Marketing Automation Platform for Growth
Updated November 08, 2016
Marketing Automation Platform for Growth
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Modules Used
- Marketing Automation (Email), Blog, COS/CMS, Integrations (Salesforce, Wistia, Etc.)
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot
We are currently using HubSpot for marketing automation, lead scoring, and nurture campaigns. We will soon migrate our blog content into HubSpot blogging system as well. The entire company uses HubSpot. Our sales teams look to HubSpot for insight on the leads coming into the database, our support team leverages HubSpot's custom event tracking (Enterprise edition) for insights, and our Marketing team certainly uses HubSpot for analytics, email, and insights. For the most part, HubSpot helps solve a few problems for us. One particular pain point is iterating and adjusting on-boarding campaigns to improve new user acquisition. We also use HubSpot's technology to present new information to our customers and website visitors based on their pervious interactions or lifecycle stages. This type of interaction helps create a more meaningful experience.
- Email automation: HubSpot excels at email automation, nurturing, personalization, and deployment. Although a few improvements can be made for Salesforce email automation, there are plenty of powerful workarounds & workflows to help you accomplish your goals.
- A/B Testing: HubSpot is a great tool for A/B testing content & subject lines in emails. They are also great for Landing Pages.
- Workflows: HubSpot's workflows tools is amazing. It's easy to use and highly customizable.
- New Feature Releases & Improvements: HubSpot is amazing about listening to customer feedback and implementing their new features FAST.
- HubSpot could use some help with their "SMarketing" or Smart Marketing Analytics. Their tools are great, but a little cumbersome to work with for analytics reporting.
- HubSpot could improve their dashboards, but to my knowledge they are working on this and it should be available soon.. so i'll be looking forward to that.
- HubSpot should improve some more customization around email automation. In particular, I'm referring to the ability to insert tokens based on the Sales Person who owns the record. Right now it's a bit difficult to insert custom tokens without some pretty heavy work arounds.
- We have improved employee efficiency (on the sales side) greatly.
- Our marketing analytics have really improved (dual lead attribution)
HubSpot is all around a more robust platform. It offers a lot more components to the marketing automation process and tracking needs. While many small business teams would benefit from products like Act-On and MailChimp, EMMA (who I also love), and Pardot, HubSpot is the clear winner in terms of growth and scalability.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Feature Ratings
Using HubSpot
3 - I use HubSpot as the Marketing Technology and Operations manager
My co-worker uses HubSpot as the Content Manager - publishing social posts, blog posts, etc.
My other co-worker uses HubSpot as the Director of Communications - publishing blog posts and monitoring our social activity.
My co-worker uses HubSpot as the Content Manager - publishing social posts, blog posts, etc.
My other co-worker uses HubSpot as the Director of Communications - publishing blog posts and monitoring our social activity.
1 - I am the only person who actively supports HubSpot at our company. By title I am considered a "Marketing Manager / Marketing Technologist". My expertise is in digital marketing technology. I know front end development languages (HTML & CSS) very well. I certainly have a desire to know more about HubL markup (which is HubSpots language) too. With all of that said, it really only takes someone with basic HTML / CSS skills and good systematic thought process to use HubSpot and start "making it work". HubSpot is an immensely powerful platform with great out of the box features for less experience teams to get the ball rolling.
- Email marketing
- Blog posting
- Internal notifications for our sales reps (via Salesforce integration)
- Social Media Posts
- Page visit alerts have been really cool! When a contact we already know visits a series of pages that we know lead to higher conversion, we alert our team to follow up.
- The Salesforce integration has been so helpful. We've been able to build out marketing engagement campaigns and assign tasks to our reps who use Salesforce for follow up.
- We may build out some more website functionality. We're considering leveraging more of their COS platform for a unique marketing opportunity.
- We might be able to use HubSpot's CRM components for certain teams if we wish... but that may not be necessary.
Evaluating HubSpot and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Third-party Reviews
It really comes down to the type of business you want to be. Whenever you're evaluating a Marketing Automation platform for your business it's really important to look at the type of company you are and the one you aim to become. For us, HubSpot was the perfect blend of functionality, product maturity/direction, and how they are built to help us go to market. Some people might discover how other automation vendors are better suited to the kind of business they are (Sales driven or otherwise).
Ultimately, it came down to feature comparisons and how we wanted to run our marketing department.
Ultimately, it came down to feature comparisons and how we wanted to run our marketing department.
I don't think I would change any of my evaluation techniques. I have a full spreadsheet and feature break down that I do from scratch every time. It's not easy but it's definitely worth it.
HubSpot Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
- Data mapping was the most significant issue. We integrated HubSpot's enterprise plan with our Software so we can have a better understanding of our customer journey, this made the implementation more challenging but far more useful.
HubSpot Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - Their standard support is enough for my team.
Yes - It absolutely was resolved to my satisfaction. It was a bug with the blog rendering code and documentation. They fixed the documentation and updated the code to help me achieve the goals we were looking for!
I can describe about thirty different times.. but here is one:
I reported an issue with HubSpots blog template builder. It was essentially tacking my code and doing what it was supposed to do, but at the same time it was causing all of my content to suddenly mis align to the left of the page (it was previously a two column page 80% / 20% split). So this was a big issue. I wanted it to truncate the text appropriately but I also wanted it to not screw up the entire page... duh.
So I reached out to their support team and put in a ticket on the developer forums. Initially it was a bit difficult to get the exact problem figured out, but once someone from development got a hold of the issue it was resolved within about a week. Kudos to Emily Morgan for supporting my request and keeping me abreast of all the updates as new developments came about. Thanks!
I reported an issue with HubSpots blog template builder. It was essentially tacking my code and doing what it was supposed to do, but at the same time it was causing all of my content to suddenly mis align to the left of the page (it was previously a two column page 80% / 20% split). So this was a big issue. I wanted it to truncate the text appropriately but I also wanted it to not screw up the entire page... duh.
So I reached out to their support team and put in a ticket on the developer forums. Initially it was a bit difficult to get the exact problem figured out, but once someone from development got a hold of the issue it was resolved within about a week. Kudos to Emily Morgan for supporting my request and keeping me abreast of all the updates as new developments came about. Thanks!
Using HubSpot
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Building an email (once the template is available) is a very easy process.
- Building a landing page (once the template is available) is also a very nice and elegant process.
- Comparing data side by side for A/B tests is very easy to do. (Email / Landing Page)
- Building out templates in landing pages can be difficult.
- Building out templates for email is a bit cumbersome.
Yes, but I don't use it - I haven't experience any problems with it, but I don't use it very often. Typically I just log on to the mobile app to see how things are progressing on a particular campaign. Other than looking at metrics, I don't go out of my way to use the mobile app.