How to integrate your digital strategy without marketing automation software

In our recent series of blogs about content marketing, we mentioned often that it’s easy to integrate your digital strategy with HubSpot. What if you can’t afford a marketing automation platform like HubSpot? The good news is that you can integrate many parts of your digital strategy with WordPress plugins instead. Here’s how:

Blogs: the key player in a content-focused digital strategy

It goes without saying that WordPress is a good place to put your blog. Although it is now a full-featured content management system, it started out as a blogging platform. It’s easy to update your blog on a WordPress website, even if you’re not tech savvy. In addition, it’s great at search engine optimization.

HubSpot has a feature that publishes blog updates to your social media accounts easily. With the help of a plugin called “Publicize,” which was developed by the makers of WordPress, you can do the same with WordPress. You can also schedule blogs in advance just like with HubSpot so they go live on a certain date.

CTAs: the engine for digital marketing engagement

A CTA is a “call to action” – a button or link that directs the visitor to engage with you more. On this blog post, the CTA is the bright, shiny object encouraging you to download OSD’s New & Improved Step-By-Step Guide to Internet Marketing. Learn more about CTAs here.

HubSpot makes it incredibly easy to create CTAs, place them, and track which users clicked on what. Creating CTAs is not automated with WordPress, but it’s totally doable with the right tools. For example, ask your site developer to build CTAs into your template and create a CTA library for you. We do that a lot at OSD. We have a set of CTAs pre-built, so you can just check the box of the CTA you want included on your blog.

By using WordPress instead of HubSpot, you lose the ability to track individual users; you don’t know which person interacted with which CTA. However, you can see which CTAs are performing best overall. Keep reading for more on analytics and measurement.

Landing pages: always in good form

If your digital strategy hinges on content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or both, you need landing pages. Landing pages are typically where people provide some information (such as their name and email address) on a form. HubSpot is a landing-page-building machine. It also puts new users onto your contact lists and triggers follow-up campaigns automatically – hence the term “marketing automation.”

If you use WordPress instead, you can integrate forms with a customer relationship management (CRM) system like SalesForce and then manage mailing lists from your CRM. Email marketing service providers like iContact, Campaign Monitor and others integrate with Salesforce through APIs or plugins. Or, you can export mailing lists from your CRM to use with a free or low-cost email service like MailChimp. Want to cut out the middle step? You can use a plugin to send form data directly to your email service. For example, the OSD Web Development Team has created a publicly available plugin that drops a MailChimp signup form into a WordPress page seamlessly. (Developers, download the OSD MailChimp Forms plugin here).

However you manage the back-end functionality, remember that a landing page needs to be a landing page. As I described in my blog about landing pages, it should have a clean design with minimal distractions that might prevent someone from filling out that form. Even if your digital strategy doesn’t include content marketing or PPC, ask your web design firm to create a landing page template during the initial site design. You never know when you might need it!

Analytics and measurement: know your audience

This is probably the biggest downfall of using WordPress versus HubSpot. HubSpot is the rock star of lead tracking and intuitive analytics. WordPress has some built-in analytics, but they’re basic. You can find plugins that offer some degree of lead tracking for free, but you will likely need to pay to get anything in-depth.

To measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy, you can use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. You can also monitor email click-throughs on whatever email platform you use. However, it takes time to collect the information, analyze it, and get the type of intelligence that HubSpot delivers automatically. That’s why my colleague Andy says HubSpot alternatives are no replacement. While I agree with that, I know many of our clients are on a tight budget. If you’re one of them, now you know the tricks to making WordPress operate a little more like the marketing automation master.

- Michael

As interactive creative director at OSD, Michael Kritsch is the brain behind many of our clients’ success stories, including the logo & visual design that helped fuel a new direction for MKM Distribution.