At PR With Panache!, we’re always striving to better help the members of our client family connect with the folks who will put their solutions to work. That’s why we’re so excited to announce that we’ve earned platinum status in Hubspot’s agency partner program! It’s both a validation of our success in serving clients, and an opportunity to provide current and future clients even more value.
This will have some direct benefits for us that we can pass along to clients. For example, we now have access to the highest tier of customer support Hubspot offers—and this has already let us jump the line and quickly escalate a support ticket to solve a challenge for a client faster than we might’ve been able to in the past. But to really understand why we think this is a big pat on the back for us and a boon to our clients, we need to look at how we got here.
Agencies move up through the levels of the partnership program by serving more clients through Hubspot and doing a good job of it. Clients trust us to do this work for them because we’re Hubspot experts and we make sure their portals are being used. This could mean we’re managing their sales hub, their marketing hub, their services hub, or their CMS hub. Hubspot is a complicated tool with a lot of buttons, and the more buttons your clients let you push for them, the closer you get to leveling up as a partner.
But tools, no matter how many buttons they have, are pretty useless, and maybe even destructive, in unskilled hands. Our clients don’t continue to trust us to manage these tools for them just because we know what all the buttons do—though Marketing Director Benjamin Bachman certainly knows what the buttons do and has the Hubspot Champion User stats to prove it. Clients trust us in HubSpot because we know when to push the buttons in what order, and what kind of content or messaging they should be implementing before we push any buttons at all.
A big part of the way we know those answers is from Hubspot itself. We’ve recently adopted growth-driven design, which is technically a process for website development, but which really extends beyond that to encompass marketing and more. The idea is that, instead of designing an entire website and then seeing what works and what doesn’t after it’s up, you build the simplest site you can, then use data to guide you as you add more features and content. Essentially, it puts data in the driver’s seat so that you’re always investing in the upgrades that are most in line with business goals and cutting losses on ideas that aren’t working out as well as expected.
Hubspot is an incredible platform for this because it brings in data from different areas, be it sales, marketing, service, the CMS, or something else, so that we can figure out where we aren’t connecting. It’s just perfect for digging into the data and then putting it right back to use.
For example, a client recently asked us to help them promote an e-book they’d made available on their site because it just wasn’t getting the number of downloads they wanted to see. We could have just come up with an email campaign or rejiggered the landing pages to boost the number of downloads for them. Instead, we took a growth-driven design approach and found that the folks visiting the e-book landing page were actually spending lots of time on the site and interacting with other content. That and a few other signposts in the data told us that the audience being sent to the e-book was not quite ready for it. They needed a little more information, perhaps another piece of content, to help them progress a bit in their buyer’s journey before they were ready for the e-book.
By putting data in the driver’s seat, we helped that client see how to best use the resources at their disposal. In that case, their partnership with us was not the resource that was most likely to solve that particular challenge. It might be the next time around, though, and we’ll have the data to prove it through our own expertise and the Platinum-level tools Hubspot has put into our hands.