Re-imaging HubSpot’s Marketing Campaign product
Today, marketers use the HubSpot campaigns tool to manage omni-channel communications to achieve business and marketing objectives. However, users of the campaigns tool face some challenges when trying to use the tool to effectively manage their marketing efforts. Between cumbersome manual workflows to create assets for their campaigns, and lackluster reporting to inform stakeholders on business impact, users crave more from the campaigns tool. At the beginning of this year, I was tasked with creating a long-term vision for the campaigns tool, incorporating content generation, marketing automation and reporting into a seamless and powerful tool for marketers.
Product Design Lead @HubSpot
UX audit, vision concepts, concept testing, journey mapping, mission statement workshop, product principles workshop, (prioritization, evolution map, vision deck- in progress)
Problem
In late-2023, the marketing campaign tool in HubSpot began to see a downturn in the core KPIs (adoption, usage & churn rate) that we track to measure the performance. Additionally, 2 new products were being built for Marketers in HubSpot that would overlap and interact with the campaigns tool at different points in time - content remix & Journey automation. Because Marketing Campaigns is a core Marketing Hub offering, it became crucial to create an aligned vision that incorporates needed functionality across HubSpot, fix core product problems and incorporate generative AI into the experience to continue to be competitive against competitors.
Who is the exact user of marketing campaigns?
Specifically, within an Upmarket marketing team, we are focused on creating an experience that works well for Campaign Managers or Marketing Generalists, who’s core job responsibilities include creating and managing marketing campaigns. They are responsible for creating a marketing plan, and working with stakeholders or cross-team collaborators to identify campaign opportunities to help achieve overall company and team goals. Using the Upmarket Journey Map, I had a clear understanding of the common process marketers follow to create a campaign as well as customer pain points with the current HubSpot campaign experience.
Who needs marketing campaigns?
Marketing campaigns enable businesses to attract, engage and convert leads effectively by allowing marketing teams to coordinate a series of marketing activities to achieve a specific goal. The main target audience of my vision work has been focused on the needs of what we refer to as “Upmarket” Marketing teams. HubSpot supports a wide band of customer maturity (low-high). To help our lower maturity customers move to a higher maturity is important to support our customers continued growth. By focusing on the needs of high maturity customers, or Upmarket customers, we can not only attract more Upmarket customers but also help lower maturity customers mature faster.
Vision Goals
Increase adoption and usage of marketing campaigns
Increasing the adoption and usage of HubSpot’s marketing campaigns is essential for continuing to drive business growth, enhancing customer satisfaction and maintain competitiveness in the market.
Incorporate AI to optimize campaign creation
Introduce AI into the campaigns experience to allow marketers to create
and distribute content within a unified workflow as well as help marketers optimize their campaign strategies with data-driven insights to boost performance metrics.
Integrate better automation tools into the experience
Enhance efficiency, personalization, scalability, consistency, and data-driven decision-making, by introducing journey automation into campaigns to ultimately lead to more successful and impactful marketing campaigns.
Increase trust in campaigns reporting
Improve data accuracy and trust provided by our platform to ensure the success, credibility, and effectiveness of marketing campaigns. It forms the basis fr strategic decision-making, performance evaluation, and continuous Improvement efforts.
Leading the design process
As product design lead, my main role has been to establish a multi-year north star vision of the marketing campaigns product and work with the other UX designers, PMs and Tech leads within the Marketing Orchestration group as well as cross-product collaborators to prioritize themes of work to move the campaigns product towards the vision.
This project is an ongoing effort and things that I have done so far for this project include categorizing themes of user feedback, running a competitor review, building user flows, building concept variations to test, and organizing concept testing with current HubSpot customers.
Starting the vision work
Auditing the existing tool
First, I partnered with my Content Designer, Laura Bury to do an audit of the user experience of the campaign tool as well as all of the content / how we proposition campaigns to new customers. Auditing the experience today will serve as a benchmark for me when I test the concepts.
Aligning on the relationships
My Product Partner, Shay Redmond and I met with the journey automation PM & UX designer to align on the underlying system relationship of campaigns and journey automation in the future. Doing this alignment work before I began to explore visual concepts was important to ensure that the vision concepts aligned with everyone’s expectations and our users' needs.
Mapping out the overlaps
HubSpot is a large and powerful platform. Lots of the system pieces overlap and changes have impact on other parts of the product. It’s important to spend time thinking about how the campaign's experience could connect to other tools in HubSpot without interrupting the user experience. I mapped out the core campaigns flow I was planning on building, along with content remix and journey automation.
