Scaling On a Budget: HubSpot Campaign Strategies for Underperforming Portfolio Assets

Underperforming portfolio companies in private equity (PE) often face declining revenue, inefficiencies, and weak market positioning—all of which demand swift, strategic action within tight timelines.

However, these challenges also present an opportunity: By leveraging HubSpot’s comprehensive platform—especially when guided by fractional marketing leadership—firms can implement scalable marketing and sales systems that deliver rapid results, including operational turnaround and renewed growth, without heavy resource investment.

This approach, described below, leverages HubSpot to deliver cost-effective strategies, quick wins, and scalable tactics that can be implemented across portfolio companies to create repeatable value-creation playbooks and accelerate growth.

Key Takeaways

1. Start with the HubSpot Foundation: A smart audit of your existing setup can uncover quick wins, such as abandoned workflows or underused features, that drive immediate impact without extra spend.

2. Think Lean & Scalable: Repurpose existing content, automate wherever possible, and use precise targeting to stretch limited budgets while improving lead quality and conversion rates.

3. Track What Matters: Set up dashboards and attribution models in HubSpot to prove marketing’s impact. Clear ROI reporting builds confidence with stakeholders and guides better decisions.

4. Accelerate Results with the Right Partner: Partnering with a certified HubSpot agency such as Hypha gives you access to deep platform expertise, ready-to-deploy assets, and proven strategies that scale across your portfolio—fast.
   
   

Start With a Smart Audit

Before launching new initiatives, it’s essential to take a step back and audit your current HubSpot setup to identify where the biggest gains can be made.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 26% of B2B marketers say they’re fully using the marketing technology they have, while 38% admit they have the right tools but aren’t taking full advantage of them.

A smart audit ensures your resources go toward the highest-impact improvements first.

The steps below highlight where value is often left untapped, and how to start reclaiming it.

Assess Your Current HubSpot Configuration

Start by reviewing workflows, CRM data quality, and contact segmentation. Many underperforming companies have HubSpot instances with untapped potential, such as abandoned workflows, incomplete contact properties, or basic setups that were never fully built out.

Identify Buyer’s Journey Bottlenecks

Map the current customer acquisition process to spot where prospects are slipping through the cracks. Are there gaps between marketing and sales handoffs? Delays in follow-up? Missing nurture steps? You’re not alone: 56% of marketers say tracking the customer journey and tying efforts to ROI are among their biggest challenges. Identifying these breakdowns is key to improving conversions.

Discover Unused Features

Take a look at which HubSpot features are available but sitting idle. Many companies paying for Professional or Enterprise tiers use only the basics, missing out on powerful tools such as automation, personalization, and advanced analytics. That’s a costly oversight. Marketing automation delivers an average ROI of $5.44 for every dollar spent, according to Nucleus Research, as reported in e-commerce consultancy Ecommerce Bonsai. Unlocking even a few of these features can drive quick, measurable gains.

Maximize Existing Content with HubSpot Automation

One of the more cost-effective ways to improve performance is by optimizing what you have instead of developing new assets. This approach often delivers faster results with minimal additional investment. Consider the examples below:

Leverage Existing Content Assets

Audit your content library to spot assets you can repurpose for nurture campaigns and re-engagement sequences. Turn existing case studies, white papers, and thought leadership into intentional touchpoints that move prospects through the buyer’s journey with purpose.

Implement Automated Email Sequences

Build automated workflows that cut down on manual effort while keeping prospects engaged. Focus on a welcome series for new contacts, nurture tracks for key personas, and re-engagement emails for dormant leads. These sequences work behind the scenes 24/7—no extra staff required!

Deploy Smart Content & Personalization

You can also tap into HubSpot’s personalization tools to boost message relevance without starting over. Use dynamic content blocks that adjust based on industry, company size, or buyer stage, and add personalization tokens to make your outreach feel more tailored and engaging.

Target Precisely, Spend Minimally

With limited spend, focus on targeting the prospects most likely to convert. The tactics below help stretch every dollar by narrowing focus and increasing relevance.

With limited spend, focus on targeting the prospects most likely to convert.

Execute Highly Targeted Campaigns

If you’re spending on ads一like those on Google or LinkedIn—make them count. Keep your audience tight, your budget focused, and go after decision-makers who fit your ideal customer profile. Skip the broad awareness play and zero in on the people most likely to convert.

Implement Strategic Retargeting

Don’t let interested prospects slip away. Retargeting campaigns help you stay visible to people who’ve already interacted with your site, often delivering better results for less spend. According to marketing analytics platform Demandsage, retargeted ads have click-through rates about 10x higher than standard display ads (0.7% vs. 0.07%), making them a smart way to capture more value from your existing traffic.

Segment for Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost

Generic messaging doesn’t cut it. Segment your audience by industry, persona, and deal stage—or go deeper with behavioral cues like page views, email engagement, and content downloads. The more tailored your messaging, the better it performs, boosting relevance, increasing conversions, and lowering acquisition costs.

Clean Your CRM to Improve Campaign Performance

Data quality directly impacts marketing effectiveness, making CRM hygiene critical in turning around underperforming assets, and custom HubSpot configuration ensures your CRM is set up to support segmentation, workflows, and campaign attribution from the start.

Here are a few simple but powerful ways to clean up your data and boost campaign performance:

Eliminate Data Issues

Start by removing duplicate contacts, standardizing lifecycle stages, and ensuring consistent data entry across your team. Poor data quality doesn’t just create friction—it drains budget. A study by Experian Data Quality, as reported by AI fabric platform SCIKIQ, suggests 21% of marketing media spend is wasted due to bad data. Cleaning it up can quickly boost email deliverability, lead routing, and reporting accuracy.

Implement Strategic Tagging

Tag contacts by source, market segment, or buyer journey stage to bring structure to your CRM. Tags can be used to group, filter, or trigger actions based on specific characteristics or behaviors, making it easier to target the right people with the right message at the right time. Tagging also improves attribution and provides clearer insight into what’s working across segments.

Optimize Lead Scoring

Ensure your lead scoring reflects what “sales-ready” looks like right now. When scoring aligns with actual buyer behavior, sales teams can focus their time on the leads most likely to close—no more estimating.

Prove It or Lose It: Focus on ROI-Driven Reporting

For underperforming assets, showing how marketing moves the needle is key to keeping support—and securing future investment. According to video commerce platform Firework, 83% of marketing leaders now say proving ROI is their top priority. The steps below focus on building visibility and credibility through clear, consistent performance reporting.

Establish Performance Dashboards

Set up HubSpot dashboards to track key metrics such as pipeline contribution, lead quality, conversion rates, and influenced revenue. Use built-in reporting tools like the Revenue Attribution Report or Custom Report Builder to connect your marketing efforts to actual business results. In short, focus on what matters—how campaigns drive leads, move deals forward, and contribute to closed revenue.

Provide Regular Performance Updates

Keep investment teams and operating partners in the loop with consistent, easy-to-digest updates. Share progress, spotlight wins, and call out areas that need attention. Regular reporting builds trust and shows the strategy is working—or helps adjust it quickly when it’s not.

Build Scalable HubSpot Playbooks for PE Portfolios

One of private equity’s key advantages is scaling successful strategies across multiple investments, creating efficiency and reducing implementation costs. Here’s how to turn what works in one company into a playbook you can roll out across the portfolio:

Develop Template Libraries

Nearly 45% of B2B marketers say they don’t have a scalable way to create content or run campaigns across their organization. To close the gap, build a library of reusable assets like email nurture workflows, high-converting landing pages, and “campaigns-in-a-box” for launches or events. With HubSpot, these templates can be quickly adapted across portfolio companies, speeding up execution while keeping quality consistent.

Share Automation Sequences

Build nurture and reactivation workflows once, then reuse them across similar portfolio companies. It saves time, keeps messaging consistent, and helps teams move faster without starting from scratch every time.

Set up repeatable processes for product launches, market entry, or webinar campaigns.

Systematize Go-to-Market Efforts

Set up repeatable processes for product launches, market entry, or webinar campaigns. When smaller teams can plug into proven playbooks—like a ready-to-go webinar invite sequence—they execute faster and with fewer missteps. It’s a smart way to scale impact across the portfolio.

Accelerate Impact with a Strategic Partnership

Internal improvements go a long way, but teaming up with a specialized agency can drive faster results and fill common capability gaps. In fact, marketing technology publication MarTech.org reports 45% of marketing teams struggle with a lack of skilled resources. The following sections break down how the right partner can boost speed, expertise, and efficiency across your portfolio:

Access Certified Expertise

Specialized HubSpot agencies, such as Hypha, bring deep platform knowledge and industry experience that enables faster campaign launches with more advanced tactics than most in-house teams can manage.

Leverage Ready-to-Deploy Assets

Quality agencies don’t start from scratch. They come with ready-to-go templates, benchmarks, and playbooks that can be quickly tailored to your business. Think: a full library of proven email workflows or nurture sequences, customized to fit your audience and goals.

Bridge Talent & Bandwidth Gaps

If your team’s already stretched thin, an agency can step in to move things forward without adding full-time headcount. They bring extra hands and strategic muscle so your internal team can focus on what they do best.

Enable Cross-Portfolio Efficiency

When managing multiple companies, the right agency can help share what’s working across the board—reusing high-performing assets, coordinating strategies, and creating efficiencies that lift the entire portfolio.

Your Strategic Advantage: Partnering with Hypha

Turning around underperforming assets doesn’t always require massive spend—it requires the right expertise and a clear, repeatable plan. When HubSpot is implemented and optimized with intention, it becomes a powerful engine for sustainable growth, without the heavy lift of traditional marketing models.

At Hypha, we help private equity firms unlock that potential. We specialize in strategic HubSpot implementations to drive real, measurable results. With deep platform knowledge and a strong track record in private equity, we build value-creation strategies that scale across an entire portfolio.

We understand the urgency of PE timelines and the pressure to show ROI fast. Our team brings the tools, experience, and frameworks needed to accelerate marketing performance, while laying down playbooks that can be reused for future investments.

Contact our team today to learn how we can help leverage HubSpot to make your portfolio companies more successful, creating measurable value to enhance your overall investment returns.