Avantages
-Easy to use
-Does not require a lot of training
-Customization available
-Various reports
-Track individual pipeline, performance and upcoming/previous sale actions
-Marketing features
Inconvénients
-Not fully oriented for hospitality company (e.g. for pipeline amount, etc.).
-Some information are repetitive between Company level and Customer level.
-It would be interesting profiles could be sync together (changing company status doesn't impact customer status), so there is a minimum of manual operation to do.
-Not compatible with Hotel PMS.
Hubspot is the solution that propelled a single position into an entire digital marketing department. The learning curve can be steep for anyone new to this type of automation and integration, but is supplemented by Hubspot Academy's learning resources and certifications. Overall, the basic environment is intuitive and features are relatively easy to use.
Avantages
Hubspot has every essential feature you need to build and manage a digital marketing department. From CRM and lead forms to email automation and content marketing to advance reporting; almost anything that is missing from the platform can be easily integrated either thru partnerships or Zapier APIs and web hooks. Hubspot keeps up with the fast changing landscape of digital marketing with regular launches of new features like chat bots and improved contact management. Managing several brands thru one enterprise portal, I am able to track deliverables from various divisions, monitor multiple team progress, and aggregate lead acquisition strategies to maximize talent resources. I recommend Hubspot to all small to mid sized businesses.
Inconvénients
Hubspot is a jack of all trades, yet master of none. Unless you pay for add-on features, your company will miss out on the more powerful integrations, reporting, and paid ads. Otherwise, Hubspot's normal customer service is really just a human connection to their extension support docs. For any custom or complicated support requests, pay the extra for designated priority tech support. Sending 12 million emails and 6,000 social posts annually for multiple brands through a single portal sometimes can to be difficult to work around. Some improvements are rolled out that aren't always an improvement over their previous features.
Hubspot is an affordable marketing automation solution that works well for our small team. While it lacks some of the features or usability of its more expensive competitors, the tools can be leveraged to powerfully enhance the reach of a small marketing and admissions/sales team. The Hubspot Academy is a treasure trove of valuable educational and inspirational resources. For a small business/institution exploring marketing automation, Hubspot is a phenomenal place to begin.
Avantages
Hubspot provides a self-service marketing automation solution that allows us to expand our admissions team exponentially by building workflows of automated emails, text messaging, and direct mail (with third-party integrations) that are triggered by a variety of criteria. It allows us to be sure that every prospect is receiving regular communication from our office, allowing the admissions reps to focus on only the leads that demonstrate the highest likelihood of enrollment.
Inconvénients
Limitations within the tool require a variety of workarounds, some of which are laborious. Duplicate entries are common due to Hubspot using email as the unique identifier (Hubspot has added a contact ID to help address this, along with tools to sort through duplicates). Hubspot's workflow tool is basic by comparison with some of the more costly and sophisticated marketing automation solutions.
It has been very useful indeed. Through my use of HubSpot over the last 2 years we have successfully launched tele-marketing, email marketing, and SMS marketing campaigns.
HubSpot customer support have provided exceptional service throughout this period, giving us early access to the drag & drop email builder while it was in Beta. This enabled us to scale our email marketing operations much quicker than we anticipated. Their customer support and account management teams will always go the extra mile to help you.
There have been one or two usability issues which I have mentioned but besides this it's a tool I will continue to use and one I will recommend for mid-size companies which need an automated direct marketing tool.
Avantages
- Intuitive UX (mostly).
- Extremely efficient and pro-active customer support - they will always go the extra mile for you, including creating draft workflows to demonstrate how certain features work.
- The new drag & drop email builder.
Inconvénients
- Clarity of which integrations are possible with HubSpot, including the accuracy of Google Analytics attribution of HubSpot emails, and whether it is possible to design and launch push notifications through HubSpot.
- The drag & drop email builder can sometimes be quite inflexible, but this is improving with additions of features like personalisation tokens.
- Some features are little hidden and unintuitive, such as the power of building custom reports.
- The way some default filters work are also unintuitive, but I imagine these will gradually be improved (for example, there's no option to segment users in lists exactly {30 days before/after} a contact status change - combinations like "more than 30" but "less than 31" have to be used to achieve this).
I've been using Hubspot Marketing Hub for over a year now across multiple businesses of all shapes and sizes. What they all value is the advanced automation. Having an all-in-one website and CRM platform integrated with their social media, blog, sales pipeline etc, etc... All of their contacts are in one place with extensive information on their interactions with the brand - what content they are actively engaged with. It's truly valuable for medium to large businesses looking to utilise data and automation in their business.
Avantages
Excellent CRM for sales and automation. Innovative workflow triggers allow for nearly any automation solution you can think of. Assigning tasks to sales team members, automatically moving deals to different stages of the pipeline, automating emails and communications. Hubspot is an advanced and genuinely useful software for marketers in particular.
Inconvénients
Considering these advanced features, it can be quite expensive. So it's not for every business.
(1) Fluid trial integration between HubSpot and Salesforc, allowing our company to streamline the sales person to reach out quicker. (2) TONS of data cleanup
Avantages
Intuitiveness. We've had several interns throughout the last 2 years of working in HubSpot and they've picked it up easily because of this.
Cloning. Makes it simple if you're only changing one or 2 conditions/criteria in a list or email.
GoToWebinar integration. Key for our monthly webinars.
Variety of ways to create a list/workflow. We work on many different nurture campaigns with different qualifiers for each.
Inconvénients
It does tend to get buggy from time to time - for example right now I'm experiencing an issue in email when I go to replace a link, it won't paste to the text box, it'll paste outside of the hyperlinked words in the actual email, quite weird.
Over my career, I have been part of the implementation team for four other platforms. I finally got onto HubSpot and am very pleased with its capabilities. My team has adopted well, the integrations to other platforms are nice also. Overall, this has been a great experience.
However, one major negative is how our account was handled. On-boarding was really not that valuable for us, we felt rushed and it was on HS time not ours. There also seems to be a lot of turnover happening in HS and my sales rep went completely dark on us when we needed them, no transition plan was brought forward. We also paid for a monthly strategy person who was great at the start, left HS, and my group was thrown into another person's account. That person tried their best to pick up the pieces but we ultimately were paying good money in strategic support and got nothing from it. No credit was issued, just admittance of how it was handled poorly with an apology. I do now have an account manager who has been with HS for more than 5 years and is truly great to work with.
Avantages
Up-time, hardly ever system outages or glitches. Increased team efficiencies. The ability to use HubSpot as workaround solutions for other areas of marketing where we need to execute something we can figure out a way within HS to make it work. Landing pages, forms, workflows, and all other tools within the Marketing platform have been great. Easy to use, easy to train, and easy to transition to.
Inconvénients
Some basic things you think should be included are not. For example, workflow chat transcripts are not available neither is the ability to identify profiles with multiple or secondary email addresses. Also, the drag and drop builder is nice but limited as you oftentimes find errors when trying to embed code within the template, it get denied even though you are able to select html editing.
HubSpot allows us to communicate with our database, create landing pages, website form, and track what people are doing on our website. It gives us great insight on who is interested in learning more about our company and makes it simple for us to communicate with prospects.
Avantages
I love the marketplace for email templates, landing page templates, etc. As a small company, we do not have the resources to build out our own templates from scratch so this is extremely helpful. Their support is pretty top-notch! Everytime I reach out, they are very responsive and I've even had some people go above and beyond for support. This is so helpful to me and my team.
Inconvénients
The reporting functionality is limiting and the workflows seem more like workarounds rather than a true integration functionality. It's very difficult to pull some basic reports on form submission and I am unable to pull a report for multi-channel attribution. We use the workflows to integrate with Salesforce and it honestly feels like a workaround rather than a true integration set-up. If you're editing a workflow and something going wrong, you have the potential of impacting your whole database. Their social media publishing abilities are limited. It's not a main reason why we use this so we rely on something else for social.
HubSpot is great. The on-boarding team was really great. I would have liked to have a personalized training track because it's overwhelming (in a good way) to have so many videos and tutorials. The best part is everyone on my team is happy - easy of use, the information is presented cleanly, etc. We've got lots more to go be so far, it's been a great move for us.
Avantages
Easy to set up. Their on-boarding team was amazing. Creating emails is simple. Customizing it for our needs was great. We've also migrated our site to the CMS. We aren't live but the migration went really smoothly.
Inconvénients
I think the workflow tool could use some work. I'm disappointed at the limited number of dashboards you can have with our plan. I am also disappointed at the # of templates we can have with our plan. With respect to on-boarding, I would have liked a more comprehensive training track. There's so much to learn that you get overwhelmed. It would be great if they guided you through a track.
HubSpot is the best tool to use when learning marketing automation. Our marketing team uses HubSpot Enterprise for emails, forms, landing pages, web chat, and social scheduling. Our biggest pain point has been our third-party integration with our CRM-- we use Microsoft Dynamics 365. The more tools/features you're able to use in HubSpot, the more convenient (and powerful) it becomes as you really can benefit from having "everything you need in one place". But as companies grow, it gets harder and harder to maintain that vision. I wish we could take advantage of all of the HubSpot Enterprise features we pay for but too many of our existing tools overlap with them and that's where the importance of reliable integrations come into play.
Avantages
HubSpot has allowed us to streamline our marketing efforts so we can focus on what really matters. With We've been able to automates so many mundane processes that we used to do manually thanks to HubSpot workflows. HubSpot's ease of use also makes training and transferring ownership/management of the tool more efficient.
What I liked:
• Simple, intuitive fool-proof interface
• Great support and learning resources
• HubSpot Academy makes it easy to learn marketing automation
• Workflows look like they were designed by a kindergartener-- I love how simple they are to understand and build
Inconvénients
Six months into using HubSpot we outgrew the "honeymoon phase" as we started running into limitations with the platform, mostly involving integrations with other tools we use. At the end of the day, HubSpot is phenomenal at what it does but has real limits to it's function and flexibility-- it doesn't scale comfortably to larger enterprise companies/databases. If HubSpot fits within the scope of your company's marketing needs, it's a delight to use. HubSpot is built by marketers for marketers and it's run by a very human company that injects soul and purpose into it's products.
Improvements I'd like to see:
• Better CRM function-- it was too limited for us to use
• Greater flexibility with reporting custom dashboards
• Ability to use spend/budget data from LinkedIn Ads connection
• Ability to A/B test automated emails without workaround
Overall my experience with HubSpot is amazing. I am using it on a daily basis and found it very helpful for my work. I am using it for campaign creation, campaign management, bulk emails sending to customers and new prospects, tracking emails, bounce rates, open rate, click rates which is a very amazing feature and accurate. I love the way I can manage all data and information which in it and fetching reports and creating dashboards is very easy and very informative in it.
Avantages
I like HubSpot easy to use user interface and powerful marketing automation feature the most. I love HubSpot mobile app which is very easy to use and effective, because of this now anyone can access their HubSpot account from anywhere easily with their mobile app and on the other hand I like their dashboard reports and email tracking system too.
Inconvénients
There is one thing that I dislike about it and want to highlight it which is HubSpot is a little bit expensive but I can say also that this platform is worth to spend.
In general, hubspot is updated in a contacting manner that allows me to create a list of different groups, build my database so that the sales team can do a more efficient job and focus the strategies specific to each work group
Avantages
It is a software dedicated to automate marketing actions, where many departments must automate tasks related to emails, social networks, in addition to those that are related to websites, in order to facilitate tasks.
With hubspot you can manage contacts, activities related to websites, Live Chat, Conversational Bots, Marketing by mail, Ad Retargeting, among others.
It should be noted that with this Software, it helps create optimized content for search engines, in turn generates user traffic on the website or blogs.
This software is recommended to all professionals dedicated to digital marketing, because it unifies all the necessary tools into one, so they can do the work in less time. In addition, consumers are no longer only in the email, nor do we have to rely solely on their actions in this medium.
Personally, what I like most about this software is that it has a free plan and allowing any company to use it, in case of wanting a paid version it has good prices.
Among other benefits of hubspot, is that you can easily see the workflow that has had a client powers, such as downloads and their interactions with the company's website, this option is great, because it can help to know how many potential customers are ready for another email or a call.
It is important to note that once downloaded the program on your computer is integrated with all the tools that are already being used.
Inconvénients
Among the disadvantages of this program is: that you do not have any tool that can merge the contact information of different organizations.
It does not have the ability to register several email addresses of the same contact, this weakness is palpable at the moment of conversation by email with a user, because if we want to contact you by another address via e-mail is very difficult to connect .
You can not ignore unimportant records, this is to facilitate the reading of relevant interactions.
If you have a company that wants a smooth and powerful solution to manage contacts, that can see the visibility of the work, this program is not recommended
Hubspot has enabled me to work in a composed and quick way, without bringing about any mishaps.
Today I have 3 accreditations supported by this stage and I truly comprehend and apply the Inbound Marketing system that is the fundamental base of Hubspot.
It is astounding to deal with the site of the organization where I work and I trust that the expense/item proportion is reasonable. Picking Hubspot as our essential work instrument has been an incredible choice.
Avantages
The genuine estimation of HubSpot Marketing is the reconciliation of each promoting stage. Blogs, email, landing pages, workflows, work processes and more can without much of a stretch be made - and incorporated - for a simple to utilize, across the board promoting entryway.
Fundamentally, my organization utilizes HubSpot to rapidly construct and distribute blog entries. With the inherent online life apparatus, you can without much of a stretch offer the blog entry to your crowds. At that point, you can repurpose the substance you previously made for an email battle.
Another most loved component: you can create beautiful landing pages. With this, you can make delightful presentation pages that make it simple for clients to change over to a deal, or showcasing qualified lead.
Another extraordinary component is the examination instrument. You can see the presentation of each showcasing component in one nitty gritty dashboard. This encourages you see what's working - and so forth. This truly helped my organization put their advertising dollars where they're most powerful and effective.
Inconvénients
There's only a couple of disadvantages to HubSpot, from my point of view.
HubSpot works best when you can create a lot of substance. HubSpot is extraordinary at making your substance lovely and compelling, however in case you're not delivering content, you won't get the full esteem.
Second, the valuing level for HubSpot can be somewhat steep for private companies without optional salary. I'd state the administration is as yet justified, despite all the trouble, yet the speculation requires talk and responsibility from the group to be an extraordinary venture.
Ultimately, HubSpot requires an on boarding charge with each new contract. Presently, this on boarding expense isn't enormous, yet this was a hindrance for passage for my organization when we initially joined. The on boarding process unquestionably helped my group take advantage of HubSpot, be that as it may, as I stated, it was a slight obstacle for the group while considering HubSpot.
Overall, their sales people are fantastic! Before you buy - ask a ton of questions and make them show you everything. Get their sales folks to help you build custom reports. Ask them to help you import. Do all of this during the demo because once you're onboarded, it's much harder to get help. We ended up hiring a Hubspot Expert to help us get everything we need, but we also have some really complicated features we wanted to track like online courseware. For 99% of businesses, hubspot is the best at what they do.
Avantages
Hubspot is a seriously my best friend. I've been using hubspot for the last 18 months and after my first introduction with the tool, I now recommend it to every single client I have. What I love most is how easy it is to sync up with Gmail, Wordpress, Google Analytics, Woocommerce, Facebook and the list goes on and on. We've also synced Hubspot up with our LiveChat tool versus using the native inbox (Hubspots Chat) feature. Hubspot now tracks visitors and upon a form submission, checkout submission, a contact is created and we track the entire lifecycle from browser to buyer and retention. We can then record all interactions we have via email so the next person that touches that customer has the entire history. The workflow automations are fantastic for staying in touch with both clients and browsing visitors. We have 10 different workflows set up based our marketing goals to make sure subscribed clients are staying engaged with our product and then for leads we can add point values for every time a successful action is taken. I could write a sonnet on how much I love Hubspot's features and how easy they make it to love this tool. Hubspot easily replaces 5 other tools. What we use most is Landing Pages, Forms, Workflow Automations, Tasks triggered by website actions, and the dashboards. Dashboards are a reporting layout with widgets some of which are standard out of the box and the others are custom reports that we've created.
Inconvénients
What I don't like about Hubspot is that their services are all "add-on". We started off with the free plan and then upgraded to the marketing plan, but then needed to add on the Sales plan for at least one user. Down the road we had to purchase an add-on for reporting because we wanted more than 10 dashboards. It feels a little like a nickle and dime tactic. But, I will admit it's smart business-wise. I probably wouldn't have signed up for hubspot with the price I'm paying now... so they make you love them and you willing fork over tons of cash to keep their brilliant shiny tool. The other feature that was a bit combersome at first was the landing pages. The few they give you are super blah... but they have free templates you can download. What they don't tell you is you need to edit the master files in the template to change the logo, footer, etc.... and that was super hard at first. I wanted to throw my laptop the first few times I build a landing page in Hub.
I LOVE this platform. Onboarding is great. My support person (yes, you get a dedicated success manager that you actually form a relationship with and can help you navigate intricate projects, offer suggestions, advice or just listen as moral support and confirm you are on the right path ANYTIME) is fantastic, the software is in my opinion best in class.
The contract renegotiation process is a bit of a bummer. Some of the folks there aren’t the easiest to talk to or deal with. My hope is that they can fix the issues and shine in this area too. Product developers and bright and knowledgeable and they are constantly improving the platform to our delight.
Avantages
I am not a marketer. In fact, it was a hat I took on with my family’s Small business just to help out. Boy are we all glad we did. First of all, it is intuitive. There isn’t a page in Hubspot that doesn’t offer help in the form of written, video and linked tutorials. It’s all in-line too. I don’t have to open a different screen most of the time. I can easily and quickly solve my issue or learn something new right within the page I am working on. It’s been a game changer.
It helps me be a better writer. Hubspot offers suggestions for how to compose and email, a landing page, an offer pop up. It also offers on page SEO and optimization help, identifying potential issues and offering suggestions before you publish it.
It caters to all ability levels. From a novice to an expert, there is something for everyone and online training to match whatever level that may be.
It also has incredible value. There are so many extras packed into Hubspot. Chat, automation, graphic editor, asset management, CRM, extreme integrations, and a wide open API.
Inconvénients
Obvs the price. It’s pricey. We have 3 different locations of the same franchise and we operate them as one business. But because we are required to have 3 domains, we were forced into the enterprise license. It is a lot for a small business with lean operations to pay. Luckily we negotiated a great deal for the time being so it isn’t breaking us.
Avantages
Where do I start with my love for HubSpot. Our marketing team has been using HubSpot's Marketing Automation for 6 years, and we have seen a world of difference in our inbound strategy. From email drafting to analytics, social publishing, blog hosting, ABM (account-based marketing) and site traffic - it helps marketers keep track of nearly everything going on.
I mainly use the social publishing and tracking feature and the email scheduling tool. I can say I wouldn't be able to organize my social conversations with customers nor would I be able to schedule posts ahead of time and track their progress with such accuracy without HubSpot. The email section of the software is great too. I can tell who opens, reads and clicks on our emails - how long they spend reading and each email's conversion rate. I can also do A/B testing to track which types of emails perform best.
If your marketing team has a budget for automation software, HubSpot should definitely be on your radar. As a medium-sized company with a small marketing team of 5, it's the perfect size for us. We have HubSpot's Enterprise Level Contract, which gives us access to all of their features. If your marketing team is small - a less expensive plan might be where you want to start out. They also offer sales solutions that fully integrate with their marketing platform, so everything stays consistent and everyone from sales to marketing is on the same page.
Inconvénients
HubSpot is pretty close to perfect, and my complaints are minor. From a social tool standpoint, I wish publishing across platforms was more consistent, often images and text sizing is a bit off in the actual social site. I also wish they would increase monitoring from just Twitter to both LinkedIn and Facebook.
Design limitations have been a slight issue for us in the past as well, but usually we can work around these and design items in house.
We saw an initial bump in lead generation when implementing HubSpot. Then, over the course of six months, we saw steady growth - particularly in generating new contacts, leads, and conversions.
The blog integration with landing pages really increased our conversion rate of customers. This made it easy for audiences to learn about our services, then go to the landing page to sign up for a free meeting / demonstration of our services. This really moved the needle in terms of lead gen.
We also saw our social media following grow, not just in overall followers, but also the engagement rate of our followers. Also, HubSpot made it easy to see the most popular content, across every form of marketing. We used this info to shape our overall digital strategy, influencing the type of content we produce.
HubSpots CRM also helped us keep tabs on customers who were most likely to convert to sales. This was especially important, since our business needs truly qualified leads - not just contacts - that we can work through the sales funnel and the buyers journey.
The best benefit though? Keeping all our marketing materials in one place. No more jumping between multiple platforms, programs, and in-app designs. Just one platform. Saves a bunch of time and headaches.
Avantages
The true value of HubSpot Marketing is the integration of every marketing platform. Blogs, email, landing pages, workflows and more can easily be created - and integrated - for an easy to use, all in one marketing portal.
Primarily, my company uses HubSpot to quickly build and publish blog posts. With the built-in social media tool, you can easily share the blog post to your audiences. Then, you can repurpose the content you already created for an email campaign.
Another favorite feature: the landing page builder. With this, you can create beautiful landing pages that make it easy for customers to convert to a sale, or marketing qualified lead.
Another great feature is the analytics tool. You can see the performance of every marketing element in one detailed dashboard. This helps you see what's working - and what's not. This really helped my company put their marketing dollars where they're most influential and impactful.
Inconvénients
There's only a few drawbacks to HubSpot, from my perspective.
HubSpot works best when you can produce a large amount of content. HubSpot is great at making your content beautiful and effective, but if you're not producing content, you won't get the full value.
Second, the pricing-tier for HubSpot can be a little steep for small businesses without discretionary income. I'd say the service is still worth it, but the investment requires discussion and commitment from the team to be a great investment.
Lastly, HubSpot requires an on boarding fee with each new contract. Now, this on boarding fee isn't huge, but this was a barrier for entry for my company when we first joined. The on boarding process definitely helped my team get the most out of HubSpot, but, as I said, it was a slight hurdle for the team when considering HubSpot.
Hubspot has allowed me to work in an organized and fast way, without causing any setbacks.
Today I have 3 certifications endorsed by this platform and I really understand and apply the Inbound Marketing methodology that is the main base of Hubspot.
It is excellent to manage the website of the company where I work and I believe that the cost / product ratio is fair. Choosing Hubspot as our primary work tool has been a great decision.
Avantages
I work for a marketing agency and I use the Hubspot Software to manage the website of the enterprise.
What i like the most about Hubspot is that it's frequently updating its functions, always at the forefront of changes in the market. As well, I love from Hubspot the Social Media tool, I can schedule all my post faster than others software or apps, and I can keep even-minded because I know all my post will be published on time.
When I have to write a post I love it helps me to apply SEO correctly, and it's very easy to put pictures into the text.
Hubspot is not only a tool for work, it's also a platform that allows me to learn and certificate new skills with the courses of the learning center, which has allowed me to become a better professional in my work area and it will be useful for me to find new job opportunities.
Hubspot is very functional and complete, I can even schedule corporate email with smart delivery, in such a way that the arrival time of the mail fits the time zone of each recipient.
I have tried others software for blogging before, but I really think Hubspot Software is the best of all.
Inconvénients
I don't have many complaints about this software, I have had a great experience during all this time. I know it's not perfect, but what I also know and I can notice daily is that the Hubspot Team is always worried about improving it's services.
Maybe, what I like least about this software is that, sometimes, the platform falls when it's being updating any detail, is a bit annoying but I think is necessary because the reward is a functional, fast and useful service.
Avantages
Amazing, if not the best user-experience in marketing automation. Workflows are particularly powerful with plenty of controls to map your buyer journeys. You can execute very powerful campaigns with tons of triggers, actions, and filtering options.
I really liked their training, including the HubSpot academy training which are built very professionally. The way they present their e-Learning platform makes the information easy to digest and ultimately understand the inbound marketing methodology. That is in itself worth the cost of admission, even though this is provided free of charge.
Inconvénients
HubSpot Marketing is an excellent solution, undoubtedly, but you will get about 80% of the features if you host your website externally. Initially, they will assess if your site can be migrated to their platform.
I imagine plenty of people would rather not do that. If you want a solution that you have to marry, then HubSpot will be okay for you.
They say you can utilize the majority of HubSpot features without hosting, and that is true, but some of their more advanced features such as A/B testing content on web pages or Smart Content will not be utilized. You can still utilize workflows, drip campaigns, and so forth...but these features are only available in the per month plan. Additionally, if you run multiple websites, you must have their per month plan, which is well out of our budget.
On top of that, there are certain modules (i.e. paid campaign tracking, additional contacts) that they will charge additional for. For every 1000 contacts past 1000 you get with the package, they will charge an additional monthly fee. There is also a fairly high onboarding cost. You are also required to commit to one year of their services.
All in all we could not afford to do business with HubSpot because A) we didn't want to move our websites under their platform and B) their price point was not accommodating to our budget. As far as features and functionality...it's all you really need for marketing automation. Their CRM is lackluster though if you want true alignment!
Tracking all data from content to marketing automation within a single platform is extremely helpful for us. We've been able to align more in our inbound and outbound efforts and have the ability to create simple or sophisticated marketing plans with HubSpot.
Avantages
Customized dashboard for a quick snapshot to help track our department's KPIs
Support is responsive and always prompt to help answer your inquiries. They are currently in beta for live chat and I love that instant answers to your problems. They also send email follow-ups to make sure you're happy.
Knowledge-base is excellent to help solve problems you come across on the platform or in marketing in general.
HubSpot Academy is an excellent resource to learn about important topics in Marketing, Sales, and Design. They're always updating materials for the courses and you get certified at the end of so many lessons, which is a bonus for any LinkedIn profile or resume.
Robust amount of features and tactics to use within the platform but not necessary to use them all. Great for any-sized companies.
Ability to request product features from the community
User-friendly Workflows tool that allows you to create a workflow process using different elements of data.
Inconvénients
Changes are always rolling out, which can be hard to keep up-to-date on them all
Not fully prepared for features getting removed, renamed or consolidated. We have to play catch-up at times to adjust to what has changed.
Design Manager is confusing for someone without coding knowledge. Really wish they would integrate a drop and drag feature to create simple emails and landing pages, most importantly.
Reporting from the Sales vs. Marketing dashboard can be confusing. I get two different metrics in certain cases, but it's because one's default is different than the other.
Can't create lists of accounts/companies, for company's running an ABM program.
Can't add external landing pages to Campaigns in HubSpot, only HubSpot created landing pages, which makes reporting cumbersome.
I have access to all the major marketing tools and all the education I need to make sure I understand the market and how to better connect with my audience. HubSpot is a great tool that helps businesses reach their goals and grow by growing their online presence.
Avantages
I like that it hosts literally everything you need tool wise to help you execute your marketing strategy. Having the blogging and social sharing platforms in one place has been extremely easy to use. They truly set you up for success by having tons of resources, checklists, etc. available so that you know how to market and connect with your audience.
Inconvénients
Specifically for the software, I do not understand the Design Manager. This directly affects your marketing because if you are editing a template so that it is unique for the campaign you are working on you have to use the design manager. I think it is confusing to anyone who does not understand coding. The old design manager made way more sense to me. Looking at HubSpot as a product it is not convenient that their tier metric is contacts and the annual payment is inconvenient. As a HubSpot partner, we sell this to customers and lose a bunch of them because the annual price or we lose customers from going to Pro rather than basic because the contact metric will screw them over and they will wind up paying more.
Hello Hannah!
Thank you for taking the time to write this review - we appreciate you giving us feedback on our product!
I am so happy to hear that you have been so happy with the software up to this point - it sounds like you are doing an amazing job at using all the tools available to you!
As far as room for improvement - I'm sorry to hear about your experience with the new Design Manager, it can definitely be a bit overwhelming to a new user, particularly one who does not understand coding. We are working on producing more instructional content to help with this process but, in the meantime, here is one article that has some helpful instructions as well as links to other helpful pieces of content (https://designers.hubspot.com/blog/introduction-to-the-design-manager).
I would love to talk more about this and the other issues you have brought up. If you are open to it, please reach out to us at the email provided.
Thank you again for the review Hannah!
Avantages
Hubspot Marketing is a big product. It can do a lot. There are so many tools and features. Sometimes too many to use. We didn't know anything about using Hubspot Marketing before we started. Hubspot taught us all we know. Their training courses are easy to watch and easy to understand, but there is a learning curve.
As with anything in marketing, results do not happen overnight. We started using Hubspot Marketing in February of 2014. It took us 8-12 months to really start seeing major results. During this time, we had a personal customer success manager who was helping us along the way. Flash forward over 4 years later and we are still using Hubspot Marketing.
We primarily use it to host our blog content, CTAs, and landing pages.
Inconvénients
We would not be where we are without Hubspot Marketing. With that said, we feel like we are not fully using Hubspot to its potential. Unfortunately, because all of our marketing content is tied into Hubspot, we continue to pay for the software. It is hard to move your content to another provider (or just export your content to your own server), so sometimes we feel locked in.
Another con is that you will be automatically charged for contacts if you go over your limit. Once this happens, you are automatically moved into a higher level plan until you get in touch with Hubspot and tell them you would like to move back down to a lower plan. To do this, you have to sign another contract with them at the lower plan. We are always checking our statements to make sure we have not been automatically moved into a higher plan automatically.
Avantages
HubSpot makes it very easy to setup a blog and email based online business. Their ability to segment, tag and reach out to our list is powerful. Plus, their Calls to Action feature is very nice. The platform was very reliable and I don't recall having downtimes with it.
Inconvénients
1. Customization: They provide a template marketplace, but designs are limited and difficult to change unless your know their special markup and CSS. Most businesses will eventually require an expensive HubSpot-specific developer to tweak their website's appearance. We grew tired of needing more customization as the years went by and started looking at DIY page builder options in the market as an alternative.
2. High cost: Hubspot is *expensive*. It became even more expensive when we needed a specific feature which required us to jump into the per month Enterprise tier package (at the time).This tier included the feature we needed plus many others we honestly didn't need (but no ala carte options were available).
In the end, after reviewing the high monthly costs and features, we realized we could replace HubSpot with WordPress (blog) + ActiveCampaign (email, tags, segmenting) + LeadPages (landing pages) + ConvertPlus (lightbox popups, hello bars).
Two months later, the migration was complete and we canceled HubSpot. Our monthly costs dropped. With the money saved, we expanded our staff and advertising budgets.
Regarding canceling, keep in mind they require 45 days written notice, not the usual 30 days. They use debt collectors (McCarthy, Burgess & Wolff, Inc) on unpaid balances.
Knowledge and Insight. Knowlege is power and having insight into all activities your marketing, sales and business development team implement is extremely powerful in knowing where to tweak things and where you excel.
Shooting blindly from the hip on massive marketing campaigns is extremely expensive and rarely effective for increasing your ROI.
But with the knowledge and insight, the HubSpot MAP provides you, you always know what you're doing, why you're doing it, the ROI of your campaigns and where you are lacking.
Not having to rely on the complexity of Google Analytics or manual entry of Excel is a huge time and money saver. You also don't have to have a million different tools, software and extensions to try to piece together your marketing strategy, analytics and results. This eliminates about 90% of all the tools you are paying for and using and brings it all into one single platform. Not to mention that it's merely impossible to get all the third-party tools and integrations to talk to each other to give you one bottom line result.
With the HubSpot MAP's benefit of cutting hours and labor basically pays for the cost of the software itself.
Knowledge is power and time is money.
Avantages
Obviously, as it's stated in its name, but the Automation part of the platform. The workflows, lists, how a published blog with automatically distribute your blog via your social media accounts, the analytics of how well your strategy, content, and workflows are working, etc. are all exceptional qualities to the HubSpot MAP.
The abundance of features and abilities available to a user is endless and always being updated, upgraded or enhanced.
I love how the HubSpot MAP is 100% synced with the HubSpot CRM and CMS. In fact, since they are open to third-party integrations, you can enhance any or all of the features given to you all throughout the HubSpot system.
Inconvénients
From experience in teaching the software to our clients, it can be an overwhelming learning curve. Especially for the CEOs and people in non-related marketing departments that have to learn to use the system as well, since it is meant to effect a company as a whole, obviously in a positive way.
As stated above, HubSpot MAP is open to third-party integrations to better your user experience and insights into your marketing performance. The only downside to that is the budget. If you're a startup company, purchasing the HubSpot MAP and platform is expensive by itself. And when you add on purchasing other third-party integrations to get all the features you want, can be extremely costly or just over-budget in general.
The other feature I would like to see HubSpot improve is their Social Media Platform, included in the HubSpot MAP. Yes, you can schedule tweets in bulk or a month's worth of social media posts for the next month, but in reality, it is very time-consuming. Especially for a feature that is meant to cut the manual labor out of your day.
One reason for this is because you have to create a customized shortened tracking URL, located in a different area of the platform, to place into each social media message. That means a separate URL for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Google+, all for the same message. Now imagine having to do that for social media posts for the next week. It does get exhausting. That is one area you would want to get a third-party integration.
HubSpot's marketing platform is very robust and contains everything an inbound marketer needs. Every time I speak with their support team, they are friendly and quickly resolve my issue. Since HubSpot is a pay-per-contact platform, the cost can easily increase if your organization is rapidly growing or doesn't keep a clean list of contacts. If your company currently uses a WordPress blog, integrating it with HubSpot is easy, but may result in having to create 301 redirects if the templates don't match up exactly. I recommend, if possible, converting the entire website (including the blog) to HubSpot.
Aside from the ease of use, the product is continually evolving to meet the needs of current marketing trends. HubSpot requests user feedback on a variety of aspects - from design to feature functionality - to make their product the best. It also integrates well with a variety of other platforms, including WordPress and Salesforce.
Avantages
It is very use full in tracking web and analyze business metrics to ensure marketing campaigns are progressing into the right direction.Our favorite part of Hubspot Marketing is the data that is made available on lead source, web traffic, and blog and email marketing performance. Prior to Hubspot we were not running any website analytics. By tying marketing efforts to website performance we are able to see what is working and what isn't and make better decisions going forward.
Good general functionality for tracking activity and reporting, and nice to have automatic download of company contact information when entering new contacts. Campaigns are fairly easy to set up.
Inconvénients
I have only found 2 things - if you send an email and use the Smart Send feature to accommodate for different time zones, then it disables the ability to "Send to More". Second: at first, there are what feels like a lot of pieces to fit together - a form, campaign, landing page, emails, etc. Until you get that mapped out, it felt a little overwhelming.
Layout is a little out dated.
You can't change the default on the list of company names from recently added to alphabetical.
You can change the sort, but the next time you sign in or refresh, it goes back to sorting by recently added.
We've been using this system for 2+ years now, and it has proven itself very useful in increasing the number of RFP received for groups and meetings. The marketing features, such Forms and Emailing is efficient and easy to use. The back office might be sometimes a bit complexe when you are looking for specific information (many sub-option hidden if primary option), but their customer service is amazing, quick and responsive so I've never had to search for hours when I needed an information. Overall experience very satisfying, we would recommand using Hubspot.