How schools can make the most of the HubSpot Free Tools

HubSpot have recently added landing pages to their free tools and with more schools starting their HubSpot journey with the Free and Starter tools, we wanted to share some tips for school marketers, that may be looking for some new education marketing tools!

HubSpot free tools can help you bring all of your marketing and admissions efforts into one place - from the CRM, to digital ad management, and lead capture forms. Some schools choose to explore the free tools as a way to test the waters before upgrading to one of HubSpot's paid products.

Top tips: get the most out of the free HubSpot tools for your school:

Use your custom properties wisely

We've put this one first as it is super important! The free CRM limits you to 10 custom properties, and in schools there is a real demand for collecting lots of different types of data about prospects. Check out the existing default properties in Settings before you begin, as there may already be something suitable for your needs. If there isn't you can create custom properties and then capture this data using web forms, think about the prospect data that will be most useful (year of entry, child name, date of birth...).

Get your tracking code installed as soon as possible

As part of the technical set-up of HubSpot, you will need to spend a few minutes installing the tracking code. Once installed, you will be able to see what website pages a specific prospect has viewed, and for how long. This insight is really valuable in understanding what matters to a prospect, for example if a parent keeps revisiting your scholarships page, you may choose to contact them to promote your available scholarships.

Start capturing leads on your website

Look at your existing website and identify any pages where you could capture information from your prospects and then create and embed a HubSpot form to start converting your visitors into leads. Alternatively, build a specific landing page aimed at conversion, using the user-friendly landing page builder which has just been added to the free tools. Forms created using the free tools will feature HubSpot branding, but are a great step towards an effective inbound marketing strategy. Great examples of ways to capture leads via a form are content offers like: 'download our boarding handbook', 'download our prospectus', or 'see our top revision tips for GCSE students'.

Save time with a personal meeting link

The HubSpot Meetings tool integrates with your Gmail or Outlook calendar to allow your contacts to book time straight into your diary. This is a big time saver for admissions teams arranging visits to the school, interviews or any virtual interactions/calls. No more 'can you do this time and date?' back-and-forth, with the free Meetings link your prospect can book time straight into your diary based on the availability of your calendar and that you set in advance.

Add live chat to your website

Today's customers are digitally-savvy, provide the answers they need in the most convenient ways as part of a Conversational Marketing strategy. HubSpot provides live chat in the free tools and it requires no development or coding experience to add it to your website. Simply choose your branding and colours, add a welcome message and in a few clicks it will be added to your website - without even leaving HubSpot (as long as you have the tracking code mentioned above installed).

Ready to learn more?

We offer a free 1-hour initial consultation and HubSpot demo for schools, we can discuss the free tools and how they can help you achieve your goals. Book now.

We also offer a range of affordable CRM training and Starter services for those using the free and Starter HubSpot tools.