Struggling to keep your customer data organized and actionable across all your tools? Many of us have been there, watching our CRM data turn into a tangled mess of spreadsheets and disconnected information. But what if I told you there’s a straightforward way to keep everything aligned, streamline your operations, and truly understand your customers’ journeys? The answer lies in mastering the HubSpot mapping tool ecosystem. This isn’t just about plotting points on a map. it’s about connecting every piece of customer information to drive better decisions, boost sales, and enhance your overall customer experience. By the end of this, you’ll know how to leverage HubSpot’s various mapping capabilities, integrate them with other platforms, and ultimately, transform your business operations. So, let’s get started and make sure your valuable data isn’t just sitting there, but actively working for you.
What is a HubSpot Mapping Tool Anyway?
When we talk about a “HubSpot mapping tool” or “HubSpot.mapping software,” we’re actually referring to a suite of functionalities and integrations within and around HubSpot that help you visualize, connect, and organize your data. Think of it as creating a clear, actionable picture of your customer relationships, sales territories, marketing efforts, and even your internal processes. It’s all about taking raw information and turning it into smart insights that help you grow.
At its core, mapping in HubSpot means aligning data fields between different systems. Imagine connecting your HubSpot CRM with another platform like Salesforce or even a simple spreadsheet. Without proper mapping, data won’t transfer correctly, leading to inconsistencies and errors. It’s like trying to put together a puzzle where none of the pieces quite fit. When you map fields correctly, HubSpot can automatically push and pull data from other apps, keeping everything updated and consistent. This includes everything from contact details and deal stages to customer preferences.
Beyond just data synchronization, HubSpot mapping tools also extend to visualizing customer journeys, organizing sales accounts, and even plotting geographical data. It’s about making your data coherent and useful, whether you’re trying to understand who your key decision-makers are or planning the most efficient sales routes.
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Why is HubSpot Mapping So Important for Your Business?
You might be thinking, “Do I really need another ‘tool’ or process?” The short answer is: absolutely, especially if you’re serious about growth. Proper HubSpot mapping is a must for several reasons, and honestly, it’s one of those things that, once you start doing it right, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Go High Level CRM vs. HubSpot: Which One Is Right for Your Business?
Boosting Data Accuracy and Integrity
First off, let’s talk about data. Inaccurate or inconsistent data is a real headache. It can lead to bad decisions, wasted resources, and a whole lot of frustration. When you correctly map your fields, you’re essentially building bridges between different data sources, ensuring that information flows smoothly and consistently. This means your CRM stays organized, reducing errors and saving your team a ton of time. It also prevents those annoying data conflicts when you integrate third-party apps, keeping everything synced and consistent. This improved data accuracy and integrity helps you build a solid foundation for all your business activities.
Supercharging Operational Efficiency
Ever feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over? Manual data entry and trying to reconcile information from different places can be a huge time suck. Automating data synchronization through mapping saves time and reduces manual mistakes, which means your team can focus on more important stuff, like actually engaging with customers. For example, sales teams using automation tools have reported saving over 2 hours per day by automating tasks like data entry and scheduling. That’s a significant chunk of time!
Enhancing Customer Understanding and Personalization
When your data is clean and connected, you get a much clearer picture of your customers. You can segment them better, understand their needs, and spot market trends more easily. This deeper understanding allows you to tailor your marketing messages and sales approaches, making them much more effective. Personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. 89% of decision-makers believe it’s invaluable for business success. By using HubSpot mapping to understand each customer’s journey, you can deliver the right message at the right time, making every interaction feel personal and relevant.
Driving Smarter Sales and Marketing Strategies
With a unified view of your data, your sales and marketing teams can work together like a well-oiled machine. Sales reps can capitalize on more opportunities and spend their time where it truly matters. Mapping out customer locations can help them plan more efficient routes, cutting down on “windshield time” and increasing selling time. One example shows reps using a mapping app like Badger selling 22% more and saving 8 hours a week. That’s incredible! For marketing, HubSpot mapping helps in creating highly targeted campaigns that resonate with specific segments of your audience, leading to higher conversion rates and, ultimately, more revenue.
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Types of Mapping Tools You’ll Use in HubSpot
HubSpot isn’t just one magic button. it’s a powerful platform with various “mapping” capabilities, some built-in and some through integrations. Understanding these different types of HubSpot mapping tools is key to leveraging them effectively.
1. Field Mapping Data Mapping
This is probably the most fundamental type of mapping. Field mapping in HubSpot means connecting specific data fields or “properties” as HubSpot calls them between HubSpot and other systems you use. Think of it like this: if you have a “Customer Email” field in your sales software and an “Email Address” field in HubSpot, field mapping ensures that the data from one flows correctly into the other.
How it works:
- Aligning Properties: You define which property in HubSpot corresponds to which field in your external system like Salesforce, your website forms, or an e-commerce platform.
- Data Synchronization: This mapping ensures that when data is updated in one system, it’s automatically updated in the other, preventing inconsistencies. This is crucial for maintaining data accuracy and integrity across all your tools.
- Directional Sync: You can often set the sync to be one-way e.g., data always flows from Salesforce to HubSpot or bi-directional data updates in either system update the other.
- Key Use Cases:
- CRM Integration: Seamlessly syncing contact, company, and deal data between HubSpot and other CRMs like Salesforce.
- Marketing Automation: Ensuring lead information from forms or landing pages flows correctly into HubSpot properties.
- E-commerce Data: Mapping customer purchase history or order details from platforms like Shopify to HubSpot for better segmentation and personalized follow-ups.
- Migration: When moving data to HubSpot, proper data mapping is critical to avoid duplicates and ensure a clean, organized dataset from the start.
2. Customer Journey Mapping
This type of mapping is all about visualizing the entire path a customer takes with your brand, from their very first interaction to becoming a loyal advocate. It’s not about individual data points but the overall experience.
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- Visual Representation: A customer journey map is a visual story of how a customer experiences your brand across various touchpoints. It helps you see the big picture.
- Identifying Touchpoints: This includes everything from initial brand awareness maybe they saw one of your HubSpot email examples or a social media post to considering your product, making a purchase, and post-purchase interactions.
- Understanding Emotions & Pain Points: A good journey map helps you identify where customers might be struggling pain points and what emotions they experience at each stage. This insight is invaluable for improving your customer experience.
- HubSpot’s Role: While the “map” itself is often a diagram, HubSpot’s tools, like its Customer Feedback Software and Journey Automation, help you gather data through surveys and automate actions based on customer behavior within these stages. You can use workflows to guide people based on their actions, sending the right message at the right time.
- Benefits: This mapping helps you identify communication or service gaps, analyze and predict customer behavior, combat team silos, and ultimately improve customer retention.
3. Account Mapping for ABM
For B2B businesses, account mapping in HubSpot is crucial, especially if you’re running Account-Based Marketing ABM campaigns. This involves selecting and organizing specific high-value accounts you want to target.
- Target Account Identification: You identify which companies are your ideal customer profiles ICPs and prioritize them based on their potential value.
- Stakeholder Identification: Within those target accounts, you map out the key decision-makers, influencers, budget holders, and end-users. HubSpot’s CRM allows you to assign “buyer roles” to contacts, helping you understand their influence.
- Intel Gathering: You gather intelligence on these accounts – their needs, pain points, organizational structure, and how decisions are made. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can integrate with HubSpot to help with this.
- Engagement Strategy: Once mapped, your sales and marketing teams can build tailored engagement strategies. For example, your messaging to a budget holder might focus on financial savings, while an end-user might care more about ease of use.
- HubSpot’s Features: HubSpot’s target account view and custom properties are excellent for categorizing accounts, assigning buying roles, and tracking your engagement. While HubSpot itself provides tools to manage these relationships, some users might look for external solutions like OrgChartHub for more visual relationship mapping.
4. Geographical / Sales Territory Mapping
This is where “map” truly comes into play! Geographical mapping helps sales teams visualize their CRM data on an actual map, optimizing territories and routes.
What it offers:
- Visualizing Data: Imagine seeing all your HubSpot contacts, companies, and deals plotted on an interactive map. This instantly shows you prospect hotspots, well-covered customer zones, and untapped areas.
- Sales Territory Management: It’s invaluable for creating, managing, and balancing sales territories. This ensures fair workloads for reps and prevents opportunities from falling through the cracks.
- Optimized Route Planning: For field sales teams, knowing where your customers are allows for smarter route planning. You can optimize routes to visit multiple prospects efficiently, saving time and fuel.
- Lead Generation: Some tools allow you to find local businesses by keywords and add them to HubSpot as contacts or companies with just a few clicks.
- Integration with HubSpot: While HubSpot itself doesn’t have native geographical mapping, many powerful third-party HubSpot mapping software options integrate seamlessly. Tools like Smappen, Mapsly, Badger Maps, and Maptive connect directly to your HubSpot data, allowing you to visualize and act on location-based insights.
- Google Maps Integration: You can also directly embed Google Maps onto your HubSpot website pages, landing pages, or blog posts by copying the map’s embed code and pasting it into an HTML module in HubSpot. This is great for showing your office location or event venues.
5. Stakeholder Mapping
Similar to account mapping but often broader, stakeholder mapping focuses on identifying and analyzing all individuals or groups who have an interest in or influence over a project or initiative.
- Identifying Stakeholders: This includes internal stakeholders like product teams, subject matter experts and external ones clients, industry partners, regulatory bodies.
- Assessing Influence and Interest: Typically, stakeholders are plotted on a grid based on their power/influence and their interest in the project. This helps prioritize who needs to be managed closely.
- Communication Strategy: The map guides how and when to communicate with different groups, managing expectations and preventing conflicts.
- HubSpot’s Support: While HubSpot provides free stakeholder map templates often in Word or Google Docs format to help you get started, dedicated platforms might offer more robust features for complex stakeholder relationship management and geographic mapping. HubSpot itself may not handle complex, multi-project stakeholder relationships natively as effectively as specialized tools.
6. Content Mapping
This is a strategic exercise where you align your content pieces with your buyer personas and their specific stages in the buyer’s journey. HubSpot’s File Manager: Your Ultimate Guide to Organizing and Optimizing Digital Assets
What it entails:
- Persona and Journey Alignment: You identify who the content is for persona and what stage they’re in awareness, consideration, decision.
- Addressing Needs: The map lays out what questions or objections they have at each stage and what content best matches those needs.
- Optimizing Delivery: This helps ensure every piece of content, from a blog post to an email, has a clear purpose and is delivered at the most impactful moment. You can use HubSpot’s CMS and email platform to personalize this content based on lifecycle stage or list membership.
- Benefits: Content mapping ensures personalized marketing at scale, helping you craft content that speaks to the right person, at the right moment, with the right message. It can significantly improve lead nurturing and conversion rates.
How to Set Up and Use HubSpot Mapping Tools Effectively
Alright, let’s get into the practical side of things. Setting up and using these HubSpot mapping tools isn’t always a one-click process, but with a bit of planning, you can make your data work wonders.
General Best Practices for Any HubSpot Mapping
No matter what type of mapping you’re doing, some foundational steps will make your life easier:
- Start with Clear Objectives: Before you start mapping anything, ask yourself: What problem am I trying to solve? What insights do I need? Knowing your goals will guide your entire mapping process.
- Audit Your Current Data: Take a good look at your existing data. Where does it live? What format is it in? Identify all your data sources – whether it’s forms, API integrations, or imports from external systems.
- Clean Up Your Data: This is a crucial step! Inconsistent, inaccurate, or duplicate data will mess up any mapping efforts. Remove old, outdated, or redundant records. Standardize field names and formats. If one system uses “Email Address” and another uses “Email,” you’ll run into sync errors. HubSpot even offers templates that map to their data structure, which can help reduce errors during import.
- Plan Your Field Structure: Decide on consistent naming conventions for your properties across all tools. Determine the field types text, number, date, dropdown for each one, ensuring they’re compatible across systems. For example, a “Dropdown Select” in HubSpot should map to a “Picklist” in another system for proper syncing.
- Prioritize Essential Data: You don’t need to sync everything. Focus on syncing key fields like contact info, deal stages, and customer preferences first. This reduces complexity and potential errors.
- Automate Whenever Possible: HubSpot’s automation features, especially with Operations Hub, can keep your mappings updated automatically. Set up workflows to update fields, saving time and ensuring accuracy.
Setting Up Field Mapping in HubSpot
This is often the first type of mapping you’ll tackle, especially when integrating HubSpot with other software. Cracking the Code: Your Guide to HubSpot on Glassdoor
- Access Integration Settings: In your HubSpot account, head to
Settings
the gear icon, then navigate toIntegrations
>Connected Apps
. - Select Your App: Click on the app you want to configure e.g., Salesforce, a marketing automation tool.
- Choose Object and Add Mapping: Go to the tab for the object you want to map Contacts, Companies, or Deals. Click “Add new field mapping”.
- Select Fields and Direction: In the panel, you’ll pick the HubSpot property and the corresponding field from your third-party app. You’ll also specify the data flow:
- Bi-directional Two-Way Sync: Changes in either system update the other.
- One-way: Data flows only from HubSpot to the other app, or vice versa.
- Match Field Types: Double-check that the field types are compatible. HubSpot’s knowledge base has detailed guides on which property types can be mapped to various third-party app fields.
- Resolve Errors: If there are any sync errors, HubSpot will often flag them. You’ll need to go in and fix any mismatched fields or data types.
Pro Tip: For contact creation, fields like First Name, Last Name, and Business Email are usually mandatory and need to be mapped correctly.
Implementing Customer Journey Mapping with HubSpot
While HubSpot doesn’t have a literal drag-and-drop journey builder map like some specialized tools, it provides robust features to power your journey maps.
- Define Your Persona & Stages: Clearly define your buyer personas and the stages of their journey e.g., Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention.
- Gather Customer Data: Use HubSpot’s analytics, forms, email tracking, and customer feedback surveys to collect insights at each touchpoint. Customer sentiment can be measured using data from NPS surveys, online reviews, and social media monitoring.
- Map the Journey Visually: You might use an external tool or even a simple whiteboard to visually lay out the journey. Document actions, thoughts, and emotions at each stage.
- Translate to HubSpot Workflows: This is where the magic happens. Use HubSpot’s workflow automation to create sequences that guide contacts through their journey based on their actions and properties.
- Enrollment Triggers: Who enters the journey? e.g., Fills out a form, visits a specific page.
- Actions: What happens at each stage? e.g., Send an email, assign a task to a sales rep, update a property, enroll in another workflow. You can use personalization tokens from your mapped fields in emails for a more human touch.
- Goals: What’s the ultimate objective? e.g., Becoming a customer, renewing a subscription.
- Leverage HubSpot’s Tools:
- Marketing Emails: Send targeted content based on the customer’s stage.
- Landing Pages & Forms: Capture relevant information at key points.
- CRM Data: Use all the information stored in your
hubspot what is crm
to personalize experiences. - Customer Feedback: Deploy surveys NPS, CSAT to understand customer emotions and pain points.
- Reporting: Track how contacts move through your journeys and measure the effectiveness of your touchpoints.
Setting Up Account Mapping in HubSpot for ABM
If you’re doing ABM, this is your secret weapon.
- Identify Target Accounts: Use HubSpot’s
Target Accounts
tool to define and prioritize your high-value companies. You can segment these into tiers e.g., Tier 1, 2, 3 based on potential value. - Map Buyer Roles: Within each target company, go to the company record and use the
Buyer Role
property to assign roles to your contacts Decision Maker, Influencer, Budget Holder, Champion, etc.. This helps you understand who to talk to about what. You can even create custom buyer roles if the default ones don’t quite fit your business. - Gather Account Intel: Use HubSpot to log notes from calls, track interactions, and store information about the company’s pain points and goals. Integrate with tools like LinkedIn for more insights.
- Develop Coverage Plans: Based on your tiered accounts and mapped roles, create tailored sales and marketing plans. HubSpot workflows can automate engagement tasks like follow-up emails.
- Personalize Content: Use HubSpot’s smart content and personalization tokens to deliver role-specific messaging and content. Remember, different roles engage with content differently.
- Monitor and Refine: Regularly review your target account list and adjust your strategies. HubSpot’s reporting tools can track engagement by role and overall account progress.
Integrating Geographical Mapping with HubSpot
For field sales and localized marketing, bringing geographical context to your HubSpot data is incredibly powerful.
- Choose a Third-Party Integration: Since HubSpot doesn’t have native geographical maps, you’ll need to use a dedicated hubspot.mapping software integration like Mapsly, Smappen, Badger Maps, or Maptive. Many of these offer direct, bi-directional sync with HubSpot.
- Connect the Apps: This usually involves a few clicks to connect your HubSpot account to the mapping software, often directly from the HubSpot App Marketplace.
- Visualize Your Data: Once connected, your HubSpot contacts, companies, and deals will appear on an interactive map. You can color-code them based on properties, filter by custom fields, and identify geographical clusters.
- Optimize Routes and Territories: Use the mapping tool’s features to:
- Plan Optimized Routes: Input multiple meeting locations, and the tool will create the most efficient driving route.
- Define Sales Territories: Draw and manage sales territories, assigning them to reps and ensuring balanced workloads.
- Identify Opportunities: Spot areas with high concentrations of prospects or untapped regions.
- Sync Back to HubSpot: Any updates or new leads identified through the mapping tool can often be pushed back into HubSpot, creating new contacts or updating existing records.
Embedding Google Maps in HubSpot Content
If you just need to show a location on your website, like your office address or an event venue, you can embed Google Maps directly. Hubspot file manager free
- Get the Embed Code from Google Maps:
- Go to Google Maps and search for the location.
- Click the “Share” icon, then select “Embed a map.”
- Choose a size and “Copy HTML”.
- Add to HubSpot Content:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to the blog post, landing page, or website page you want to edit.
- In the content editor, drag and drop a “Rich Text” module or “HTML” module if available.
- In the rich text toolbar, click the “Advanced” dropdown menu and select “Source code”.
- Paste the Google Maps embed code into the dialog box and click “Save” or “Insert”.
- Preview and Publish: Always preview your page to make sure the map displays correctly before publishing.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Even with the best tools, you might hit a few bumps. Here are some common challenges with HubSpot mapping and how to tackle them:
- Data Quality Issues: This is probably the biggest hurdle. Inconsistent, incomplete, or duplicate data will always lead to problems.
- Solution: Invest time in data cleansing before you start mapping. Implement data validation rules at the point of entry e.g., on your forms to prevent bad data from coming in. Regular data audits are your friend.
- Mismatched Field Types: Trying to map a text field to a number field, for example, will cause errors.
- Solution: Always ensure your field types are compatible across systems. HubSpot often provides guidance on compatible types in its integration settings. If a field doesn’t exist in HubSpot, you might need to create a custom property for it.
- Integration Complexity: Connecting multiple systems can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially with complex data flows.
- Solution: Start simple. Focus on your most critical integrations first. Consider using HubSpot’s Operations Hub for advanced data synchronization and automation, or leverage third-party integration platforms like Make formerly Integromat for complex workflows without needing to write code.
- Lack of Native Geographic Mapping: HubSpot doesn’t have built-in territory or route mapping.
- Solution: Embrace specialized third-party integrations like Mapsly or Badger Maps. These tools are designed specifically for geographical data visualization and field sales optimization and integrate seamlessly with HubSpot.
- Stakeholder Mapping Depth: For very intricate project stakeholder management, HubSpot’s native capabilities might feel basic.
- Solution: Use HubSpot for contact management and basic role assignment, but consider external dedicated stakeholder management tools or templates for more advanced analysis of influence, interest, and communication planning.
Real-World HubSpot Examples of Mapping in Action
Let’s look at how businesses put these mapping tools to good use:
- A Growing E-commerce Brand: They used field mapping to sync customer purchase data from their online store to HubSpot. This allowed their marketing team to segment customers based on buying habits and send highly personalized HubSpot email examples promoting related products, leading to a 15% increase in repeat purchases.
- A Field Sales Company: By integrating their HubSpot CRM with a geographical mapping tool, their sales managers could visualize customer locations and sales territories. They rebalanced territories, ensuring each rep had an equitable workload and optimized routes, which helped increase weekly meetings per rep from 12 to 20.
- A SaaS Business: This company implemented customer journey mapping using HubSpot workflows. They noticed a significant drop-off at the “consideration” stage. By mapping the journey, they identified a gap in educational content and automated a series of targeted emails providing more in-depth product comparisons and case studies, resulting in a 10% improvement in conversion rates from consideration to decision.
- A B2B Tech Company: They leveraged account mapping for their ABM strategy. By identifying key decision-makers and influencers within target accounts and assigning buying roles in HubSpot, their sales team could tailor their outreach. They focused on delivering specific value propositions to each role, shortening their sales cycle by an average of two weeks.
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Conclusion
The HubSpot mapping tool ecosystem is far more than just a set of features. it’s a strategic approach to managing your most valuable asset: your customer data. By embracing different types of mapping – from field mapping that keeps your data clean and synchronized, to customer journey mapping that personalizes experiences, and geographical mapping that optimizes sales efforts – you’re setting your business up for sustainable growth. Don’t let your data be a static collection of information. Transform it into a dynamic, interconnected system that empowers your teams, delights your customers, and propels your business forward. It’s time to map your way to success!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary purpose of field mapping in HubSpot?
The primary purpose of field mapping in HubSpot is to ensure that data fields properties from HubSpot align correctly with corresponding fields in other integrated systems or tools. This process is crucial for maintaining data accuracy, consistency, and integrity when information is transferred between different platforms, preventing errors and ensuring smooth data synchronization.
Can I use HubSpot for geographical sales territory mapping directly?
HubSpot itself doesn’t offer native geographical sales territory mapping features in the same way specialized tools do. However, you can integrate HubSpot with various third-party HubSpot mapping software like Mapsly, Smappen, Badger Maps, or Maptive. These integrations allow you to visualize your HubSpot contacts, companies, and deals on an interactive map, manage sales territories, and plan optimized routes for field teams. HubSpot’s Freemium Magic: What’s Truly Free?
How does customer journey mapping help my marketing efforts in HubSpot?
Customer journey mapping helps your marketing efforts in HubSpot by providing a visual representation of your customer’s experience across all touchpoints with your brand. This allows you to identify pain points, understand customer emotions, and pinpoint opportunities to deliver personalized and timely content. By leveraging HubSpot’s workflow automation and analytics, you can create targeted campaigns and communications that guide customers more effectively through their journey, improving lead nurturing and retention.
What is account mapping, and why is it important for B2B businesses using HubSpot?
Account mapping in HubSpot is the process of identifying, organizing, and understanding key target accounts and the various stakeholders within them for Account-Based Marketing ABM strategies. For B2B businesses, it’s crucial because it helps sales and marketing teams identify key decision-makers, influencers, and their roles, allowing for highly personalized and coordinated outreach. HubSpot’s target account features and buyer role properties help you segment accounts, gather intelligence, and tailor engagement strategies for better conversion rates.
How can I embed a Google Map into my HubSpot website or blog content?
You can easily embed a Google Map into your HubSpot website pages, landing pages, or blog posts without needing to write code. First, go to Google Maps, find your desired location, click “Share,” and then select “Embed a map” to copy the HTML embed code. Then, in your HubSpot content editor, drag an HTML module or use the “Source code” option within a Rich Text module, and paste the copied embed code there.
What are some common data quality issues to watch out for when mapping data in HubSpot?
When mapping data in HubSpot, common data quality issues include inconsistent naming conventions e.g., “Email Address” vs. “Email”, duplicate records, incomplete information, and incompatible data types between systems. These issues can lead to sync errors, inaccurate reporting, and frustrated teams. It’s best practice to cleanse and standardize your data before mapping, implement data validation rules, and conduct regular audits to maintain data integrity.
Can HubSpot connect with Salesforce for field mapping, and how?
Yes, HubSpot can connect with Salesforce for field mapping, and it’s one of the most common integrations. You can set up field mappings in your HubSpot account by going to Settings
> Integrations
> Connected Apps
and selecting Salesforce. From there, you can choose the object Contacts, Companies, or Deals and define which HubSpot properties map to which Salesforce fields, specifying the data flow direction one-way or bi-directional. Your Go-To Guide for HubSpot Free CRM Login (and Everything Else You Need to Know!)
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