Adam Marquardt
Search and buyer trends show a growing preference for personalized user experiences (personalized UX). As inbound marketers, this is old news. We understand that Personalization is the pillar of UX, and UX is the heart of inbound (customer-centric) marketing.
HubSpot tools give us the power to create personalized experiences and conversion funnels. However, there are a few limits and even minor issues that come with using HubSpot. Certain tools are limited to a small portion of the platform. These tools can also be slow to load and require skipping through multiple screens. This can all limit how extensively we tailor the personalized UX for each buyer persona.
Thankfully, HubSpot has come out with The Easy Initiative - a series of improvements to the HubSpot interface that put the full function of its tools in marketers’ hands, in every screen. For those that don't already offer their buyer personas a personalized UX, we’ll briefly touch on this powerful practice. For those that do, we’ll cover how The Easy Initiative will help you reach the next, more effective level of personalization.
Benefits of Personalizing For Your Buyer Personas
A personalized UX allows marketers to create a flexible path to conversion that is consistently serving buyer personas with the most relevant and important content based on THEIR INTERESTS. There are no force-fed sales pitches. Those old, outbound marketing tactics grow progressively less effective by the day. Buyer personas are served only the content that applies to them.
Imagine their satisfaction when they're surprised with just the thing they're after and delighted by the rich, informative content that answers their questions. That satisfaction goes a long way to increasing the likelihood that they convert from a visitor into a lead and from a lead into a customer. A great example of this phenomenon can be found in shopping for clothing. Think about buying shoes. Generally, our first concern is fit. When we find a shoe that fits just right, we’re delighted. It’s comfortable and feels as if it’s made just for us.
In many cases, this makes us more likely to buy. We go from asking “Why would or should I buy this?” to “Why wouldn’t I buy this? It’s perfect for me!”. The conversion rate potential has gone up significantly. We offer buyer personas a unique UX for this very reason - to leverage that delightful “It’s perfect for me!” feeling and see our number of leads and prospects grow. In terms of inbound marketing and personalized UX, we can think of fit with respect to content medium. What speaks to our buyer persona? What fits them best? If they’re particularly busy or inclined to read short, salient bits of information, blogs may fit them best. Those buyer personas that require more in depth knowledge are often best served with long-form content types, like eBooks and whitepapers. The personalized approach doesn't stop there.
Fostering Loyalty
We can also leverage a personalized UX to improve our user targeting and increase their level of engagement with our business. If I know my buyer persona prefers blogs, that’s great, but we can do more to meet their needs by serving them blogs that are topically relevant to their searches and interactions within our site.
In doing so, we offer immense value to the consumer. We’re seen as a go-to resource for the information they need. Their return visits to our site increase and their total time on site rises as well as they comb through more information on their first area of search or even find other topics where our business can be of value to them.
In essence, we're creating loyalty. They come to know, trust, and value our business as a part of their life, which has a hugely positive impact on the likelihood that they become and remain our customer. This gives you a basic idea of how powerful personalization is in inbound marketing. So, what is The Easy Initiative and why is it going to help you offer a personalized UX?
Personalizing With HubSpot's Easy Initiative
The Easy Initiative is HubSpot’s campaign to ensure the product grows more robust while remaining streamlined, fast, and easy to use. The entire product team was brought together to meet the goal. The end result is four major improvements to the HubSpot platform and its tools. A larger, fullscreen interface was developed so graphs are larger and render in greater detail and more vivid color. New editing screens have been added to every content tool. You’ll now have editors and optimizers across Blogs, Site Pages, Landing Pages, and more.
Additionally, editing will now occur on a single screen. Gone is the need to jump back and forth between preview and editing views. New dashboards have been added, with a greater emphasis on key metrics. This will allow users to survey data and gain better insights faster. Finally, the list tool has been improved so that you can create lists faster. It is also now accessible in the same screen where you create workflows. These changes were specifically made with inbound marketers in mind and should go a long way to improving how they operate in the HubSpot platform.
What It Means For Marketers
The Easy Initiative means inbound marketers can now leverage the full functionality of HubSpot's tools to put themselves in their buyer personas’ shoes and create more deeply personalized user experiences.
The revised editors, optimizers, and list tool are of particular value. Site-wide optimizers mean we can ensure that every page - not just a few within certain tools, but every page - is SEO’d with the most relevant terms to each buyer persona.
More than that, marketers can choose to view content as specific buyer personas in all tools. What’s even better is that this can all be done in one screen. Added some smart content to a blog post and want to see how that will appear to your primary persona? No problem. Use the optimizer and editor to view as the primary persona. You can view the exact UX they’ll receive, regardless of whether you’re in Blogs, Site Pages, etc…, and be able to see firsthand where further changes or improvements need to be made.
Workflows have also been greatly improved with the changes to the Lists tool. We sometimes find users taking actions that we didn’t foresee or plan to include in a workflow. Sometimes we notice this as we’re in the actual building process. It’s worthwhile to add the extra steps and lists to ensure the most personalized UX, no matter what path the buyer persona takes. It used to be that you had to go to lists in a different screen, create the list, and then go back to workflows to finish adding the new actions. This is no longer necessary.
Now, you can create the list on-the-fly, inside the workflows tool. This saves you time and allows you to cover all actions a buyer persona could take within a conversion funnel. If we’re covering all the actions they could take, we’re ensuring a greater level of personalization and increasing our chance for conversion.
UX Is The Heart of Inbound Marketing
When we take time to personalize the user experience for each buyer persona, we are using a powerful tactic to not only attract new customers but also to create loyal customers that see our business as a thought leader and that serve as advocates for our brand. A personalized UX is something that was always possible via HubSpot but reaching the goal was often difficult and labor-intensive. Consequently, many users never took advantage of all HubSpot tools to create as robust a personalized experience for their buyer personas.
With The Easy Initiative, inbound marketers can more seamlessly use all the functionality within HubSpot to manage a personalized UX. We can better do this because of the greatly improved ability to see our work in the same screen, from the buyer persona’s position, and then fluidly return to editing the content. If you are not currently creating a personalized UX for each of your buyer personas or, perhaps, have given up on doing so, we recommend you make it a priority. It’s never been easier.
