12 Useful HubSpot Tools for Freelance Writers and Writing Agencies
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Let’s start at the beginning… What is HubSpot? It’s an all-in-one software – a lead capture tool that includes all the necessary functionalities to run your business from a single platform. Actually, this tool became popular among marketing and sales professionals. But why? What exactly is HubSpot for? How does it work? And what are the top HubSpot tools for freelance writers and writing agencies?
Just as caterpillars become beautiful butterflies, your leads can grow and become loyal and regular clients. All it takes is time, patience, the right product or service, and good business relationships.
One of the easiest ways to manage these relationships with your clients is to use a CRM tool like HubSpot. A CRM tool is software that allows you to record and manage every interaction with your clients. It includes all the information needed to maintain relationships such as data and documents and gives you the ability to:
- Import contacts
- Add a task list for each contact
- Upload documents (such as contracts and invoices)
- Track all contacts
- Assign contacts to different people in your team (in case you manage a writing agency)
- Manage your work time
That’s why so many freelance writers and agencies love HubSpot. It can help you manage all the relationships with multiple clients in just one platform, achieving good results with little time investment.
Here, we show you the top 12 HubSpot tools for freelance writers and writing agencies.
1. Email Marketing: Automation and Customization
HubSpot is able to manage your content intelligently, generating workflows and combining campaigns and channels in a simple way. All this will allow you to segment your audience effectively, respond quickly to your contacts, and be present in more channels. Indeed, segmented campaigns increase revenue by around 760 percent.
With this email marketing tool, you’ll be able to keep your clients engaged with your content and offers, and segment clients according to the work you’ve done for them. For instance, you can create specific emails to clients who hired you for writing white papers and another email template for clients interested in your social media post-writing services.
You can also show your clients your latest work, so they can keep up with your activities. And if you have their full information, like their birthday, you can send them a birthday card email to show that you value them.
Thanks to the customization that HubSpot offers, you’ll adapt the experience for each user, creating a unique opportunity to convert leads and keep your existing clients engaged. This personalization tool is one of the key factors in communicating your value as a writer, especially given that the open rate of personalized content is 50 percent higher than non-personalized content.
With the preview function “what you see is what you get,” you also get to see exactly what your clients will receive. Similarly, you can also perform A/B tests to improve opening and click rates.
So, powerful email tools like this one will strengthen your connections with your clients and make your life easier too.
2. CRM
Do you want to bring more clients to your writing website or waste your time with outdated databases? Well, HubSpot tools for freelance writers help small writing businesses get organized while scaling up their activities.
If you’re at the beginning of your freelance career, it’s easy to keep track of everything with a simple spreadsheet. But once your business starts to grow, a spreadsheet doesn’t cut it anymore for keeping on top of customers, sales, work progress, email correspondence, internal notes, exchanged files, invoicing, appointments, and interviews – it’s impossible to manage everything!
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A CRM relieves you of repetitive tasks and helps you focus on your creativity. In a few words, HubSpot CRM automates tasks that salespeople hate. That means optimizing the sales process.
3. Content & Marketing Analytics
Many marketers claim that analytics and metrics are what make marketing a science and not a bet… And HubSpot helps you with a dashboard that makes it very easy to visualize and interpret what’s going on. With a simple glance, you’ll get all the information you need to tell you if your marketing efforts are paying off.
HubSpot is capable of analyzing both specific actions and campaigns. So, you’ll quickly find out which marketing strategies work for you, learn from your mistakes, and become more successful.
As an illustration, the website’s analysis tool allows you to analyze the performance of your HubSpot content using various statistics, such as the bounce rate, the average time spent on the page, the page views, and the number of entries on a HubSpot form.
This means that if you’re writing for your clients’ projects, you’ll be aware of their metrics and can make changes to increase engagement. Alternatively, if you’re analyzing your own blog performance, you can optimize your content based on the metrics HubSpot shows you.
In a few words, it offers you:
- Convenience. You’ll be able to manage all the content from the same space.
- Great design. You’ll get plenty of templates for blogs and websites.
- SEO optimization. HubSpot has a feature that tells you how you can optimize each piece of content for your website and blog.
- Personalization. It allows you to adapt and personalize the content you display – for example, different content depending on the phase of the purchase cycle your leads are in, and who has viewed your ad or downloaded content, among others factors.
4. Creating Your Blog
HubSpot allows you to create customized templates for post-publishing and helps you analyze your results.
More specifically, you can create posts, optimize them for search engines, manage published posts, save drafts, schedule posts, create different authors, manage comments, carry out analysis on the results of each post, etc.
With HubSpot’s blog software, it’s also possible to give access to the platform to different users. For example, if your writing agency manages many freelancers, you can define a writer profile for your collaborators and they will leave their articles in your blog’s draft.
Haven’t optimized your blog yet?
Having an updated and optimized blog is one of the key elements of your marketing strategy that helps you position yourself as an expert in your field. So, managing your blog with a CRM tool will:
Improve Your SEO
If your writing agency is small, you may have problems ranking for certain keywords… and a blog increases the range of keywords you can use with every post you publish.
Help You Get Loyal Visitors and Clients
If you offer quality content, you’ll get readers. In addition, as your blog grows, you can create a community of subscribers who will follow your news and comment on your blog.
Provide You with Content for Social Networks
You’ll be able to share your content and drive traffic to your website through social networks.
Improve Your Online Reputation
Having a quality blog on your website will help you demonstrate your knowledge. It humanizes your business and shows that there are real people behind the brand.
Help You Understand Your Target Audience Better
If you analyze the data from the blog, like searches and comments, you’ll have a better understanding of the needs or interests of your target audience. This, in turn, will help you improve your services, processes, or products.
Learn… and Learn a Lot
When you have a blog, you always end up researching new topics and going deeper into those topics you already know about to make better posts.
5. Landing Page and Thank You Page
What you really want is to convert visitors into leads, and those leads into customers… and later, into promoters of your brand and writing services. The hardest part of all this is getting their contact information.
First, you offer valuable content, a CTA (Call-To-Action) button, a landing page, and a thank you page. And with HubSpot, you can create and manage a landing page very easily. The landing page editor lets you do almost everything from the same window: Define the URL, titles, body of the landing page, images, forms, information, etc.
HubSpot tools for freelance writers help you create all these high-performance pages, with templates, rates, analytics, measurements, and personalized queries to get more clients for your agency and freelance services.
6. Social Networks
With HubSpot, you can monitor all the mentions of your brand and the conversations that interest you in all social networks, follow the engagements (tweets, likes, shares…), see everything that happened in your accounts chronologically, and schedule the publications in your social profiles. It definitely helps to attract and keep customers engaged with your content.
Additionally, you can use it for your clients’ posts and offer a better service when writing for their social networks as you’ll be able to evaluate the performance of the content every time you publish. It also allows you to manage their conversations and interactions with followers.
Specifically, HubSpot’s social media management tool gives you the following benefits:
- Inbox. This section shows, in real-time, all the interactions in your social networks linked to HubSpot; for example, Twitter retweets or Facebook messages, among others. It allows you to respond to conversations in the different social networks and follow up with your followers.
- Publishing. You can publish and schedule posts for all social networks. One of its advantages is that it allows you to share the posts, landing pages, and web pages created in the HubSpot “Content” section. This speeds up publications for you.
- Reports. From the “Reports” section, you can analyze the results of the different social networks.
- Social Settings. You can add and manage your accounts, post schedules, and notifications, among other things.
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7. HubSpot App Partner Program
HubSpot offers a lot of integrations through its app marketplace. This tool integrates with more than 200 software programs, so you can create a technological ecosystem to control your business and get more clients.
For example, it integrates with most email marketing platforms (Outlook, Mailchimp, Moosend, etc.), with chatbots and live chat tools, productivity tools (like Slack or Facebook Workplace), and with video platforms (like Wistia or Vidyard), etc. It means for example that you’ll be able to meet your clients in real-time using Zoom or manage your writing agency team through Trello.
And, if you don’t find the tool or integration you need, you can access the HubSpot API. Although to do it well, you might need a developer.
8. HubSpot Research
On its website, HubSpot also publishes great studies and reports on market trends. This is HubSpot Research, which will give you first-hand data on any marketing topic. Here, you’ll find updated figures on different marketing and sales topics, which will help you when writing for your clients’ blogs, or even your own blog. It brings out valuable information to inspire you as well as updated figures for making quotations.
It’s also worth mentioning that HubSpot offers some professional services such as consulting, onboarding services, and tool implementation or training in small groups for those companies that want more personalized attention. All these are worth considering if you’re looking to take your business to the next level.
9. HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Academy is where you can carry out training and learning in greater detail. The courses will keep you updated and give you certifications, so you can show them to your clients, generating social proof and more confidence in your services as a writer.
The more training you have, the more skills you can offer via your writing services. As a result, this free academy is one of the best options you have to train as a freelance writer who uses modern marketing tools to promote and optimize content.
10. HubSpot Blog
HubSpot has a very interesting blog with new content added frequently. The blog specializes in sales, customer service, website optimization, and marketing trends. And it is a very interesting resource to keep up to date, incorporate ideas and expand your knowledge on marketing topics.
Likewise, the HubSpot blog offers a lot of downloadable resources such as PDF guides, computer graphics, templates or presentations, etc. This is an interesting option if you need to go deeper into certain topics.
11. Calls-to-Action (CTA)
With HubSpot tools for freelance writers, you can create and manage CTAs for your marketing strategy. It allows you to design the buttons to your preferred measurements, change their color or upload an image – and this is available for any content.
In addition, you can also design smart CTAs based on your users’ characteristics. Depending on who’s viewing, HubSpot will show different messages to guide your readers and let them know the next step when navigating your website.
In short, CTAs are small elements that make all the difference to your business. With them, you can direct customers to your latest post on your blog, keep your readers engaged on your website or even take them to a landing page for your services as a freelance writer.
12. Contact Management
HubSpot’s contact management tool serves as a database and stores the information of all users that interact with you.
The moment a visitor fills out a form, they automatically become a contact in your database. As it is linked to your other HubSpot tools for freelance writers, you can analyze all your social networks and websites quickly as well.
The contacts tool gives you:
- All your contacts in one platform. HubSpot creates a list of all your potential clients with their relevant information.
- Workflows. This allows the creation of automated messages. For example, you can notify your clients every time you finish a writing project, or automate payment reminders.
- Forms. You can create and add different fields in order to have customized forms to get your potential clients’ information.
- Lead Scoring. You can configure and control the lead scoring, which consists of an automatic score assigned to all users of the database according to your level of qualification. In this way, you determine which users are most likely to hire your writing services, make better decisions and prepare personalized campaigns for each level of score.
Try These HubSpot Tools for Freelance Writers
Whether you’re a freelance writer or a writing agency, HubSpot covers all the areas you need when growing your business, pitching your writing services to potential clients, closing new clients and offering excellent service.
HubSpot is probably the most advanced tool on the market to implement these strategies. But, if you want to be successful, it’s not enough to just buy the tool and expect to see instant and automatic results. In addition, you need to set aside time to refine and refocus your strategy, create content and invest in techniques that will help you gain traction.
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