The Ultimate Guide to Driving High-Quality Signups

An essential part of your affiliate marketing strategy is creating the right content for the right people. What better way to improve your content performance than by targeting specific groups of businesses and tailoring your language to resonate with decision-makers in those organizations? In this blog post, we'll explore HubSpot’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas, explain why these two things are important, and provide you with actionable tips on how to optimize your pathway to success within our program.

We'll cover:

• What is a High-Quality Signup? (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Who Buys HubSpot? (Buyer Personas)
• The Importance of ICP and Buyer Personas
• How to Drive High-Quality Signups
  • Assess and Refocus Your Strategy
  • Create Intent-Driven Content
  • Use Localized Links
  • Diversify Your Content

Let’s get into it!

What is a high-quality signup?

High-quality signups represent HubSpot users who are most likely to convert into paying customers. They are the most valuable customers based on the total revenue we can expect from them throughout the business relationship.

We created an ideal customer profile (ICP) to help define what a high-quality signup is and identify businesses that you should be targeting to get the greatest return on your efforts. The three factors that contribute to the quality of a signup include region, product type, and device type.

Here’s the formula for a high-quality signup: 

Region / Country:

• NORTHAM: United States & Canada
• UK & I: United Kingdom & Ireland
• ANZ: Australia & New Zealand
• DACH: Germany
• France
• Japan

Product type: CRM or Marketing

Device type: Desktop

The ICP provides a broader definition of who you should target, but that’s just the first step in developing your promotion strategy. You also need to determine the best way to market to those potential customers. That’s where buyer personas come into play.

Who buys HubSpot?

Buyer personas dive deeper into the ICP and define the target customer’s challenges, goals, and behaviors. They are semi-fictional, generalized representations of a business’s target audience that are based on market research, data about existing customers, and educated assumptions.

What type of companies buy HubSpot?

What type of industries are those companies in?

1. Marketing & Advertising
2. IT & Services
3. Real Estate
4. Computer Software
5. Higher Education
6. Health, Wellness & Fitness
7. Management Consulting
8. Financial Services
9. Education Management
10. Retail

What type of person buys HubSpot?

Head of Growth 🌱

• Savvy marketer who is earlier on in their career
• Works for a startup
• Spends a lot of time thinking about and trying new technology — likes to keep up with cutting-edge technology
• Very comfortable with technical concepts
• Wants to increase efficiency and automate processes to free up time for meaningful work
• Interested in freemium tools due to lack of budget in the short-term, but still want to optimize systems to cut costs in the long-term

Marketing Director 📈

• Career marketer with 7+ years of experience managing a team
• Works for a scaleup
• Has experience with marketing automation & CRM
• Generally comfortable with technology & basic principles
• Focused on generating demand, having an impact, and improving ROI
• Wants to create cohesive campaigns across channels

Operations Manager ⚙️

• Functional operations professional with 3+ years in operations or related GTM function
• Works for an SMB
• Manages all of the systems, processes & reporting on a company's internal operations
• Supports team enablement so wants easy-to-use tools
• Primary stakeholder in a company's tech stack and strategy
• Extremely loyal to current tools — values integrations
• Cares about data integrity & protection

The Importance of ICP and Buyer Personas

Understanding HubSpot’s ICP and buyer personas is important because they provide a way to segment potential customers and sell to them more effectively.

The ICP helps you better focus your marketing efforts toward the most profitable customers who are most likely to buy. This makes your affiliate marketing approach more efficient by avoiding unproductive efforts aimed at people who are unlikely to convert.

Additionally, buyer personas allow you to create more personalized messaging that is tailored to the unique needs and pain points of specific groups of people. You can use buyer personas to navigate how you engage with the decision maker(s) of target companies to nurture them into customers.

Using these tools as the foundation of your promotion strategy increases your chances of attracting and retaining high-value customers who are the best fit for HubSpot software.

How to Drive High-Quality Signups

Assess and Refocus Your Strategy

Do your HubSpot promotions target our ICP? If you find yourself answering that question with “no”, then we encourage you to assess and refocus your strategy.

Although our ICP includes signups in specific regions and for certain product types, that is not to say you shouldn’t continue promoting other HubSpot products. At the end of the day, you will still get commission for any purchases made through your link. However, suppose you’re only promoting HubSpot Academy in India. In that case, you should also focus on driving CRM signups in content that is likely to be viewed on a desktop within the United States, for example.

Once you identify where (region) and what (product type) to focus on, then you can plan out how you will position HubSpot in your content. Your content should align with our buyer personas and speak to their needs, preferences, and behaviors. If you are new to HubSpot or struggling with creating content that captures the product-market fit of our CRM platform, you can start learning about why businesses should choose HubSpot here. 

Create Intent-Driven Content

To be intent-driven means creating content that aligns with the search intent of the user. In other words, it involves understanding the reason behind your target audience’s search query and providing them with content that fulfills their needs.

That's one of the reasons why defining our buyer personas comes in handy; once you know what they are looking for and the language they will likely use to search for a solution, then you can create content that is relevant, valuable, and engaging to them. 

Keywords help you create content that is both focused on your audience's interests and optimized for search engines, which gives you a higher chance of ranking well and driving conversions. We compiled a list of organic search keywords with difficulty levels ranging from easy to hard to save you time on keyword research.

Check out the keyword list here.

Use Localized Links

Is your target audience non-English speaking? If so, it's best to use localized links which direct visitors to non-English landing pages. For example, if your target audience speaks German, you should use one of our German links to optimize your conversions.

You can find these links in your Impact affiliate dashboard or by using our link cheatsheet. Use the following instructions to access your localized links:

Diversify Your Content

Have you ever heard someone say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket...”? Well, this phrase reigns true when it comes to your content strategy. A diverse content strategy entails discussing an array of topics, incorporating different types of posts, and using multiple channels. With greater content diversity, you’re more likely to keep your audience engaged and reach more potential customers. So how can you diversify your content? 

Expand into new content types.

From tutorial videos to podcasts, there are many ways you can promote HubSpot — check out these 12 strategies you can use to diversify your content.

You can also diversify your content directly on your website by implementing a navigation tab for each type of content. For example, you could have a page dedicated to software/tool reviews, another one for downloadable guides or templates, and another one for your online courses. This strategy helps your website visitors find exactly what they are looking for quicker.

Repurpose your content.

People like to consume content differently; some people prefer listening to a podcast and others love reading blog posts. Repurposed content is valuable because it broadens the scope of how many people you can reach with a certain topic.

You can diversify your content by reusing elements of existing content to create new content in a different form. For example, you can create an infographic that summarizes all the key points of a specific blog you have already published, then post that infographic on a social media platform like LinkedIn.

It’s important to note that there is a difference between repurposing your content and repeating your content. Repurposing content enables you to create new types of content that cover the same topic for different channels. Repeating content refers to posting the same form of content about the same topic within one channel.

Conduct a content audit.

Repeating content may cause your audience to become uninterested or negatively affect your search engine rankings. To avoid these things from happening, you should conduct a content audit on a regular basis.

Content audits help you keep track of your content diversification strategy by identifying optimization opportunities within your existing content and helping you plan future content that performs well.

To learn more about how to conduct a content audit, read this article.

With a comprehensive image of who you are trying to reach, you can focus your resources on the right businesses/people, connect better with those potential customers, and ultimately drive more profitable signups. Higher payouts await you!