Potential customers are everywhere.
It's getting harder to acquire and keep customer attention. While customers want personalized experiences, they also want information, fast. Your customers look for answers across multiple platforms - they no longer just use Google.
With so many different ways for a customer to engage and interact with a brand, it’s more challenging than ever to create seamless user experiences. This is where integrated marketing communications come in, and HubSpot is growing to accommodate more effective marketing and engagement strategies.
How HubSpot Empowers Integrated Marketing Communications
Integrated Marketing Communications
Brands have learned to develop more customer-centric marketing, content, and messaging, but today’s customers are fickle. After years of forcing customers to interact via phone, email, or on a website, the landscape is changing.
Customers are no longer living in their inboxes, or going out of their way to contact brands. As a result, brands have struggled to keep their message in front of their prospects.
Marketers need to shift the focus, from “our space” to “their space” - the space where their customers are actually spending their time. While companies are doing a good job of advertising across all these channels, advertising can’t be a catch-all.
To master integrated marketing communications, you need to natively reach people, but you also need the data about those interactions as well.
This is where HubSpot comes in.
HubSpot and Integrated Marketing Communications
The goal of integrated marketing communications is to engage, but also to gain data. For instance, marketers have commonly ventured onto Facebook to entice people away from Facebook and onto their website. Today, Facebook is prioritizing content that keeps people on the Facebook platform.
So it YouTube.
So is Instagram.
So is just about any other smart platform with a huge user base.
Keeping users on their platform means they get to show them more ads - which means more money for the platform. Why would any platform prioritize advertisements that took people away?
They don’t, anymore.
Integrated communications are the art of communicating with customers, from channel to channel, while keeping a seamless experience. And, you want to keep the data from those communications as well, so you can measure and learn from your marketing actions.
Ways To Use HubSpot To Create Better User Experiences
Most companies no longer require potential customers to sift through a ton of content to get answers to easy questions. Most prospects don’t have time to go through the pages of a website of a blog when they have a simple query. Smart brands also don’t require the customer to pour through a knowledge-base of information.
Instead, companies are using instant chat solutions like Drift or Intercom.
Their support is instantly accessible, and all the information can be captured and stored within HubSpot CRM, we see all that information.
We get insights on every message, action, or email opened - ALL inside the CRM. We don’t miss out on context, and we can guide customer conversations across platforms. The tools are no longer isolated.
Another example of an integrated tool is Facebook Messenger. It’s is becoming a rapidly popular method to engage with customers.
That's where they are.
We go to them.
A lot of brands using Facebook Messenger give their customers the ability to get questions answered faster, sign up for trials or demos, make appointments, download assets, and more.
The best part?
There are ways to integrate FB messenger on websites built with HubSpot. Using Hubs.ly links within FB Messenger, you can also track and trigger actions, storing all of the information within the contact record.
HubSpot also provides a lot of other capabilities to create better experiences for the customer, including:
Smart Content.
When used strategically, you can use smart content to collect more data about customers. That data can be used to change and personalize your website, landing pages, etc. based on the information known about a customer. By matching what you know about a visitor/lead/customer, marketers can serve up either TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU content, depending on anything from their stage, preferences, or location.
Voice Optimization.
We’re moving way beyond traditional SEO here. With tens of millions of Amazon Alexa devices sold in 2017 alone, marketers are measuring and analyzing voice search behavior more than ever. Using HubSpot, you can source traffic, queries, and search from desktop vs. mobile, tablet, and AI searches, and use data to further optimize for voice search.
On-Demand Content.
On-demand content and assistance are all about customer engagement. Using HubSpot, you can immediately deliver content, enroll customers into workflows, and provide customers with the answers and information they need as quickly as possible.
Where Integrated Marketing Communications Is Going
Building integrated marketing communications into your strategy is like social media strategies were ten years ago. It’s inevitable, and early adopters will benefit the most from it. Tools like HubSpot are developing more ways for brands to seamlessly interact where their customers are.
Word on the street is, HubSpot is testing a tool called HubSpot Conversations, which enables users to build and execute an integrated marketing communication strategy and help desk. In the future, customer support, FAQs, knowledge base, and everything that enables you to talk to customers will be connected. All of the customer data from your live chat, messenger, landing pages, documents will be stored within one contact chain.
With HubSpot, you can execute cross-channel lead nurturing and engagement strategies. Although one of the most common hurdles to a HubSpot implementation is the price tag, it's worth the investment. We put together a pricing guide for new HubSpotters to get started. See how you can save up to 60% on HubSpot with our savings guide.
