3 HubSpot Hacks to Save Marketers Time

In any business, time is money.  Especially for marketers, any opportunity to save time and increase productivity is a no-brainer.  The hard part, however, is that as marketing opportunities arise, as do daily responsibilities of the marketer; ranging from content writing, to social media, to reporting.  To handle these various activities, HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing platform is a great asset.  Not only does it save time by eliminating the need to log into and report from multiple systems, it streamlines common processes by connecting these tools together.  Additionally, we can take this a step further.  Employing HubSpot certainly makes a marketer’s life exponentially easier, yet there are some internal hacks one can take to add even more bliss to their marketing efforts.

1. Dashboard Customization

When logging into HubSpot, the dashboard is the first screen you see.  This is your home base, your starting point.  Although you can access any HubSpot tool from this screen, it often provides a great snapshot of your marketing efforts this month to date.  For many marketers or even upper management, this screen helps to take the temperature of their overall marketing health compared to the previous month or a particular goal.

What many HubSpot users might not know is that this screen is customizable.  Depending on what you normally look at on this screen, we can move that data front and center.  Conversely, if there’s a section of this screen that is of no value to you, you can hide it from sight.  To do this, simply click the gear icon next to the text “customize dashboard” at the bottom of the right-hand column of the page.  This shows you the modules available, which you can drag and drop to reorder as well as hide them by dragging them to the “hidden modules” section.  Upon saving those changes, you will see your dashboard reflect these updates.  For many marketers, being able to see the information of interest to them quickly and efficiently saves precious time throughout the day.

2. Saving Reports for Later Use

For many HubSpot users, the Sources tool tends to be a common destination.  In Sources, you are presented with granular data on traffic trends to your site, conversion data from various sources, and the ability to track these metrics over time.  Depending on your organization, how you report this data and what metrics are tracked can vary.  The standard view for this tool is looking at traffic from all traffic sources, this month to date.  To isolate specific sources or expand the date range, we must do some additional customization.  The issue here is that we must do this every time we log into this tool in order to report this specific information.   

A great hack to be aware of lives within the Reports Home tool.  This tool allows you to create reports and save them for easy access.  Doing this, we can have customized reports, showing only the data we need in the timeframe that is most important.  To do this, click the blue “create report” button in the top right corner of the Reports Home Screen and select a Sources Report.  In this next screen, you can build out the report based on the factors you want to include and save this to your reports dashboard.  Having premade reports that give you just what you’re looking for without further modification can streamline your overall reporting from daily to monthly marketing reports.

3. Social Publishing with the Chrome Plugin

Social media is a major part of any inbound strategy.  Whether composing a tweet, scheduling posts, or even following industry thought-leaders, social takes up significant time in any marketer’s day.  HubSpot’s Social Media Chrome Plugin can help in this regard.  In the social inbox tool, you can see a grey box advertising this plugin on the left hand side of the page.  By installing this, you now have access to your HubSpot publishing tool from anywhere on the web.  This comes in handy when publishing links to industry articles from other websites or even promoting certain pages or blogs from your own site.  Simply click the HubSpot icon in the Chrome add-on bar and your HubSpot social tool will pop up, allowing you to share that page through your various social channels.  This tool allows you to schedule posts without leaving the page or having to log back into HubSpot and copy/paste the page URL.  It’s also a great way to tee-up articles for future posts as you come across them on the web.

These hacks can help any HubSpot user free up time in their day and focus on improving their overall inbound efforts.  What hacks have you found that help you be a better marketer?  Tell us in the comments below!