Som Puangladda

What marketing automation platform are you using and how long has it been a part of your tech stack? 

We use HubSpot and it’s been part of our stack for three years now at GumGum.

What are the key features you utilize and find critical on a daily basis? Why? 

We primarily use HubSpot as our core tool to capture leads through content and website forms, lead management and filtering. We also use it as an email marketing tool to provide additional content, warm up leads and drive conversions. 

Do you believe that you are maximizing the use of your MAP? Why or why not? 

We are not fully utilizing HubSpot as lead generation and email marketing hasn’t been a part of our strategy for a while. We’ve been focusing more on events to help drive revenue, but this is changing in 2019. We are developing a demand generation strategy to support revenue that we can get from the more than 8,000 leads that come through HubSpot, as well as cracking email marketing tactics to help support it. This entails drip campaigns, re-marketing leads with new pieces of content, push notifications to sales teams when their top accounts have web or lead activity and, last but not least, we are looking into using the analytics component more for better reporting. We have a dedicated marketing ops analyst that is fully responsible for this, which will help us tremendously.

What are the challenges limiting your abilities to leverage the full functionality of your chosen MAP? 

A lack of resources has been keeping us from fully owning our MAP, so we’ve been using the basic functionality of email marketing, form management and creating landing pages. We also feel that it is a full-time job to fully leverage HubSpot, as we have hundreds of leads come in each day and it’s been a challenge to work on the cold leads versus the hot leads. Hot leads are more urgent to us and have proven some ROI, but they are mostly overlooked since our sales team’s success is built more on relationship building and not lead conversion as their prospects may just be interested in content but not the next opportunity. A majority of our hot leads also need to be filtered. We are working on creating more efficiencies around this so we can use HubSpot for other areas to help us drive more revenue with our top accounts. 

What are the features/functionalities you are looking for your MAP to incorporate in 2019 to improve performance? Why? 

We are looking to explore analytics functionality as we invest more time and resources to show us ROI on our multimillion-dollar marketing budget, so we can make better decisions next year. Building our email nurturing campaigns for cold leads is another important feature that we need to tackle, as they are the low hanging fruit that we can convert to opportunities.

What is your New Year’s resolution for marketing automation?

Proving ROI from our MAP is key as we expand its usage more. We’d also love to have our sales team feel that demand generation and MAP are key to their success in reaching their sales goals!