You've just purchased HubSpot! Congratulations. You've worked hard to identify the optimal marketing automation software for your company, chosen HubSpot, and are primed for success. Here's some key things you should do in your HubSpot Portal the first month.
Get Certified
Before you dive into your HubSpot portal, take advantage of the Training & Certification center within your portal. Whether you want to get certified in Inbound Marketing, Growth Driven Design or Inbound Sales, this is the place to do it. Depending on your role in the organization and how much you'll be doing in HubSpot, plan on at least getting the basic Inbound certification. To do this, click on the graduation cap icon in the top right of your portal.
Give Access
Give the proper access to other people in your company who will be using HubSpot. Be sure you let people know you'll be giving them access to HubSpot. If they are unfamiliar with HubSpot, set up a time with them to walk through your new HubSpot portal. To to this go to your Profile in the top right of your portal and select Settings from the drop down menu.
Be Social
HubSpot offers integration for a number of social media platforms. You'll want to integrate the social platforms you use the most to easily publish and track your social engagement from blogs or landing pages you create. Hubspot lets you post social content simultaneously to multiple platforms. To set up social integration go to: Social > Settings in your portal.
Exclude IPs
You'll also want to exclude internal IP addresses or IPs of agencies or consultants that will regularly work in your HubSpot portal and visit your site. This allows for cleaner reporting and legitimate visit tracking. To exclude IPs go to: Reports > Report Settings in your portal and you will see an IP Filtering Link on the lower left of the screen.
Identify Keywords
If you have keywords that you have been tracking or would like to rank on, HubSpot can monitor them for you with its Keyword tool. Don't beat yourself up worrying about SEO when you first start using HubSpot. In your first month of HubSpot, start by adding 10 keywords you would like to monitor. To set up keywords, go to: Reports >Keywords in your portal.
Track Your Competition
It's always good to see where you rank relative to your competitors in items like Internet traffic rank, Facebook fans and linking domains. There is always someone waiting to snatch away your next potential customer from you so why no keep tabs on them and use them as a measuring stick for your online marketing success. To track your competition go to: Reports > Competitors in your portal.
Identify an Agency
If you don't have a large internal marketing department, you'll want to do some research on a HubSpot agency that will be able to meet your needs. Whether it's developing a marketing plan and then helping to implement it, or producing advanced content and blogs, or managing your paid campaigns online, an agency can help shoulder your marketing workload.
It's just important to get started. HubSpot is like a beautiful new Corvette. You have to be mindful and considerate as you learn to drive it.
