HubSpot: great for marketers who are a "one man band"
December 16, 2015
HubSpot: great for marketers who are a "one man band"
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot
Within the past year, we have put a greater emphasis on publishing and promoting original content to educate our market. We needed a platform that could help us do a better job of managing our contacts and understanding their online behavior in order to tailor our content more appropriately. We also needed a more efficient way of organizing and analyzing our digital marketing efforts. HubSpot was one of several vendors we looked at to help our marketing and sales team gain insights into our audience and improve our efforts in reaching out to them/attracting them to our content.
Pros
- HubSpot does a superb job of onboarding and educating clients. The process is smooth and well-organized. Their learning library of content made it simple for me to get trained quickly on the platform and start using it almost immediately.
- HubSpot is also great from an ease-of-use perspective. No matter what I'm building in it (email, blog post, landing page, etc.), I don't need coding knowledge. (Although sometimes I will bring a designer in to help jazz things up a bit.) I also find the optimization prompts extremely helpful to ensure I'm covering all the bases before I hit publish/send.
- With SEO being such a critical component of successful content marketing, I really appreciate the keyword tool. I use it all the time to get new ideas for content or see where I have ranking and conversion opportunities that I can develop further.
Cons
- We used to use Constant Contact for our email marketing. I would like to see HubSpot's email tool improve - something as simple as seeing "forward" information is either not available from HubSpot or not intuitive at all.
- I have mixed feelings about the campaign tool. Overall, I love the ability to tie multiple pieces of content into a single campaign and see reporting for how it all works together. However, building the campaigns can be a bit of a pain. I don't like needing to publish landing pages in order to build other pieces...I wish there was a way to create all components of the campaign and then hit "publish" all at once, rather than piecemeal and backtrack to add links, etc.
- I think HubSpot's reporting add-on really ought to be a part of the product as a whole. Reporting and analytics are one of the key ways for me to prove the efficacy of our marketing efforts (and of HubSpot's value). The offerings in the Professional edition are pretty slim in my opinion.
- Our business has a long sales cycle by nature. The insights we've gotten from working within the HubSpot platform have helped us understand where gaps exist in our content and allowed us to address those gaps quickly. In turn, that has helped us move more groups through our marketing and sales funnel than we have even just a year ago.
For the size of our company and the budget we were working with, we looked at both HubSpot and Marketo. The two were comparable in features and functionality; however, I did not find the Marketo interface as intuitive through the demos we received. I'm sure it also helped that I had some exposure to HubSpot in a previous role, so I knew the learning curve would be much quicker for me with HubSpot as well. I think the biggest difference is that Marketo seems to have a much bigger emphasis on outbound marketing, whereas HubSpot has planted their flag firmly on the inbound side. Given our own strategy of using content to attract, educate and convert our prospects over time, HubSpot seemed to be better aligned.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Feature Ratings
Using HubSpot
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- List building
- Tying content together under a campaign tag
- Keyword research and page optimization
- Designing landing pages, blog posts and emails
- I've had some trouble figuring out why my blog notifications are not connecting to my lists.
Yes - I don't use it often, but I have found it helpful when I need a quick update on the performance of my marketing efforts and I'm away from my laptop.
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