Ah, Hubspot – the holy grail of marketing tools. Is there a more holistic marketing solution out there, really? Hubspot is the one-stop-shop for any marketing consultant. It’s essentially an automated marketing tool combined with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. That means your marketing, business development, and sales efforts can all be seamlessly integrated under one roof. That’s really important for clean-as-possible funnel tracking.
CMS (Content Management System)
So what does Hubspot cover, exactly? Well, for starters, it offers its very own CMS (Content Management System), including blogging and landing page capabilities. It’s all drag, drop, click, type… so anyone can easily go in and make page edits whenever needed.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO support is a big part of Hubspot’s CMS offering. Run a scan of your site on the Hubspot platform and, like magic, receive recommendations for page improvements you can make to immediately improve your site’s rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
You can also research, manage, and monitor topics and keywords directly through Hubspot, to understand how well you are – or could be – competing for certain keywords. Think of Hubspot’s SEO tool as an auditor, but the friendly kind 🙂
Email Marketing
Additionally, Hubspot offers a powerful email marketing tool, with the ability to create advanced automated workflows, as well as smart content and smart audience capabilities, so you can get really targeted with your segmentation and messaging.
Lead Scoring
Hubspot also makes automated lead scoring easy. With good lead scoring in place, salespeople only spend time on qualified contacts who meet their target personas, have been engaged with marketing efforts, and are ready to move down the funnel in a more direct and personal way.
Best of all, because Hubspot fully integrates Marketing and Sales, sales folk can see all the marketing activity that’s occurred – and for example, get notified if a potential big ticket client spends more than 5 minutes on a particular webpage, signed up for an event, or downloaded a brochure. That kind of information is so valuable for knowing when the right moment to pick up the phone might be.
Other Features
The platform also has things like a campaign and content planning calendar, social media monitoring and publishing tools, and great reporting functionality so that any marketing consultant can get all the info they need when tracking campaign performance, and pull all the data required for great retrospectives. There’s even a dashboard feature so you or anyone on your team can easily see your most important metrics visually and in real-time.
Believe it or not, that’s not it. Hubspot covers a variety of other things I haven’t even mentioned above. And if they don’t, you bet they’re working on it, or have an integration that easily plugs right in. Their customer support is incredible, often picking up the phone in less than a minute, and always responsive by chat.
Downside
So what’s the downside of Hubspot? Well we can all agree that it comes with a hefty price tag, that’s for sure. We have to consider, however, the cost of running all the tools it houses separately, including integration shortcomings that often exist when using disparate services.
Would you rather pay less to spend more time trying to work out your funnel using a variety of tools? Or pay more and have everything you need in one place, seamlessly? That’s up to you, but one can’t argue that Hubspot is definitely in every good marketing consultant’s dream toolkit, and certainly in mine.