HubSpot CRM vs. Marin Software (discontinued)

I think HubSpot CRM is really worth it for small to large organizations who have at least 5 sales people. You really get more use out of the program the larger your sales team is. HubSpot CRM is such a robust program it does take time to learn and you need to be prepared to scale with it for years. You will be better at utilizing it after year 2 than year 1 for sure.

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It's well suited when you have to integrate it with another data source, like an FTP for example. The dimensions you can assign to campaigns or ad group levels help for easier performance management and reporting. What makes it difficult is that everytime you need to update anything on the account, you can't use the publisher but have to do it through Marin. This makes the whole process very time consuming and causes more mistakes. Also if you have paused anything on the publisher and you don't remember to sync marin after, all changes on the publisher will get lost if you make new changes on marin

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• With a unified workflow, we can effortlessly update contact records, generate sales deals, and dispatch personalized marketing emails.
• With Breeze AI, I can easily automate tasks by giving it the proper prompt. It doesn’t generate random text. It helps in managing tasks.

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• Marin is a self-serve platform. You can tailor your campaigns per your preference/convenience/needs. You can customize your view, see % changes, create custom columns depending on your Key Performance Indicators, and set any sort of dimensions and labels that will help you filter for your campaigns on a daily basis.
• Bidding and changes to destination URLs can be done through mass edits within the UI, without having to upload bulk-sheets. You push any changes from Marin to the Engines, and can also pull in your changes from Bing/AdWords engines by syncing your campaigns as well. The system will not publish anything you do not manually post until Midnight PST. You can copy paste straight from your excel bulksheet into the uploading tool (or upload the document through unicode text).
• The Administrative log keeps track of all changes, and keeps users (through their logins) accountable for any edits. This way, you can filter for your name, and find the edits that you made, just to double check your work, or to make sure you are publishing the correct changes. There is a keyword- group- and campaign-level history/settings log, where you can see the name of the user who created, edited, published, paused, activated, deleted, etc. any item.
• You can set up alerts that will help you manage accounts: anything from active campaigns with 0 ad copy, to finding keywords in low ad positions.
• If you push duplicate keywords, the system will reject them, keeping our accounts from getting clouded due to human error. There is no need to download existing keywords or groups and use their keyword or group IDs to make any edits--instead, editing is a breeze because the system detects the new changes automatically. The only need for IDs is when making edits to creative.

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• The mobile app could be better. It is fine for quick updates or checking something on the go, but it feels limited compared to the desktop version.
• In my time of using Hubspot, the dashboard UI has changed twice I think, and it certainly isn't helpful when you're trying to get used a new view entirely.
• I have observed HubSpot CRM sometimes has issues with large lists, and shows incorrect number on the list page versus the detail page.
• Search can be improved, because sometimes it misbehaves or doesn't show what is expected.

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• Support. They are addressing this currently, and things seem to have improved lately, but we were experiencing long delays in getting support tickets addressed.
• New Google Shopping campaigns will not even show in the tool. Old PLA campaigns are fine however.
• Random missing data. Typically this happens after an update, but we've seen data missing in various clients. Usually logging a support ticket and having Marin Support rerun a backend process resolves the issue.

Thus far, our company has found HubSpot CRM to be a reliable service that serves its purpose well: a centralized business contacts database, accessible remotely, with a simple and visually-pleasing interface. Issues are non-existent or resolved quickly, and when the service is experiencing interruptions, notifications and/or updates are sent regularly.

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I've used Marin Software now at three separate companies where I evaluated the platform along with several other internal partners. In each case, we did make the decision to renew based on our positive experience with the app and the customer support we received at the Enterprise level. Especially when we had complex integration questions or faced the change to Google's enhanced campaigns - Marin worked closely with us to make the transition seamless.

There is a steep learning curve with HubSpot compared to more rigid Client/Case Management APIs. The platform's openness can be overwhelming to navigate and to teach to those who are technologically challenged. Once you learn the navigation and the tools needed to complete tasks, it becomes easier. There was a lot of clutter on the navigation menu. If your subscription doesn't give you access to a tool, you should be able to deactivate it or remove it from the navigation, which could reduce the platform's overwhelming nature.

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Marin Software's usability is bar none in the paid search world. All that said, I think Marin Software only appears superior because all the tools in the space provide extremely subpar support. Kenshoo is so complex that I don’t know think half the people that work there know how to use it.

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Because when I needed help HubSpot responded immediately and provided me with the information I needed which enabled me to realize that HubSpot was even more customizable and easier to use than I thought! And I already thought HubSpot was very user friendly and easy to use, and then Support showed me how to manipulate the settings, columns and the appearance of the tool.

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The times that I have had to contact Marin support, they have been very helpful. When I spoke with them on the phone, they walked me through the process to be able to resolve the issue that I had, The gentleman walked me through all the steps and easily helped me resolve the issue that I had.

Interactive helpful videos, summaries, and quizzes help a user learn the platform in demo-mode. The only challenge was that once you clicked certain buttons per instructions, you couldn't necessarily go back to retake notes without redoing the entire module.

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If you've had any prior experience with cloud based marketing automation or group communication tools, you can do the implementation without paid outside support. Though getting to a SLA (service level agreement) would be best achieved with the help of a third party who can facilitate

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As I said previously I would just highly recommend everyone being hands on during implementation to make sure everyone knows how to use the product. Marin Software does an excellent job with training and answering questions so this is not a significant insight however it makes the process easier in the long run

Our team and senior managers deemed these products worth reviewing and requested that every team assess them, enabling our company to make an informed decision about the software to purchase. Everybody checked, and a survey was conducted among all those employees. We received the most votes for HubSpot CRM, as most employees preferred it.

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Marin is a must have for any enterprise-level PPC account. The time savings from task automation and the very sophisticated bidding platform can help any advertiser or agency effectively scale any account. In both AdWords and Bing, the bulk editing and automated bidding features are less reliable and prone to error. The interfaces are also unnecessarily complicated and outdated. While Google Analytics is a great tool, there are no features that tie true revenue data into these interfaces, limiting the amount you can really optimize around ROI.

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• When the decision came to explore a platform that would migrate our data and leave the transition as seamless as I would like to see more native options for automation possible, a number of products were suggested. Once we saw HubSpot CRM we knew it was for us. My division were the trial usage group...which has led to enterprise adoption and we couldn't be happier.
• I wish I could say that the support team has been awesome... but we haven't needed to utilize them, which is a testimony in its own right. The couple of minor issues we had were largely user education issues and were quickly handled.
• The commitment the entire HubSpot team has for, not just their clients, but anyone in business that is open to learn resonates with everything they do. I subscribed to their blog and the free resources they deliver is truly amazing and they deserve kudos.

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• It has definitely increased employee efficiency because we run on Yahoo Gemini, Bing, and Google. If we had to optimize/report per engine, it would take hours and hours each week.
• I think it's made optimizations less of a daunting task in my daily routine. I've been able to pinpoint where our ROI suffers and work from there in a matter of minutes.
• The customer service has gotten better and could still be improved. Our Marin rep used to be horrible at returning messages but once he got support, we were able to implement a ton more pixels and betas.

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