Five Useful HubSpot Certificates for B2B Startups

Pursuing a HubSpot Certification in each core tool is essential to get the most out of your HubSpot investment and achieve recognized proficiency. Fortunately, HubSpot offers excellent free online training through their HubSpot Academy for every aspect of its platform, along with the sales and marketing game in general. Here are the five critical HubSpot Academy certificates we recommend every one of our B2B clients take to navigate HubSpot successfully. 

1. HubSpot Marketing Software

HubSpot's marketing features are powerful tools to grow your customer base and increase customer lifetime values. The HubSpot Marketing Software course contains 14 lessons and 11 practical exercises that equip you with the knowledge to implement these tools and deliver content to the three stages of HubSpot's inbound strategy: Attract, Delight, and Engage. You’ll learn the following:

• How to use HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to achieve your SMART marketing goals and reduce acquisition costs
• How to use topic clusters to gain topic visibility and brand awareness
• The top 5 elements of a conversion-focused landing page
• HubSpot’s top 10 CTA design tips to maximize conversion rates
• HubSpot’s top 7 tips to optimize design for contact, lead generation, order, registration, and survey forms
• How to create active and static lists to properly segment customers 
• Why buyer personas are the heart of your business and how to create them in HubSpot
• How to merge your email marketing and inbound strategies to build trust with your contacts
• How to 10X your social media following without buying followers

2. HubSpot CMS for Marketers

HubSpot's CMS lets you create high-performing websites — with as little or as much developer input as you prefer. HubSpot offers a drag-and-drop website builder, a fully integrated growth-focused CRM, custom web page templates, and SEO tools. Essentially, CMS for Marketers lets you create, manage, optimize, and analyze your content all in one place.

The HubSpot CMS for Marketers course contains nine lessons and five practical exercises that equip you with the knowledge to build a high-performance website that blows your competition out of the water. You'll learn:

• How to use HubSpot system templates to customize 404 errors, site search results, password prompt, and subscription pages
• How to enable Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to optimize content for mobile devices
• The six best practices for creating a high-performing website with CMS Hub
• How to integrate HubSpot with Google Search Console to analyze (and improve) content performance
• How to use just three HubSpot technical SEO tools to avoid costly search engine penalties
• The best ways to customize robots.txt files, canonical URLs, and sitemaps so search engines can crawl your site more efficiently
• How to analyze your website performance and create attribution reports to determine which marketing efforts result in the most new contacts, deals, and revenues
  

3. Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing uses contextual data, such as location or interests, to create personalized experiences for site visitors. It lets you deliver relevant messages to the right people at the right time. Pretty spiffy, if you ask us.

The Contextual Marketing course contains eight lessons and three practical exercises teaching you how to create a great website experience for your target audience. You’ll learn:

• Why contextual marketing is personalized and how it contributes to better customer experiences
• Six steps to creating a killer contextual marketing strategy
• The five characteristics your website must have to provide a good user experience
• The six steps you must take for a successful user experience redesign
• Why segmentation is the foundation of contextual (personalized) marketing and the two key ways of segmenting visitors in HubSpot
• How to segment unknown (first-time) visitors by country, device type, referral source, or preferred language
• How to segment known visitors by contact list membership or lifecycle stage
• What a great personalized experience looks like and how it increases email open rates

4. HubSpot Email Marketing

The HubSpot Email Marketing course contains 11 lessons and 1 practical exercise to help users ace customer engagement and reduce churn. You’ll learn:

• What an effective email marketing strategy looks like — and how to build one
• Why segmentation is critical to increased customer experiences and reduced churn
• How to create a high-performing email that gets results 
• The two parts of an email deliverability strategy that sets you up for success
• The top three email metrics every successful business tracks
• The five steps to creating powerful lead nurturing campaigns that build loyalty
• How to protect your carefully honed brand reputation through A/B testing

5. HubSpot Sales Software

HubSpot's sales features are robust tools that let you track leads, identify sales opportunities, and close deals faster. The HubSpot Sales Software course contains 5 lessons and four practical exercises that enable you to implement an effective inbound sales process that increases trust — the secret to higher conversions. 

Why does trust matter? During economic volatility, customers turn to organizations they trust the most. Eroding trust in the B2B sector is the canary in the gold mine. Most of your competitors aren't harnessing the power of marketing to promote trust — until late in the game. 

In this course, you’ll learn how to capitalize on this and build trust through:

• A robust HubSpot prospecting process that lets you identify good-fit leads
• Customizable sales templates that increase response rates
• HubSpot and Zoom integration makes it easy to coordinate invites for webinars and increase customer touchpoints
• AI-powered contact creation and management to reduce customer friction and increase retention rates
• Fully customizable and reusable discovery call and qualification playbooks that help your team generate quality leads more efficiently
• Fully customizable and reusable snippets (text blocks) that save you time by crafting ready answers to common customer questions

Once you complete these courses from the HubSpot Academy and earn your HubSpot Certifications, you’ll see it’s not just about boosting your skills—it’s about driving powerful results for your business! HubSpot's powerful automation and features give you a solid competitive edge that can really set your business apart.

Getting the Most Out of Your HubSpot! 

As you dive into these HubSpot courses and start applying the powerful tools and strategies you learn, you may find yourself looking for ways to further optimize your HubSpot portal. That's where our ebook, Why Your B2B Needs A HubSpot Portal Audit, comes in.

Use our ebook to discover how a targeted audit can:

•  Maximize your HubSpot efficiency
• Enhance your marketing efforts
• And significantly boost your conversion rates!