In this series on How Automotive companies can use HubSpot I look at the different website, sales, marketing, and service tools and how we use them to help our Automotive clients to grow. This time I’m going to walk you through how to blog to attract your ideal customers.
As always you can read our blog, watch the video on YouTube, or listen on iTunes and Soundcloud...
I'm sure you already have a website with pages that tell people what you do and a contact page so they can call and email you when they're ready to make an enquiry. However, if your website isn't regularly updated it's likely that it won't give you a consistent flow of new leads for sales. Now, when I say 'regularly updated' I don't just mean tweaking the content on existing pages, I mean 'regularly posting new content' that we typically call blogging or you might refer to as news and updates. Even if you are regularly posting new content, are you using Content topics, Pillar pages, and supporting content? Either way, read on to learn more...
Getting your website found is a challenge
If you're in Automotive then it's likely you're in a competitive space even if you only have a handful of competitors. All of those companies are trying to attract similar customers so getting your website found, when people search for answers to their challenges and solutions, can be difficult. It's no longer about picking a few keywords and trying to rank number 1. Search engines are more intelligent than that and each person searches in a different way.
To get your website found and consistently coming top of a variety of searches you need to think less of posting individual updates to your news area and more about content topics, with content that is linked and organised in the right way so that search engines understand the topic that you specialise in and so that when visitors arrive at your website you offer them an obvious journey to easily find related content to help educate them on solutions and then reasons why your companies can help them.
Enter, Topic Clusters
I covered an introduction to Topic Clusters in this previous post about SEO. This time, lets look more at the related content feature in HubSpot to make it easy to find content that you've already created to easily build your topic clusters. This approach lets you quickly add related content into the content strategy tool so that search engines see you as the thought leader on a subject and will show your content higher up in search results.
The content strategy tool also shows the performance of each content topic, which is a great way to link lots of different blog posts and pages to know the overall performance of a topic as well as individual pieces. That way you know what topics resonate the best with your ideal customers.
Topic coverage and Topic performance views
Inside the HubSpot content strategy section, you have access to two tabs when viewing your topics: a “Topical Coverage” tab, and a “Content Performance” tab.
Source: HubSpot
The content performance view shows you combined stats for each topic:
- Amount of content in each topic.
- Total website views for each content topic.
- The amount of people leaving your website after viewing only one page or post in each topic.
- The average amount of time people stay on your website when viewing content in the topic.
You will also see the pillar page performance. A pillar page is the main page that all individual blog posts link back to as the way to link all content together in the topic (read about pillar pages in our post on SEO).
Pillar page stats have the addition of showing backlinks, which is how many times people have shared or linked to your pillar page because they've seen it as a helpful resource - more backlinks from high quality websites will help you rank higher in search engine results.
Source: HubSpot
You can then drill into the performance of each individual post or page. This is a helpful way to check that each piece of content is linked to the pillar page and to know the popularity of your supporting content.
Source: HubSpot
How to get started with content strategy
First you need access to HubSpot Marketing Professional or Enterprise. I'd always suggest starting with a free consultation so we can recommend the best solution for your business growth plans. We also include 90-days on HubSpot onboarding for all new HubSpot Marketing customers.
Once you have HubSpot Marketing; start by creating a topic and the tool will automatically show you a list of related pages and posts that you've already created. You can easily add that content to the topic cluster and the tool will show you if you need to add hyperlinks between pages and posts.
Know the ROI from your pages and posts
If you're just starting off with creating content then you'll use the content strategy tool to give ideas for new content to create using a variety of search engines; however, before starting you should always complete your Ideal customer research as that includes asking what keywords people use when searching for the products and services that you sell.
You'll want to use the Content Strategy tool to make sure you're creating cluster of related content to help you rank in search engines as well as linking all assets (pages, posts, calls to action, landing pages etc.) using the HubSpot Campaigns tool so you see your ROI for all campaign assets. More on that in a future post.
To learn more about attracting your ideal customers in Automotive, start with How inbound works when you use The Tree Group + HubSpot.
You can find previous posts in our series on how to use HubSpot on our blog, at iTunes and Soundcloud, or on YouTube.
