Hubspot review from intermediate user, primarily from social media/email marketing perspective.
Updated February 25, 2015
Hubspot review from intermediate user, primarily from social media/email marketing perspective.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot
Currently we use HubSpot for a multitude of things ranging from emails, website management, blog creation, stats/analytics, contact lists, social media efforts, etc. Currently, it is only utilized by the marketing department, and this is the only department in which I truly see it being utilized at Clearwater. It simplifies content distribution and management through a wide variety of channels that we can also automate and track stats on. It helps us solve the problem of managing and tracking all this information, which would be next to impossible manually or just using Salesforce. Additionally, because it is integrated with Salesforce to some extent, it helps us to manage efforts there and view the results of our marketing tactics to see if they are working for sales, too. Additionally, it connects our whole department so we can see each other’s work, edit it, stay connected through it, share files/documents in one place and general productivity by way of visibility in all the different tabs for content/social/contacts/reports.
- Hubspot is immensely helpful in managing social media. By planning posts ahead, I can have a month’s worth of social marketing done in one day and not have to worry about being at my computer so I can post it at the right time. Also, by connecting to various accounts in the same post, we don’t need to make 3 separate posts for the same topic; conversely we can avoid being spammy because it is easy to toggle between messages and customize them. For social media monitoring, it is quick to detect responses or track topics which is good to keep up on industry trends, what people are saying about us, or what our competitors are Tweeting about, etc.
- Another thing I like is email creation and management. While there are some hiccups with formatting (though this seems common in email software…), it is nice that anyone can log in and edit in real time to avoid 5 versions of something or forwarding emails on. That gets confusing and is error prone. Additionally, the ability to track the email/campaign after it is sent is helpful to gauge our efforts and tweak them if need be in addition to seeing overall trends, especially with the suggestions tab.
- Finally, I like the campaigns breakdown to get a good overview of everyone’s efforts on the same campaign. Our web developer is concerned with CTAs/landing pages, demand gen is concerned with email stats, and content is concerned with blog views and responses. You can see exactly what contributed to the stats and that lends credibility to your department and can also help you see what wording/tactics were effective and move forward from there.
- With social functionality, sometimes responses don’t show up in real time, or pieces are just missing. However, Linked In is more difficult to track as the API is not open. But still, it doesn’t completely cut out the need to be connected to the platforms separately.
- Email formatting can be difficult at times, even for things as simple as text color or font size. The preview does not always match how the sent email appears in an inbox, so you have to be extra diligent when editing before pressing send, otherwise your formatting might be off, through no real fault of your own.
- HubSpot might not be perfect, but I can’t really imagine our marketing team being as responsive, efficient and up to date on what everyone is doing in marketing and how that helps/hurts sales if we had different platforms for everything, did things manually or relied on someone else to do it. HubSpot allows us to be individually responsible for our marketing efforts, but also makes it easy for others to see what we’re doing and find out where the holes might be. Every single person in the department uses it.
- Because leads come in real-time, you can immediately see who is doing what and where they came from. That helps marketing to know what's working, and it also clues sales in to help them give a more personalized starting point from which they can reach out by understanding who the potential client is and what they're looking at.