HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)

As I said previously, I was not a fan at the beginning because, like everyone, I don't take change so well. Once I started following leads through HubSpot Marketing Hub, I integrated it with my email and created templates for what I needed, I started to see the positives immediately. My time working was better spent as I eliminated time put in routine tasks. I was able to track all communication in HubSpot Marketing Hub, we created systems in the office assigning tasks to one another and, through HubSpot Marketing Hub, our leads were able to book meetings in my calendar automatically. To be honest, if you are in sales and marketing, I cannot think of scenarios where HubSpot Marketing Hub cannot help. All I would like to say is, when using templates, pay attention to where you send them - you may need some personalization. I would encourage the management of HubSpot Marketing Hub to create short tutorials for beginners like me who need to configure and start using various features: setting up deals, templates, and dashboards.

Incentivized

If you are looking to manage multiple social channels and quickly schedule posts it's a great tool. Not the best tool if you're looking to provide real time or near real time support and feedback to customers who are in the moment.

Incentivized

• All-in-one software - the main thing HubSpot does well is the breadth of functionality.
• Easy of use - personally, I find it more intuitive than Marketo, which is the other MAP that I know well.
• Ads - I like that we can drill down on ads by channel, ad group, campaign, and even create and see performance data at each level.

Incentivized

• The ability to schedule months of content at a time and view it across a calendar.
• The approval process - you can set up teams to create, edit, publish, approve etc.
• The content and apps module allows you to create modules which can be displayed on your Facebook page under the tabs section. You can create interactive modules for your customers to view.

Incentivized

• While Hubspot has added some collaborative tools, I think this could improve. I'd like to see more options to comment on emails and ways of being able to share out changes as well as approval channels.
• The ability to update ads via the calendar is pretty cumbersome. There's no good way to bulk edit or update. You have go into each one individually.
• Real time edits would be nice. If you have multiple people working on the same thing, you'll get kicked out and your changes might not be saved.

Incentivized

• Videos posted to Facebook via SRM have to be clicked to run instead of running automatically.
• No ability to boost posts or ads from SRM.
• Due to privacy restrictions of various social streams, unable to listen to 'people'; can only listen to business pages.
• Not able to publish the same post at the same hour across time zones. So, if you want to publish a post at 8 am EST and 8 am PST, you have to do 2 separate posts. Otherwise your 8 am EST will post at 5 am PST.

Incentivized

Our business relies on the HubSpot platform to manage our marketing, sales and CRM processes. HubSpot marketing automation helps us define our activities and streamlines them in a cohesive and efficient way. Without HubSpot, we will have to revert to the 'old way' of doing everything with a variety of disparate systems.

Incentivized

Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.

While there are some frustrating things that pop up unexpectedly ("wait... I can't do X?"), I have found HubSpot to be easy to use and extremely helpful to my daily work. The documentation is really good, and when it's not helpful, the support staff have been amazing.

Incentivized

Within a few hours you should be able to get up to speed to do the basics. I find it very intuitive

Incentivized

They have had issues with system availability over the course of days. Sometimes the system is unusable, other times updates simply take a long time to show up. It's better now but, from a reliaibility standpoint, HubSpot is not Salesforce.com yet. Still great software though.

With all the new features in HubSpot, the system can get a tad slow sometimes... That said, most of the time it is lightning fast and I have no problems. Because most of the integrations are API, they silently work in the background. I have not had trouble with lag due to HubSpot integration

During the few times I've needed it, HS support has been accessible, helpful and efficient. Often rolling up their sleeves to make changes for you as opposed to leaving you with a list of instructions to decipher on your own.

The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies

Incentivized

I did the 2-day classroom at HubSpot's corporate office in Cambridge. First off, it was amazing to see their corporate office in general. They have such a cool office environment. But it was also great to have the ability to learn in a workshop format with other HubSpot users and meet my Account Manager/ Inbound Marketing Consultant in person.

I went through Inbound Marketing University in 2006. Great training and helped my transition from traditional (outbound) marketing to inbound marketing that I've been able to apply to a number of businesses from wastewater and water reuse, to professional services and SaaS. Share information of value to build awareness and trust. Answer customers' questions in a transparent way to generate more qualified leads. Understand the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead and put together a lead nurturing program. Your sales and marketing efforts will see significant ROI.

Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.

My biggest piece of advice for those who are implementing Hubspot is that you need to devote the time up front and learn how to use the product. Once you learn how to use Hubspot, it will be much more effective as well as much easier to use in the long run

Other competing software such as Zoho and Boomtown may have more bells and whistles, but it is too cumbersome and has many parts that only advanced users can operate. With HubSpot, each function is within reach of the average agent. It doesn't overpromise and then makes you feel incompetent when you can't use it all...

Incentivized

I have used one other enterprise level application; it was comparable to SRM. We moved away from the first application because our parent company uses many other Oracle applications, not because we were 'unhappy' with the application we had at the time. Having said that, SRM does everything we need from it; in fact, there are features we aren't fully leveraging at this point. I especially find Engage, Content and Apps and Publish particularly useful. This is the kind of platform that is very robust; you get out of it what you have the time and resources for

Incentivized

HubSpot is addressing this more and more. Currently you can assign tasks to designated sales teams, which grow as you grow. They've added free baseline products for those just getting started. These and more contribute to the scalability of HubSpot - so I gave it an 8 and am hoping for more in the future!

• HubSpot has helped us increased our lead generation.
• HubSpot has allowed us to continue to grow our customer base without having to spend a ton of marketing dollars on advertising.
• HubSpot has allowed our company to standardize our process and bring the company onto one platform for sales and marketing.

Incentivized

• Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
• Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
• Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.

Incentivized