HubSpot, the world's leading inbound marketing software and our partner, comes with many advantages for its users. Businesses can use its extensive suite of tools to build landing pages, set up email automation and nurturing campaigns, manage and monitor their social media campaigns, and much more.
But one often-overlooked feature of the software may also be its most important: reports.
The extensive reporting options HubSpot offers can help marketers optimize their efforts and maximize their ROI. In fact, leveraging the reports tool in HubSpot can significantly improve the quality your inbound marketing strategy, which means more leads—and more sales.
Organizing Data In One Place
HubSpot's Reporting add-on tool pulls in all inbound marketing-related data and presents it in charts and graphs that are easy to understand and analyze. But of course, you may still get data overload, especially if your inbound efforts are complex—which is where customized dashboards come into play.
On the home screen of the Reports tool, you can create, edit, and arrange dashboards for specific subsets of data. These dashboards can be distributed team-wide or remain within your personal screens, depending on who needs access. The entire process is true to the software's drag-and-drop methodology that makes arranging and analyzing data easy even for novices.
Building Out Your Reports
Based on these dashboards, HubSpot allows users to build reports that can and will impact both sales and marketing efforts. Here are just a few examples for your consideration:
- A contacts report enables you to view crucial insights about the current records in your database. Where do your leads come from, and how long do they typically stay in your database before taking some type of action? The report enables you to answer that and other questions about your individual contacts.
- A funnel report allows you and your team to analyze exactly how your leads move through the funnel. You can use that information to optimize the yield at each stage; if, for example, you only turn a small amount of your leads into sales-qualified leads, you may need to make adjustments at that stage.
- A sources report helps you determine which of your inbound efforts are most successful. For example, you can gain insights into whether you get most of your leads from organic search or your social efforts, giving you direction in terms of which sources give you the best possible ROI.
- An attribution report enables you to draw similar conclusions as a sources report, but based on internal factors. You can use it to learn which of your landing pages converts the most visitors to leads, or which web pages most frequently draw visitors toward your calls to action.
Of course, these are just a few of the many reports HubSpot enables you to run. All of them, though, come with the same goal: to optimize your inbound marketing efforts by guiding you toward the strategies, tactics, and efforts that work best for your audience.
Distributing Reports
Building your reports can give you crucial insights into your own efforts. But what if you need to share these efforts with others in your company? You may not be the only one engaging in inbound marketing, or you may need to prove ROI to your superiors in the company.
Fortunately, HubSpot reports help out in this area, as well. With the push of a button, you can email your reports to any user or non-user of the software. Alternatively, export the data as an Excel or .CSV file for easier access.
We have spent much time in this space talking about the value of inbound marketing. But even if you already engage in this marketing philosophy, you need reliable reporting to back up your efforts and maximize your success. With the HubSpot Reports tool and reporting add-on, you can visualize your progress more easily, allowing you to make smarter improvements and track your growth along the way.
