When you first start with marketing, it all seems to be so overwhelming – so much stuff to do. You have to make your brand and products known. You have to attract customers. And perhaps you also want to actively approach your customers. You have to have a website. You may want to be on social networks. You may also want to run ads. Of course, you want to keep your existing customers happy. And to top it off, you have to keep track of all your activities.
For each of these tasks you could use a dedicated tool or you could go with a comprehensive digital marketing solution. Hubspot Marketing Hub tries to integrate everything you need into a single solution. It has customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, campaign automation, content creation, and reporting.
If you’ve spent some time looking into marketing solutions, most likely you’ve heard about Hubspot. It’s one of the most popular marketing automation tools out there and has a long history on its back.
It was founded way back in 2006. It’s the typical story where the founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah scratched their own itch. They wanted a solution to approach their audience with content so that the latter would willingly engage.
Hubspot Marketing Hub is one of its suite of tools. The others are Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, and CMS Hub. This almost sounds like you could run your customer facing business with Hubspot.
Pros and cons of Hubspot Marketing Hub
Hubspot Marketing Hub is one of the tools in HubSpot product suite. The entire suite covers all you need for digital marketing, sales, customer support.
With Hubspot Marketing Hub you have all the tools you need to
- find and attract potential customers
- automate your marketing
- do analytics
It actually sounds so simple, right? But these 3 bullet points don’t show what’s really needed in marketing. It doesn’t describe how much creative work is involved, how you have to sift through leads and do other repetitive tasks without getting bogged down, or go through and crunch the numbers to see what works and why.
Pros
24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat
forever free plan – although with a very limited feature set
no credit card required at signup
Cons
- even though 73% of HubSpot’s current user base identify as owners of small to medium-sized businesses (1-25 employees), getting the features you need can weigh on your pockets
- some features are paid add-ons
- some features can be too advanced for novices
Who is Hubspot Marketing Hub for?
If you find you and your team don’t want to wait for your IT to make tools talk to each other, Marketing Hub can help you create and improve your digital marketing efforts.
It’s a good tool if you
- want to attract the right people
- convert the into leads
- create and launch comprehensive and scaleable marketing campaigns
How easy is Hubspot Marketing Hub to use?
You can experience how it is with the free plan and don’t need to have your credit card at hand. It’s always a good sign. Otherwise, I always have the nagging suspicion that the service isn’t really as good as it makes itself out.
Signing up can be quite a hassle. Hubspot wants to know your industry and your role. Also, if you use a VPN, you may not pass the captcha bot test.
Even though Hubspot has designed its Marketing Hub to have a user friendly interface. It has striven to make the interface behave consistently so as not to confuse users.
It can be a tad overwhelming due to its many features. Therefore I recommend going through its quick demo – except if you’re a veteran in using Hubspot tools.
Features
You get a bunch of tools for email marketing, creating landing pages, social media marketing, content management – and no need to write a line of code.
Email marketing automation
Using Marketing Hub, you can use emails to help you grow and nurture your relationships with your customers. You create targeted emails without having to write any code. You can then automate the sending of these emails at the right time to the right leads because you can choose from a range of triggers, conditions, and actions.
The email marketing solution runs smoothly alongside the CRM. This means that all the interactions you and your team had with your audience are collected. All this data is handy when you want to send personalised messages. It helps lift the tedium when you’re sifting through your contacts.
The built-in automation also lightens the burden on your shoulders in that it helps you create targeted workflows.
Website, landing pages, and blog
You can build and modify your website without a line of code. You’ll find everything you need such as templates and a draft-and-drop editor. Once you’ve got your site up and running, HubSpot helps you give your audience a reason to visit.
Its content strategy tool gives recommendations in real time on how to optimise your website for SEO as well as topics for your blog. Blog and content marketing is central in that it helps you build trust and ultimately generate leads.
Website and blog are excellent to attract people but you also need a way to convert visitors. You have the choice in getting the visitors to convert: subscribe to email lists, webinars, demos, free trials, schedule a meeting, and more.
Ads
It’s cool when your brand draws people organically to you. But in the beginning, you may want to get the ball rolling with ads. With Marketing Hub, you can track, test, and optimise your online ads.
The ad management tool will highlight how your ads influence your leads at every stage of their journey and allows you to segment your contacts based on how they interact with your ads.
Social networks are also part of the journey, hence you’ll find tools that allow you to include share buttons within content, capture leads from social media channels and pull queries related to leads or contacts. If you’re like to schedule when your social media posts go out, you can control your social scheduling straight from your Hubspot account.
Hubspot Marketing Hub integrations
Most of the time, if you’re not starting from scratch, you want the new tool to work in the eco system of your existing business tools. Or at times, you need more than what a tool can do out of the box.
For that, Hubspot comes with a large app marketplace with free and paid integrations. You’ll find it can work with popular web services such as Zapier, MailChimp, Salesforce, and WordPress. Hubspot regularly adds new integrations.
Hubspot Marketing Hub customer support
It’s exemplary that Hubspot offers 24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat. You also find a comprehensive knowledge base with articles and tutorials. Since Hubspot is like the granddaddy of digital marketing, there’s also a large community of users that are willing to help out with questions.
Hubspot Marketing Hub pricing
Hubspot gives you the choice of 4 plans with the usual motto the more you need the more you pay. You can start with the free plan and it grows with you. Its plans are flexible and can be scaled up or down as you need.
Is Hubspot Marketing Hub the right tool for you?
It’s not without advantages to using Hubspot Marketing Hub. The most prevalent is that you don’t have to plan in the time and resources to make different tools talk and work with each other.
If you like the idea of having a comprehensive suite of tools for creating and optimising your digital marketing efforts, from automation to personalisation and analytics Marketing Hub is the way to go.
It’ll help you capture, manage and nurse your leads. You’ll be able to see the ROI of your efforts and improve your marketing efficacy as well as efficiency.
If you found this review, it’d be great if you could share it with your network. Thanks for taking the time to read it and I hope you found it useful.
Original post here: Hubspot Marketing Hub review
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