Ads are a great way to drive awareness and conversions at every stage of your customer journey. Plus, Ads compliment a good inbound marketing strategy with relevant and non-interruptive content.
They’ve become even more relevant in the current Covid-19 pandemic, with more businesses moving to online sales than ever before.
But there’s also more advertising noise than there’s ever been. Customers are being constantly targeted with endless choices. And achieving positive ROI for marketers has become more difficult.
It’s more important than ever for marketers to stay targeted and personalized throughout the customer journey to break through the noise and generate leads that are the most valuable for their business. We’ve found that increased personalization captures attention and leads to better results.
But we know how hard that is. It’s a real challenge to deliver personalization in a scalable way. It’s hard to consolidate data across multiple platforms. It’s hard to keep up with the latest ways you can optimize your ads for each lifecycle stage. And it’s hard to commit budget to ads when getting a good return is becoming more difficult.
That’s why our latest additions to the HubSpot ads tool are focused on allowing you to build the most personalized, targeted ads in the easiest way possible.
The Ads tool enables CRM-powered advertising, which means you can use your existing customer data to build highly targeted and personalized ads without the need to import and export data manually.
Our latest releases help you:
- Optimize for the most valuable conversions through CRM-powered advertising
- Build and deploy the best ads for every stage of the funnel
- Ensure your ads are highly targeted and personalized
- Give you more ways to manage your campaigns from within HubSpot
So what’s new?
- Ads Optimization Events
- Ad Sequences
- Exporting Ad Campaign Data
- Advanced Campaign Management
- Custom Fields
- Hidden Fields
- LinkedIn Lookalike Audiences
- Expanded Ads Reporting
- Company List Targeting
- Facebook & LinkedIn Web Traffic Campaigns
- Embedded Workflows
- Google Campaign Creation
1. Ads Optimization Events
To break through the noise and get the best return on ad spend, you need to be as targeted and relevant as possible at every stage of customer interaction.
An excellent way to do this is by using the customer data that lives in your CRM. Data about offline conversion events, for example, can help you target and optimize your campaigns to improve lead quality and increase profit.
Here’s what that means: sometimes ads don’t lead directly to an online sale and instead lead to a sale made offline, such as at your office or over the phone.
By importing these offline conversion events to Google, you can measure what happens after your ad results in a click or call to your business. This gives you a more comprehensive look at which keywords and targeting criteria — for example, geography or time of day — drive the most cost-effective conversions. Which means more customers for less money.
That’s why we built Ads Optimization events. It allows you to sync your HubSpot CRM contact lifecycle stages with Google and feed your offline customer conversion data right from HubSpot into Google Ads, no integration work nor developer help needed.
And this is where the magic happens. When you feed your Google Ads account more accurate conversion data, it triggers your Smart Bidding algorithm. With Smart Bidding, Google uses your offline data to make real-time bidding adjustments and prioritize high-quality leads, driving a higher return on ad spend.
Now, Facebook and Google will know when a user became a lead or customer and how much that is worth to you. Which means they can start optimizing toward the most valuable leads for your business.
Optimizing advertising campaigns towards users that have converted into paying customers helps you find more customers for less dollars leading to a higher ROAS and a higher ROI on your overall marketing campaigns.
This is available to Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise users.
2. Ad Sequences
At HubSpot, we’re big proponents of Journey-based advertising to make sure your ads are always relevant and helpful as part of a good inbound-marketing strategy.
Journey-based advertising uses the buyer’s journey to inform your advertising content, formats, and campaign settings. It’s the key to a better user experience and optimizes ads for performance. If you need to get more advertising ROI, it’s time to focus on buyer needs through journey-based advertising.
We’ve introduced a way for you to do this directly in HubSpot with Ad Sequences.
Ad Sequences allows marketers to create an end-to-end lead generation sequence that takes a cold audience and finds warm leads that will turn into paying customers. This automated sequence takes the guesswork out of targeting and allows you to focus on crafting the best ad messages to attract the right types of leads.
Ad Sequences are going to be live for Facebook Ads in November, but because we know you're always looking to grow better, we plan on expanding this to include even more networks.
The Ad Sequence builder will be available for Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise.
3. Exporting Ad Campaign Data
HubSpot marketers use their data for lots of different purposes. So we’ve enabled an efficient way for you to gather ad network reporting and HubSpot data into one easy spreadsheet so you can use your data in the way that’s most valuable to you.
You can now download ad campaign and ad set data from the Ads Tool based on filters set in the Ads Tool.
4. Advanced Campaign Management Across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google
We’ve introduced the ability to edit names, budgets, start and end dates, and times for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ad Campaigns directly from HubSpot. This makes it easier for you to manage your campaigns without switching back and forth between tabs.
For example, you see Campaign A has brought 10 leads in, contributing to $10,000 in revenue. Now, you can choose to extend that campaign and add additional budget to continue getting qualified leads without ever having to leave HubSpot.
You can also:
- Edit campaign names and ad set names
- Remove ad groups
- Edit budgets
- Add new keywords
- Edit or remove keywords
- Edit the end date
- Edit the start date if the campaign or ad group hasn’t launched yet
- Automate a list of contacts associated with a Google campaign or ad group
- Pause and enable campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords
5. Custom Fields
Now, when you create a Lead Form ad in HubSpot, you have the option to add your own custom field that will then automatically become a property in HubSpot. This means you can capture the information that’s going to be most useful for your business without having to manually enter it. Having more enriched data on all your leads lets you nurture them more effectively through the funnel and then route them more efficiently to the appropriate sales reps.
6. Hidden Fields
Hidden fields help you report on campaigns more efficiently and easily organize your data without making your forms clunky. Using hidden fields in your lead ad forms also means you don’t have to manually track and enter source information for each campaign.
For example, you could capture data like lead source, medium, and ad content then easily spin up this data for the reports that you need.
You can now create new hidden fields for Facebook and LinkedIn lead ad forms directly from within HubSpot. You can also view data from hidden fields created directly in Facebook and LinkedIn within HubSpot.
7. LinkedIn Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences are extremely powerful for advertisers when it comes to targeting the best possible audience for a campaign. They allow you to create an audience based on your ideal customer or actual prospects that have visited your website. This enables you to target the people that are most likely to convert.
With our latest update, you can now create lookalike audiences of website visitors and contact lists created in HubSpot and have those automatically pushed into LinkedIn.
This was previously only enabled for Facebook, but now HubSpot customers can create lookalike audiences for both Facebook and LinkedIn.
8. Expanded Ads Reporting
Being able to see real-time metrics when looking at ad spend data is critical for marketers to make sound decisions. Marketers now have the ability to see Cost per MQL, Cost per SQL, Cost per deal, Cost per lead, Cost per opportunity, and Cost per session.
Adding these metrics will make ad reporting more actionable so you can quickly see which ads are performing well and which need adjustments.
This is available to Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise users.
9. Company List Targeting
Account-based marketers need the ability to target ads based on lists of companies, instead of lists of users, since they’re often targeting many different personas at one company.
Company list targeting in HubSpot is particularly powerful for ABM customers because HubSpot dynamically syncs company lists. This means when a company is no longer a target account, and thus doesn't need any more ads targeted at them, the company will be automatically removed from the Matched Audience in LinkedIn.
In this way your ABM campaigns are automatically optimized to target the most valuable prospects for your business at any given time.
This is available for all Starter, Pro, and Enterprise customers.
10. Facebook and LinkedIn Website Traffic Campaigns
You’ve just created a great new webpage through HubSpot that highlights the reasons why potential customers should download your ebook. But how do you get traffic to this page? One way is to create a website traffic campaign on Facebook or LinkedIn.
And now, you can do all of that through HubSpot.
Create a Facebook or LinkedIn ad campaign in HubSpot that links directly to a landing page. Build your campaign directly in the Ads Tool or from the CMS and Landing Pages.
11. Embedded Workflows
One of the most powerful tools in HubSpot is Automation. Having this embedded directly into campaign creation means you can automate all of your lead follow-up at scale.
When you create lead generation or website traffic campaigns in HubSpot, you can create workflows of the contacts you acquired from those campaigns directly from within the campaign creation tool. You can set up lead follow-up workflows quickly and easily, without having to remember what form they used or what ad ID the contact converted on. HubSpot will automatically do all of that for you.
This is available to Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise users.
12. Google Campaign Creation
HubSpot customers love using HubSpot because they can "do it all" on one platform. With Google search ad campaign creation, you can now create ad campaigns for all three ad networks directly from HubSpot. And because campaign creation exists within HubSpot, you can also easily use assets you've already made in HubSpot for your search campaign.
By leveraging the unique CRM-powered advertising capabilities in HubSpot, you can start to build the most personalized, targeted, and effective ad campaigns possible. Content tailored to each customer has never been more important and it’s never been easier to achieve with HubSpot.
Check out our Ads Academy courses to learn how to put all these great updates into practice and level up your ads strategy for 2020.
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