8 Time-Saving HubSpot Hacks for Busy Marketers

If you’re like us, then you spend an enormous amount of time per week working within the HubSpot Content, Contact, and Reporting tools. Content marketing requires time to take root and thrive. According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report, the average marketer spends between 1-3 hours writing a single blog post.

If your priority is generating remarkable content that your target audience will love, you don’t have time to be weeding through remedial, repetitive HubSpot tasks. That’s why we’ve come up with a list of 8 time-saving HubSpot hacks, so you can get back to what really matters – crushing your marketing goals for the year.

1. Save Your Report View

Whether you’re using HubSpot Basic or Enterprise, you have the power of custom-built Sources reports to help you close the loop on your marketing. Let’s say your CEO wants monthly updates on how your inbound marketing sources have performed over the past three months. Do you recreate this report at the end of every month? You don’t have to!

If you create an awesome report you love in HubSpot, simply click on the “Save as report” button in the top-right corner of your screen.

After you’ve named and saved your custom report, it is available for quick glances under Reports > Reports Home. No rebuilding necessary. Rolling dates will automatically update for the most up-to-date information.

Here’s another hack: while you’re in the tool, generate a variety of time-variant reports for quick view in Reports Home. That way, identifying trends in your source marketing is easier than ever. Just toggle between your saved reports in Reports Home and voila!

Some other customizations of your saved Sources report could include:

• A view of visits, contacts, or customers
• A view of specific sources, such as organic traffic
• Customization of a given time period
• Segmentation by your subdomains
• A standard bar graph, or cumulative graph

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

2. Use Reporting Recipes

If you’re just starting out on your HubSpot journey, you may not have a clear idea of what reports to create in order to gain the most insight into your marketing efforts. That’s why HubSpot created Reporting Recipes.

Reporting recipes are commonly used reports which are designed to help you measure your marketing performance over time.

To access Recipes, navigate to Reports > Reports Home and click on “Recipes” in the left-hand column.

Some standard reporting recipes available are:

• Understanding your contacts database with lifecycle stage distribution reports
• View your most converting offers
• Pages that generate the most leads
• Revenue reporting (if your CRM is integrated)

Simply click “Add this recipe” and there you have it! Your custom report is ready for you to name and save for future use.

But that’s not the only recipe outlet you have at your disposal. Recipes are also available in other tools, as well. Look for recipes in the Workflows tool to create common lead nurturing flows, or create a standardized content campaign using campaign recipes.

3. Emailing Reports

If you’re drafting weekly email updates for your entire team, you could save time by scheduling regular email updates based on your saved reports.

Let’s say you’d like to send monthly marketing source updates to your CEO. The first step is to navigate to your saved report in HubSpot. Go to Reports > Reports Home. Then select the report you’d like to email to your team.

In the left column menu, select “Email report”. Then select recipients, your email subject, a custom message, and the frequency which you would like the email to be sent. You also have the option to choose the day and time you would like the email to be sent on a recurring basis. HubSpot will automatically generate a report on that day, and email a copy for your team. The best part is, the recipients do not need to be HubSpot users to receive the report. You can send your findings to your entire company if you’d like.

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

4. Batch Upload Tweets

Using HubSpot’s social publishing tools is a great way to save time as a marketer. You can schedule Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter updates all in one area.

But if your company is sending out multiple Tweets a day, you don’t want to waste time scheduling each Tweet individually. HubSpot has made it easy for you to batch-upload your Tweets to the social publishing tool.

Simply navigate to Social > Social Publishing and click on the upload cloud in the top-right corner. Draft your Tweets in an Excel document following this outline, and upload the file. You can upload all your Tweets for the month in one step. You can even specify the date and times you’d like the Tweets to go out.

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

5. Automate Tasks with Workflows

If you spend time manually updating contact records, consider using the Workflows tool (available on Professional and Enterprise) to automate your internal and external tasks.

Some common tasks you can automate using workflows are:

• Assign a salesperson based on location
• Schedule a task in the HubSpot CRM
• Notify your team of form submissions
• Send follow up emails to contacts
• Assign lifecycle stage or move through the sales funnel
• Apply lead scores
• Set or delete internal contact properties
• Add or remove from other workflows or lists

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

6. Use Hidden Form Fields to Add Contact Data

Similar to how you can use workflows to automate tasks, you can also assign contact values by using hidden fields in the Forms tool.

For example, if your contact fills out a bottom-of-the-funnel form, such as to request a demo or a pricing quote, you can automatically assign their lifecycle stage to Sales Qualified Lead.

Simply add the field “Lifecycle Stage” to your form. Click on the pencil icon to edit the property. Then select the checkbox to make this field hidden. This prevents the contact from seeing this field when they fill out the form.

The next step is the most important. Select the option that you would like the default to be upon form submission. In this case, we are going to select “Sales Qualified Lead”. This will automatically assign that property type to any contact who fills out this form. Now instead of running a list of form submissions, and manually assigning a lifecycle stage, the Forms tool is completing this task for you behind the scenes.

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

7. Cloning

Did you spend an hour building an awesome landing page? Did you build a campaign that had incredible results? Do you have a content lead nurturing workflow that would work pretty well for another content offer?

In HubSpot, you almost never have to build anything from scratch twice. All of the tools in HubSpot allow you to clone an existing piece of content. You can clone emails, social posts, workflows, landing pages, site pages, CTAs, entire campaigns, lists, and forms. Where can you find the clone shortcut? In many places, such as within the CTA and Forms tools, it is located under the gear icon.

Alternately, the clone link may be located in the top-right corner of your screen, like on your email detail page, for example.

Here’s how to do this in HubSpot.

8. HubSpot Marketing Library

Adopting HubSpot’s incredibly successful and popular content marketing strategy has helped thousands of businesses see increased leads, contacts, and customers. HubSpot is a marketing master, and they regularly create new and exciting pieces of downloadable content for their personas.

As a HubSpot customer, you are granted full access to their content downloads in the Marketing Library. Here’s how you can access it:

Log in to HubSpot. Click on the “graduation cap” icon in the top-right corner and then select “Marketing Library”. From here, you can search for relevant content genres, content by lifecycle stage, or content by topic.

The Marketing Library can save you hours with free stock photos, PowerPoint templates, customizable CTAs, planning workbooks, content ideas, how-to guides, and educational webinars. If you’re starting a new project, hop over to the Marketing Library and see what free resources you have at your disposal.

Here’s where you can access the Marketing Library.

Your ultimate goal is to have HubSpot marketing tools working for you! These hacks will not only save you time, but will jumpstart your overall inbound marketing success.