HubSpot - Highly Recommended for Inbound Marketing
September 13, 2013

HubSpot - Highly Recommended for Inbound Marketing

Ben Lamorte | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Basic

Overall Satisfaction

Pros

  • The product is not just the software. We had a great experience with their services team which was like a "coaching relationship" so they sent standard homework assignments and lined up 30-minute meetings every-other-week. This coaching relationship solved the problem of "we have lots of ideas but we don't execute them".
  • Hubspot automated the KPIs we needed to present at our board meetings and showed trends in traffic, traffic source, keyword search, landing page conversion rates etc.
  • Before Hubspot, creating a landing page required a lot of time and planning. With Hubspot, it was easy for us to create dozens of landing pages and we could create one for a specific campaign in less than an hour! This meant more targeted marketing and better visibility into campaign performance.

Cons

  • I don't think the nurture program (e-mail campaigns) were very good as compared to Pardot, Eloqua, or Marketo, for example.
  • The social media features were limited and I never figured out how to leverage these - for example, it would be nice if HubSpot had the equivalent of HootSuite integrated so it could send out tweets on a schedule etc. But if there was such functionality, I never saw it!
  • 200% + increase in organic search traffic
  • Landing page conversion rate was up to 30% overall (I believe due to highly targeted nature of our 20+ landing pages)
The only reason I don't say 10 is that we switched to PARDOT and I believe this may have had most of the functionality of HubSpot other than the blog...
I know they increased their prices so not sure if it makes sense for companies <$1M annual revenue. I do think that if you can afford the $1,000/month or so, it should pay off. If you cannot justify this cost though, maybe you're not ready to market your product. Also, consider the extent to which inbound marketing is important to you - if important, give HubSpot some serious thought. If you have more money to spend, look at other tools that are higher-end.

Product Usage

  • It improved our search rank so we appeared higher in organic searches for our key words.
  • Gave our blog much more visibility and enabled us to track performance of each post.
  • Helped us focus on the right keywords so we didn't waste a bunch of money trying to go after competitive but not focused keywords such as "budgeting software".

Evaluation and Selection

We were using our home-grown blog system and it was embedded on our website but not connected directly to Salesforce or Marketo, our marketing automation tool at the time.
We looked at an SEO consulting company and also considered launching a blog on a totally different platform, but none of these "point solutions" offered the full suite of offerings from Hubspot. The low-cost and full feature set of Hubspot made it the clear choice, so we quickly eliminated alternatives

Implementation

Our marketing manager did most the work and ate this stuff up!
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
We had a great trainer, but I've heard not all trainers are as good...
It was so SHORT and you got check marks every time you completed a section :)

Support

It was world class.
Yes - Their premium support is VERY recommended in the early stages - after 6-9 months, the marketing team should be able to take it and run.

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