultation in order to get started.
This post has been edited and republished from Dec. 14, 2021.
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