You’re likely aware of the immense pressure on your marketing team to generate high-quality leads without increasing headcount or budget. If your current marketing efforts aren’t delivering the results you need, it might be time to consider implementing a marketing automation strategy, combined with a strong content strategy, to streamline processes, enhance lead nurturing, and drive conversions more efficiently.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a 30-60-90 day action plan that outlines how to implement a comprehensive marketing automation strategy using HubSpot. This plan is designed to help you develop a system that attracts, nurtures, and converts leads—all while working smarter, not harder.

Why Marketing Automation and Content Strategy Matter

Marketing automation is the key to scaling your lead generation efforts. By automating repetitive tasks like email marketing, lead nurturing, and segmentation, you can create a more efficient, personalized experience for prospects without overwhelming your marketing team. Paired with a content strategy that aligns with your buyers’ needs, you can attract more qualified leads and guide them through the buying process with minimal manual effort.

Let’s break down how you can get your strategy off the ground in just 90 days.

Develop and Implement a Marketing Automation Strategy in 90 Days

30-Day Plan: Laying the Foundation for Automation

The first 30 days are all about preparation and setting up the building blocks for your marketing automation system.

Step 1: Define Marketing Goals and KPIs

To start, you need to define clear, measurable goals that align with your business objectives. For example:

  • Increase marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) by 20%.
  • Improve lead-to-customer conversion rates by 10%.
  • Reduce lead response time to under 24 hours.

Having these metrics in place allows you to track success and ensure that your automation efforts are paying off.

Step 2: Map Your Buyer Personas and Journey

Understanding your audience is critical to developing relevant content and workflows. Use HubSpot’s persona tools to create detailed profiles of your target customers, including their pain points, goals, and behaviour patterns. Map out the typical buyer’s journey, from awareness to consideration and decision stages, so you can craft content that resonates at each phase.

Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content

Next, take inventory of your current content. Identify gaps, especially in the consideration and decision stages, where prospects are evaluating solutions or preparing to make purchasing decisions. This audit will guide your content creation efforts in the next phase.

Step 4: Set Up Initial Workflows in HubSpot

With your personas and journey mapped, start creating basic marketing workflows in HubSpot. These workflows could include a welcome email series for new subscribers or an awareness-stage nurturing sequence for leads who download an eBook. These initial automations will help you kickstart lead nurturing right away.

60-Day Plan: Expanding Automation and Content Creation

In the next 30 days, your focus shifts to expanding your automation efforts and developing content that moves leads further down the funnel.

Step 5: Develop Key Content Assets

Start producing high-value content based on the gaps identified in your audit. Prioritize creating content for the consideration and decision stages, such as white papers, case studies, webinars, or product comparison guides. These assets will help educate and engage prospects who are actively evaluating solutions.

Step 6: Expand Lead Nurturing Workflows

Now that you have more content, build out your automation workflows to cover all stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, create workflows that trigger based on lead actions, such as attending a webinar or downloading a case study. These workflows should send relevant, targeted content to nurture leads through the funnel automatically.

Step 7: Implement Lead Scoring

Lead scoring allows you to prioritize your hottest leads by assigning points based on their behaviour (e.g., website visits, email clicks, or content downloads). HubSpot’s lead scoring tools make it easy to rank leads and automate the handoff to sales when they’re ready to engage.

Step 8: Optimize Landing Pages and CTAs

Use HubSpot’s A/B testing features to refine your landing pages and calls to action (CTAs). Test different designs, copy, and offers to see what drives the highest conversions. Optimizing these touchpoints can significantly improve your lead capture rates.

90-Day Plan: Complete Automation, Sales Alignment, and Optimization

In the final 30 days, you’ll focus on fine-tuning your marketing automation system, aligning it with sales efforts, and setting the stage for ongoing growth.

Step 9: Finalize All Workflows

By now, you should have automated workflows for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Ensure that each workflow is fully automated and that leads are nurtured without manual intervention. This will free up your team to focus on strategy rather than day-to-day execution.

Step 10: Align Marketing and Sales

Work closely with your sales team to ensure seamless lead handoff. Establish a service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales that defines how leads are qualified, scored, and passed over. HubSpot’s CRM and sales automation tools can help you track and manage this process efficiently.

Step 11: Optimize Lead Scoring and Campaigns

Continue refining your lead scoring model based on real-world data. If certain actions (like visiting a pricing page) indicate stronger intent, adjust your scoring system to prioritize these leads. Run A/B tests on your campaigns to optimize email subject lines, content, and timing for better engagement and conversions.

Step 12: Plan for Long-Term Scale

Finally, identify opportunities to scale your automation efforts further. This could include adding new workflows for upselling, cross-selling, or customer retention. Regularly assess your content strategy and automation processes to ensure ongoing optimization and growth.

Summary: Achieve Success in 90 Days

Download your copy of our guide, ‘90 Days to Transformation – The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation Strategy‘ today.

By following the guide, you can develop and implement a comprehensive marketing automation strategy in HubSpot that drives high-quality leads and increases conversions without adding headcount or inflating your budget.

  • 30 Days: Lay the groundwork with clear goals, persona development, and basic workflows.
  • 60 Days: Create content, expand nurturing workflows, and implement lead scoring.
  • 90 Days: Complete automation, align with sales, optimize performance, and prepare for long-term scalability.

Marketing automation, when combined with a well-planned content strategy, allows you to streamline lead generation and nurturing, ensuring your company can grow efficiently in a competitive market. With HubSpot as your tool of choice, the process becomes even more powerful, enabling you to automate personalized experiences for every lead in your pipeline.

Ready to get started? Let’s talk about how you can implement these strategies in your business and start generating more high-quality leads today.