Episode 89 - Three Hidden HubSpot Gems for Your Bank or Credit Union

Join Meredith Olmstead and Kristin Mock from FI GROW Solutions as they dive deep into the lesser-known features of HubSpot that can transform how financial institutions engage with their clients. Discover innovative ways to leverage smart content, enhance user experiences, and optimize your digital strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Smart Content: Tailor your digital presence dynamically based on user behaviors and characteristics to provide a personalized experience for each visitor.

• SEO Website Scan: Utilize HubSpot’s built-in tools to analyze and optimize your website’s SEO performance effortlessly.

• HubSpot Academy: Access a wealth of resources and training materials to keep your team at the cutting edge of marketing technology.

Transcription:

Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there, I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FIGROW Solutions, and I am here with Kristen Mock. Kristen is one of our senior inbound marketing strategists. Say hi, Kristen.

Kristin Mock:
Hello.

Meredith Olmstead:
So, Kristen and I were just looking over some of the podcast topics that we have brainstormed over the years that we wanted to talk about, and one of them that jumped out at us today was hidden gems of functionality or things that you can do with HubSpot. So basically, we were going, just wanted to talk about three areas of the HubSpot tool that we love, that you might not be familiar with or that you might not realize the tool includes and you might not be taking full advantage of it. So it's just an informative topic, so I thought we would hit record and just chat about it.
So the first one that I think we haven't always unpacked well for people, or people may not realize really sets the HubSpot tool apart, is the ability to utilize smart content. So when I say... First, before we talk about how it works, what is it, Kristen? When I say smart content, what does that mean?

Kristin Mock:
So it's content that's on any of your digital assets that is going to change based on the user, on a basic level.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay, so a known characteristic?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah.

Meredith Olmstead:
So like a known characteristic or basically just the ability to change something out on an email or on a website page or a landing page of some kind, based on some known factor, some known characteristic. So that's how we talk about smart content.
So the first thing I'll say is that it's not often built into other content management systems. So a lot of times it has to be layered in additionally with a plugin or something else in order to customize something or change a user experience. So it's really about, it's an intuitive way or an intuitive piece of the tool that allows you to personalize the individual's experience based on what they've done, what their products and services they have are, where they live, some other known characteristic. Or, based on recent behavior by them. Something, a page they've visited, a link they've clicked, something like that.

Kristin Mock:
Right.

Meredith Olmstead:
So some examples in terms of financial institutions, so credit unions and banks. We utilize smart content a lot. So what are some powerful ways that we use it to help personalize the user experience, Kristen?

Kristin Mock:
Right. So, a huge one is going to be your members or your customers versus a non-member or non-customer. Somebody that's familiar with your brand, maybe has one or two of your products versus somebody that's brand new to knowing who you are. So the content that you're going to show them is going to be different on your website, different in the email. It's different in the way that you talk to them. You're talking with a member about products that you know they don't have-

Meredith Olmstead:
Right.

Kristin Mock:
... compared to the products that they do have. And then a non-member or a non-customer looking at more brand awareness, higher level of who you are, what makes you different as a financial institution, something that is also different about the smart content versus even a plugin. I've seen some of the plugins where you have to have one member and one non-member experience. You have two options.

Smart content can work in layers. So when we talk about this member versus non-member content, it's not just we've got two different pages or two different emails. This isn't A or B. You can have the top message be the same. You can filter in layers. So the smart content is even smarter than, I think, some of the other layers that you're going to see from another CMS if you have a plugin or you have something bringing in. So I wanted to call that out because a lot of them, we're going to talk about two different comparisons, but it's not only two options.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, and I think that one's a really interesting difference because in a bank or a credit union, you don't just have one product or service that you're promoting, right? You have a suite of products and services that you are trying to utilize to deepen your relationship with your customers. You want to become their PFI, their primary financial institution. So you can actually set up your smart content to feature all seven different high priority products or services in order of importance. And then you cycle through those options based on what that individual has.

So, say you have somebody who comes in who is a new mortgage customer and they also have a savings account and they have online banking set up because maybe they're paying their bill pay through there, but they don't have a checking account. It would cycle through... You can set up your smart lists around the smart content in an email, onboarding program or in a homepage experience for that individual, where it would cycle through and know all of those things and be like, "Okay, I don't need to tell this person about bill pay. I don't need to tell them about online banking. Obviously I don't need to tell them about a mortgage. They already have a mortgage. But hey, we need to hammer checking accounts, high yield checking, any kind of additional benefit that we might offer a mortgage account if they do move their checking account over and create direct deposit."

So that would be where that smart content could become very impactful in that scenario. Also, real time for people who aren't existing customers is huge, right? Because you can say, "Opening an account is as easy as one, two three," and give them one, two three, quick steps. Or, "Switch to save," or whatever, and you have a click switch service to switch bank accounts. You're not going to show that to people who already have accounts with you. So you would want to hide that completely and change it to something more relevant. And so that's really important, for sure. Anything else you can think of in terms of smart content?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah, it doesn't just have to be a characteristic. It can also be based on behavior. So maybe auto loans isn't a huge push for you at the moment, but somebody's visiting your auto loans page or they've engaged with an auto loans email that went out. Then you know that that person right now is in the market for that with your financial institution. So that's huge. That's a very hot lead, and that's somebody that you definitely want to be showing them that auto loans content on your website as they peruse, as they come back. You also can email them, say, "Hey, I saw that you were on our auto loans page recently. Here's some more information about that product," to just help move them down the funnel.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, absolutely helps with making sure you're showing the right content to the right person at the right time, because timing is key. Okay, so smart content is an amazing "hidden gem" of HubSpot. The next one truly was a hidden gem to me because I did not even know about it when you told me about it. So tell us a little bit about the SEO website scan that is available now through HubSpot. I don't know how new this is, but of course I'm not as invested in working tactically in the tool as you are. And I think because you run all of our website projects, you really know a lot about these kinds of options. So there is an SEO website scan option now in the HubSpot tool. How does that work and what does it do?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah, so if your website is hosted on HubSpot, it can obviously crawl all of the pieces of it. It's looking at your meta description, it's looking at every page, every image and every load speed and everything. HubSpot can see all of that. So underneath your little content menu, you've got SEO as an option and it gives you recommendations. So you can tell it to scan your URL. It can take a few hours. So scan it, it'll email you when it's done and come back and HubSpot will give you recommendations. Say, "Hey, you've got 22 images that are a little bit slow to load. Here are some recommendations of file formats," or, "You should compress them," and give you recommendations and actually show you the pages those are on, and exactly which images to fix. Meta descriptions that are too long or too short, duplicate content, broken links, incoming and outgoing.

Meredith Olmstead:
Wow.

Kristin Mock:
And it'll even organize all your recommendations into the level of technical difficulty to fix those issues, the SEO impact that fixing those issues will have on your website, the level of expertise needed. It'll say a high level marketer, a beginning marketer, a developer is probably going to be needed. So you can sort those and be like, "Look, I'm a marketing assistant. I only know a little bit, so let me just take these ones that are a little bit easier for me to fix and then send some of the others to somebody else." So having all those filter options, you can have immediate impact on the SEO of your website.

Meredith Olmstead:
Fantastic. That's really cool. That's a lot of... Sometimes we will go in and take a look at people's SEO for them. It sounds like at least some of those high level things that are basic on-page SEO elements that oftentimes you used to have to crawl them manually and take a look at them. It's now doing all that for you, so that's pretty cool. So strategically it might still need some expert guidance from somebody, but I think it's doing a lot of the little small tactical implementation of checking different things for you, so that's pretty cool. It can definitely make things more efficient. Very, very cool. Where is that tool? When you go in, is it on the website side of the HubSpot tool itself?

Kristin Mock:
So when you get the content menu, so you've got your CRM, your marketing, on your little left menu. Go into content, and then down at the bottom there's an option for SEO.

Meredith Olmstead:
Gotcha.

Kristin Mock:
And so underneath that, you're going to get recommendations, analyze, you analyze your organic search performance, and then topics is that other tab, and that's where you get those-

Meredith Olmstead:
Nice.

Kristin Mock:
... inbound marketing clusters, yeah.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay, cool. Last thing we talked about is a combo, support plus academy. And it's basically where... Okay, personally, first off, one of the main reasons that we were drawn and stayed with HubSpot for as long as we have is because of the support, because the technical support is far and away better than any other automation, email or content management system that we've ever utilized. You can get live people, you can email support and get quick responses. Oftentimes there's live chat with tech and there's even a phone number, which is actually answered by a live person, typically someone who is at the HubSpot headquarters in Boston or working remotely for them. So it's usually somebody who's in your same time zone or similar time zone and is live and can answer questions for you, really somewhat unheard of in this day and age when it comes to tech support.

Now, obviously they're doing a lot more nowadays with AI and with live chat or with chatbots and trying to surface answers for you before you call them or engage an actual human. But the support for HubSpot is second to none. So we often tell clients, "Hey, you can treat us like your HubSpot support." You can come to us, you can send us an email and ask us a question if you can't figure something out. And we're going to do a ton of training with you, of course. With all of our clients, we do tons of training. But oftentimes you can figure out the answer to your question faster than we're going to be able to answer it for you. So that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize that they can actually self-help very quickly, often, through the HubSpot tool. Anything you want to add into the support side of things?

Kristin Mock:
No. HubSpot support is really great, and even if they have to switch you to an email, they're pretty responsive and keep you updated regularly on the process of your ticket if it's a longer, bigger problem. So definitely one of the better customer support experiences that I've had.

Meredith Olmstead:
And we tend to... When we come up against something where we find an area of functionality that isn't working the way that we expected or the way that it used to or the way that we want it to, a lot of times people will just be like, "Oh, well," and they just throw up their hands and move on. We tend to push through that a little bit because of the quality of HubSpot support and say, "You know what? Actually, let's open a ticket on that. Let's dig a little deeper. Let's see if there is a different way or if this functionality has moved somewhere that we didn't realize it had been relocated to."
So when, with really complicated tools, they're constantly getting updates and changes, and if you just kind of sit back and let things change and disappear without staying up on it, you can really lose functionality. But with HubSpot support, they tend to help you stay on top of that, those changes and updates.

Kristin Mock:
Well, and that community too, there's the HubSpot community. You can suggest, say, "Hey, I expect this functionality to work this way, and it doesn't seem to." And you can put that out there in the HubSpot community, and people can see that. Other HubSpot users will see that and up-vote that and you can actually help HubSpot see what kinds of changes they should make. So it's not even just like, "I don't know how to do this," or, "Something's broken." Sometimes it's, "I would like this feature, or this should work a certain way," and you can really help move the needle in the right direction for you.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And the knowledge base on HubSpot is so robust nowadays because it's been added to and developed for so many years that you can actually, oftentimes you don't even need to search in the HubSpot tool. You can oftentimes pull up another tab, ask your question in Google, and it will surface the actual knowledge base article that exactly answers your question. It's so incredibly useful in that sense. They've done a very nice job building out their knowledge base of support over the years.
But the Academy is separate from HubSpot support, but also something that is really, really robust and you can really tap into as a junior marketer, as somebody who is learning something new when you're bringing on new team members or onboarding a new staff member at your institution. So what do we mean by HubSpot Academy, Kristen?

Kristin Mock:
HubSpot Academy is free learning tools... I don't even want to say for marketers. It can be for developers, it can be for your executive teams. So it can teach you both how to use the HubSpot tool at a basic level, at an advanced level. It can teach you marketing strategy, higher level things, and you can get free certifications.

So if you are switching roles or you're training someone new or you're looking for a new position, the HubSpot Academy can get you a lot of training to refresh on things that maybe you haven't done ever, you haven't done recently. Marketing's always changing. So just things that have updated since the last time you did something. And you can actually create playlists too.
So we do this with, as we help onboard new clients onto the tool, we've got some pre-built playlists and we say, "Hey, these are the first five things you should learn how to do in the tool at whichever level or subscription level you're going to be on." And I can assign that and then track your progress to make sure that you're watching those things. Not that I'm going to babysit you.

Meredith Olmstead:
Sure.

Kristin Mock:
But just to make sure that you're learning, that you're progressing.

Meredith Olmstead:
Sure.

Kristin Mock:
And if you do it quickly, I can immediately assign you newer things and be like, "Great, you're going through this really quickly. Here's two more things that you can hop into." So that can be really great for training new marketers or new team members.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And honestly, the opposite of that is true too, because some people really work well in that kind of scenario, those self-paced short little videos to learn how to do things. And some people don't work well in that training kind of scenario. So we've had Danielle, she works in our sales training side of the team, and she will keep a close eye on some of the lenders or the team members that she works with. And if they're not pacing through some of the trainings that she's created or that she's put together for them, she can see, "Oh, you know what? Let's do a one-on-one, or let's do a team call and I'll review this information with them live," because they're obviously not motivated to get through these videos or these videos just weren't resonating with them, or whatever it is. So you can really use that to tailor the training that you have with existing clients or new clients in positive directions.
And the other cool thing about it is you can get certifications that can show off your expertise. So I'm partner certified. I always have to be partner certified in order for the agency to be partner certified. But I've had probably five or seven different HubSpot certifications over the years, and all the team members on our team have lots of different varied certifications.

And the other cool thing is that it's not just about HubSpot. So when we were talking about this, I opened up the HubSpot Academy and the three different areas of playlists that they were featuring is digital advertising learning path, content marketing learning path, and marketing foundations. So I'm sure, my guess is that the digital advertising and the marketing foundations, they might touch on the HubSpot tool a little bit, but probably not all that much. But they really are talking about lots of different things that are related to those areas of marketing, which could be very useful to junior marketers or people who are just coming into the inbound environment.

Cool, awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been a great topic. So again, hidden gems, smart content, your built-in SEO website scans, and your HubSpot support, and the HubSpot Academy. Awesome areas of the tool that hopefully you all are taking full advantage of. If you want to learn more about HubSpot for banks and credit unions, please visit us at FIGROW.com. We have lots of other podcasts, blogs, case studies, all kinds of good information there. But otherwise, let's just get out there and make it happen.