Have you got a HubSpot hangover?

It was an expensive investment but you wanted your marketing in one place, and more analytics than you can shake a stick at. You attended the training sessions and may have even created a campaign or two. But now that the dust has settled you're trapped with a guilty feeling. You know the software could deliver improved results, but you're simply too busy to tackle the mountain of courses and activity required to keep this well-oiled machine working.

We don't blame you. Inbound marketing, and managing HubSpot, takes time, and lots of it. There's training, planning, creating, delivering and not to mention analysis involved, and only a certain amount of hours in the week!

Let's break down the time that you should invest in inbound on a weekly basis to really have a good go at it.

Training: 2-4 hours

Let's assume you're a paid up member of HubSpot's Professional package. You'll want to do the inbound certificate, if you haven't already, the email marketing course, the content marketing course (for your blogs), design and probably sales to keep the sales manager happy. We doubt you'll tackle all this at once, but upwards of 3 hours a week and you might complete a course each week/fortnight, depending on your learning.

It's well worth it though, what's the point of doing all this activity if you're not going to make it better.

Planning: 2 hours

Social media posts, emails, advertising, blog articles, SEO updates all require even a casual and rough plan. The more time you invest, the better your chances of getting better results. This is especially true when you factor in part of your planning should involve going over past performance and looking at how to improve.

Creating: 4 hours

Some people take a lot longer. If you use HubSpot's 'clone' function then you can use the backbone of previous campaigns to create content and assets much faster than creating templates from scratch each time but even so a bit of fiddling with layout on a blog, some design work on an email, fitting everything you want to say in 140 characters (including hashtags) and sourcing great stock images can be a hassle. The latter has been made a lot easier with Hubspot's partnership with Shutterstock, but it can still take time to find that killer image.

Delivering: 2 hours

The scheduling function in HubSpot takes out a lot of work from this, as everything can be loaded in one go without frequent trips. Despite this you'll still need to refine times to suit different platforms and audiences. You'll also have to create segments for emails and weed out the un-engaged contacts. If your social media is working well then you'll also have to respond to comments and messages - and make sure you do to unlock badges that encourages more people to contact you!

Analysis: 1.5 hours

Experiment, tweak, repeat, improve. Understanding that you can't get it right first time means that each new campaign, or piece of activity, is an opportunity to improve. If your test reveals improved results, great! If your experiment doesn't pay off then learn from it and do better next time. Either way, to properly study open rates, engagement rates and work out ways to improve is essential for better inbound marketing.

Doing all this on your own can be a bit daunting. You probably find there's barely enough time to keep on track with your day-to-day tasks as it is, so how can you hope to make the most out of a system like HubSpot when you're barely holding on?

Luckily there are a few places you can turn for help.

HubSpot has a partner directory where you can find agencies that specialise in HubSpot and can help you with getting the most out of the platform, and your investment. Note that the 'Tier Status' is a reflection on how much business they do, not the overall quality of the work.

Outsourcing management of your HubSpot marketing could be the biggest saving your business makes as you'll get more from the platform, your marketing, and your time whilst letting people that know the software like the back of their hand deliver results.