HubSpot is a name quite common in the digital marketing space, but few digital marketers understand how it can make their jobs easier. The marketers who do are even intimidated by HubSpot’s complexity. While it may pose a challenge for smaller businesses, it unlocks a lot of value in the form of leads, conversions and insights.
Understanding a CMS like HubSpot takes time and experience that many organisations simply do not have. This blog post will outline what HubSpot is and why you should use it for your digital marketing objectives.
HubSpot’s background
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimise your inbound marketing strategy to generate a more significant amount of qualified leads. In essence, HubSpot is a software platform that looks to make your company’s marketing and selling more efficient.
HubSpot started in 2005 as a means for marketers to get started with inbound marketing. During this time, HubSpot offered the tools and resources for this to be true for companies who made use of their help. Since then, HubSpot has developed a cloud-based platform where all digital marketing efforts can be housed. This includes everything from blogging to social media posting and email marketing - all combined in one place for easy access. This way, marketers can use HubSpot’s tools to nurture qualified leads until they are ready to pass them on to the sales team.
HubSpot offers this original software in the form of a free CRM - alongside specific software for sales, marketing and service departments.
HubSpot’s CRM
HubSpot’s CRM (customer relationship management software) is a platform where companies can organise their contacts and keep track of every conversation they have with them. In the beginning, HubSpot’s CRM was primarily for marketers, but now it is more robust. Instead of functioning primarily for the marketing team, the existing CRM looks to help every customer-facing team in a given company.
The CRM stores every company contact and lead. Each department can access their leads here and use whatever tools are available to help nurture the relationships with these leads. These are some of the free features of the CRM:
- Reporting dashboard
- Company insights
- Deal tracking
- Pipeline management
- Email tracking and notifications
- Prospect tracking
- Meeting scheduling
- Live chat
These tools are meant to save time for your sales team to close more deals with less work. They also give capabilities for your contact records to be enriched with information from over 20 million businesses - with tools to notify your salespeople when a prospect opens your email or visits your website. Your sales team will have the context they need to follow up with the right leads punctually.
Why use HubSpot?
HubSpot offers many free features that help with the effective workings of your marketing strategies. However, premium versions of these features can further your marketing planning - including enterprise software for marketing, sales, customer service, content management, and operations. Not to mention, HubSpot offers excellent deals on its premium services.
There are three options you can take for the premium features:
- The Starter, which provides you with up to 1,000 marketing contacts, the removal of HubSpot branding from certain features, and email and in-app chat support.
- The Professional, which provides you with up to 2,000 marketing contacts, all features included in the Starter, and the ability to; automate and personalise your engagement across channels, orchestrate efficient campaigns, optimise campaign conversion, build custom reports, and get advanced support.
- The Enterprise, which provides you with up to 10,000 marketing contacts and includes all the features with the previous packages. Enterprise also comes with: the ability to manage your teams and brand, extend the platform and advance your reporting.
All packages come with a significant discount if you commit to an annual agreement. The CRM Suite comes with free tools, a marketing hub, a sales hub, a service hub, a CMS hub, and an operations hub. Moreover, you can make custom bundles that suit your needs - and can contact HubSpot at any time to find out what plan may be right for you.
Find success with your CMS
HubSpot is just one option of many CMSes. It may take a while for you to find the perfect fit for your business needs and organisation, but taking the time to find and use one is critical to your digital marketing objectives. The key to unlocking the potential of your business is to use a CMS to its full potential - but many companies lack the resources to do so.
HubSpot can be confusing and has led many users to be stuck with an expensive platform that doesn’t return its investment. The key is aligning your tools and processes with your entire team towards the goal of converting new customers. This is why we adopted the HubSpot CRM platform ourselves, which allows us to engage prospects and customers at any stage of the journey in a seamless way. As a HubSpot Gold Partner and one of Europe's leading HubSpot inbound agency partners, we can help you do this too.
Contact us for a quick 30 minute meeting and we can present you with a personalised plan for converting more customers efficiently.