How HubSpot Helps Our Small Marketing Team Appear Massive [Customer Story]

The marketing team at ISS 24/7 had been trying to build a marketing operation that lived up to
our brand name. Our issue was that we had rudimentary systems in place preventing us from generating much brand awareness. We appeared to be a far cry from reaching our goal of being true industry thought leaders.

Once we started using HubSpot, things changed. The result: We became a recognizable authority across many verticals in our industry and quadrupled our new contacts rate within a year.

When we first began formulating our marketing strategy here at ISS 24/7, the leader in incident management and CMMS software, we looked at our resources and what we could do – as lean as possible. Our goal has always been to increase revenue. But, to do that we knew we needed to build brand awareness, exponentially, and become industry thought leaders. 

How to Make Your Small Team Appear Massive

For the reach that our organization has as a niche B2B software company, we have myself, our graphic designer and multimedia specialist, Julia, and our VP of Administration, Debbie. Debbie edits the blog posts and helps me create marketing and sales emails people love to read. We currently have a 29% open rate on emails.

We’ve come a long way since we started using HubSpot a little over a year ago. Just like us, you can make your small marketing team appear massive. Trust us. We did it…and we’re still doing it.

Step 1: Learn Everything About HubSpot's Marketing Software, and Some More

Before you build your lean marketing team (that appears massive!), you must understand one thing: There’s a lot to learn. The key to your success and achieving your goal is putting in the work. The more you know about inbound marketing and HubSpot’s marketing software, the higher rate of success you’ll realize.

Do you want to be able to make your marketing appear bigger and bigger? Then, create the perfect foundation to do so. It’s a challenge to build what appears to be a massive marketing force from a few people. My team and I do a lot with a little, but that’s because we’re knowledgeable of our industry, marketing, and our tools (HubSpot).

Start with the Inbound and HubSpot Certifications provided by the HubSpot Academy team. The exams test your knowledge of inbound and HubSpot. You might think you know inbound marketing or HubSpot’s software. The truth is, you’ll only know once you’ve officially passed both exams. 

The HubSpot tools that we used to help our small marketing team appear massive were: The HubSpot Email, Landing Page, Social, Lists, and Workflows tools. 

Pure and simple, don’t leave any rocks unturned. Know your inbound marketing and your HubSpot marketing software. Know them both extremely well. When you do, then you can start to build your ‘massive’ marketing powerhouse.

Step 2: Define Your Strategy, Then Start Paving the Foundation

Now that you’re an inbound and HubSpot genius, are you ready for the fun part? Knowledge is power. Execution makes your power real.

It’s time to develop your secret plan. Use your newfound marketing knowledge and look at:

1. [Your] Buyer's Journey
2. [Your] Buyer Personas
3. [Your] Content Strategy
4. [Your] Social Media Strategy
5. [Your] Automation Tactics (a vital aspect of portraying a massive marketing team)
6. [Your] Analytics (KPIs, Data, the “stuff” you measure and how it’s important to your business)

You must know all this. It’s time to be ruthless and scrappy in your marketing...starting with your context as a business. Basically, what’s your relationship with your customer all about? How are you going to communicate with them, and how are they going to tell you they want what you’re selling?

You must do this well. Once you define your strategy, as it relates to the six areas I mentioned above, do what we love to do at ISS 24/7 – freaking execute! Your initial setup might not be perfect. And I get it, it’s a lot of work. That’s what will make your marketing operation great, though.

Step 3: Turn on Automation - It's a Small Marketing Team's Way for Appearing Massive

Once you have the foundation in place and the content available as a part of your arsenal, then you can turn on “Ludacris Mode.” ISS 24/7’s version of “Ludacris Mode” is automation. Automation is brilliant. We love it here at our software company. It’s the only way, with the help of my team, that I could run such an agile marketing operation without needing 10-100 other marketers, designers and copywriters to be successful. 

With your resources (content) at your fingertips, it’s time to unleash endless possibilities. I want you to think for a moment and put yourself in the perspective of your buyer. (We do a lot of role-playing for our business. It’s great for understanding. We recommend it.) Consider all the ways you can delight and nurture your leads, customers and evangelists. Now think about how you can do this without having to lift a finger, many times a day. We bet you can come up with a lot of creative ways to appear massive. Here’s the thing, before marketers could use automation we had to write email after email for each person we wanted to nurture.

Not anymore. 

Your number one way to make your small marketing team appear massive involves using automation. Here’s our disclaimer: Automation can be tricky but powerful if done correctly. The ROI on marketing automation can be drastic once effective workflows are in place.

HubSpot’s Workflows tool is my favorite aspect of the software. At ISS 24/7, we use workflows for internal updates, marketing, and sales. 

We do this with one basic concept in mind: We need to be top of consciousness with our buyer. So, to do that we have a lot of workflows. I mean a lot – well over 100. You can use these workflows to do anything from internal updates to sales follow-ups. You might even create internal workflows that trigger other workflows to start.

Like I said, though, you need to make sure you can handle this exponential growth. You need to define a format for your workflows so that anyone could go into your software and understand their purpose.

The greatest benefit of all this automation? ISS 24/7’s prospects, leads, subscribers and customers are receiving and accessing all sorts of valuable information. Money never sleeps, why should your marketing?

I love waking up in the morning seeing my HubSpot notifications on my phone. Our tagline at ISS 24/7 is “Peace of Mind for the World’s Greatest Properties.” As our Chief Communications
Officer, I have peace of mind knowing our leads and subscribers are being taken care of. I HubSpot because I want peace of mind.

Over to You

Appearing massive has its responsibilities. You must be able to continuously challenge yourself and provide your buyer with value. After all, you want them to buy from you and be happy to tell everyone else how awesome your business is.

Today, I wanted to give you some inspiration. If you only take away one lesson from this article, know that we at ISS 24/7 made our small marketing team appear massive. You can too.