3 Lessons From HubSpot Integration Partners' Customers

“It’s pretty simple,” Forbes says. “Make a customer happy and they buy more. And what makes them happy, in addition to a good customer experience, is feeling that they are being heard.”

What Can You Learn From Listening to Your Customers? 

There are many benefits of listening to your customers,” G2 says. “But the most important is the strong relationship you create with them. When you listen to customers, you learn about their problems and pain points that need to be solved.”

To help illustrate how valuable listening to your customers can be, we spoke to a few HubSpot integrations partners and asked them about the marketing lessons they’ve learned from their customers. This is what they told us:

Customer Lesson #1: There’s Value in Keeping Everything Under the Same Umbrella

It’s easier to meet the needs of your customers when all of your tools are in one place. For example, if your social media, email, and video marketing efforts are separated across different systems that don’t communicate with each other, you’re going to need to jump through a series of hoops to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. This not only invents work for yourself but also muddles your ability to solve your customer’s problems. 

This is something that LeadsBridge—an automation tool specifically designed for advertising—is adamant in avoiding. To keep themselves organized, they strive to keep all of their various tools under the same umbrella: HubSpot.

“HubSpot is a great platform that centralizes everything,” Gabriele Tontini, the Chief Marketing Officer at LeadsBridge, says. Many LeadsBridge customers have benefited “from syncing their HubSpot lists with Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn for retargeting purposes, lead generation, and offline tracking,” and as a result, LeadsBridge has made sure that this is a service their product can provide.

We can learn from this example, too, as it illustrates how valuable it can be to keep as many of your marketing tools under the same roof as possible. Not only will it streamline the work your internal teams are responsible for, but as LeadsBridge demonstrated, it will also benefit your customers!

Customer Lesson #2: Predict Your Customers’ Needs

Predicting what marketing tools and strategies will work is a tricky balancing act. Something that sounds great on paper can, in actuality, fail to generate any meaningful traction once it’s launched. 

Here’s a story from Michael McCarthy at Inkit that illustrates how valuable it can be to know who your audience is, what they value, and how that information can help you preemptively meet their needs.

“Bite Squad is an online-based restaurant delivery service operating in 30+ cities across the country. Bite Squad needed to reactivate dormant customers, so they integrated Inkit's direct mail automation software with its CRM to send a targeted postcard to customers who hadn’t placed orders in the past two months or more. Before finding Inkit, Bite Squad used direct mail for acquisition only.

“As this was Bite Squad’s first foray into targeted direct mail, Mike Black [Bite Squad’s Senior Marketing Manager] didn’t have overly high hopes for the campaign. However, the campaign netted an 18% redemption rate, performing far better than Black expected.”

This is a great example of how a product or service can predict the needs of its clientele. Bite Squad previously used direct mail exclusively for lead acquisition, but thanks to Inkit’s capabilities and expertise, Bite Squad was able to use a familiar tool in a brand new way. 

Of course, this didn’t happen spontaneously. Inkit is a direct mail automation software, which means it’s well-versed in the world of direct mail and knows how to utilize it in as many ways as possible. They committed themselves to making their product the best version of itself it could be, and as a result of that investment, customers like Bite Squad are able to benefit.

Similarly, Mylvio Mendes, the Marketing Manager at NUACOM, says that they’ve also learned how important it is to predict the kinds of tools and services their audience will want.

NUACOM offers a robust system, Mendes says, and as a result, it’s been crucial that they customize the way they communicate with their customers. Delivering “what the customer can easily understand is crucial to solving their needs,” he says. Since NUACOM knows itself and its customers well, it’s been able to anticipate its audience’s desires and preemptively accommodate them (in this case via clear communication and tutorials).

As you can (hopefully) tell, taking the time to listen to your customers and learn what’s important to them will put you in the perfect position to provide your customers with a great experience. 

Customer Lesson #3: Be Human!

If you want to really connect with your audience, then you have to interact with them like people. It’s all too easy to get lost in the abstract term “target audience” and lose sight of the fact that your marketing target audience is made up of real people with real needs, ideas, and expectations. 

One of the best ways to treat your audience as people, and to portray your brand as being more human and approachable, is to ask questions and listen to the responses. Or, to take that even further, ask questions and then predict how your audience would respond.

For example, Denis Lunev, founder of DepositFix, says that a crucial segment of their clients is non-profit organizations. With this information, they were able to learn “learn that applying e-commerce techniques to donation pages works very well” for their audience. Since they looked at their audience as people and took the time to get to know them, they were able to customize their service so it could better predict and meet those peoples’ needs.

James Winter of Brandfolder says it like this: “Make it human! Most people are not buying technology to benefit the company; they're doing it to benefit their career and day-to-day.” As a result, he says that the company always tries “to make sure we're selling a positive future state.” They understand that they’re selling to human beings, and as such, they’re selling a service that’s designed to speak to those people.

Start Building a Customer Feedback Strategy Today!

There are countless marketing lessons to be learned from customer case studies and feedback, so if you’re looking for a way to get clearer insights into who your customers are and how you can market to their needs, then start developing a feedback strategy today! 

The benefits of a study all come down to one primary thing: knowing your audience. The HubSpot partners we spoke to here all understand that fact and used the lessons they learned from their customer feedback to build a better service and customer experience.