HubSpot is an inbound marketing automation toolkit. With all the features you’d expect from a giant in this industry, HubSpot Marketing Hub helps you grow your leads, convert leads, track your progress, and manage every aspect of your marketing campaigns. Packed with email, forms, ad management, live chat, reporting, and more, this comprehensive service lets you manage everything from one place for efficiency and results.
Pros
- Best in marketing automation
- Includes full CRM integration
- Excellent social media management tools
Cons
- Big jump from Basic to Professional plan
- Expensive option
Ideal for SMBs, mid-sized businesses, and enterprise-level organizations
Primary uses: Lead generation, email marketing
Prices start at $40 per month
Free trial. Free plan forever
SEO
HubSpot Marketing Hub has a great SEO assistant that offers optimization tips as you write to make your content search engine friendly. The site also has built-in analytics so you can see your SEO ROI.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one area where HubSpot’s Marketing Hub has come full circle. It includes the usual elements like customizable email templates, responsive design, and automated marketing campaign scheduling, but there’s so much more. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub collects data from across the web, including business information, social media, and other relevant information. HubSpot helps you use this information to personalize your communications with each prospect.
HubSpot Marketing Center has a smart, drag-and-drop email editor so you can include that personal information in every email you send. It’s one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use email editors we’ve seen yet.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is just as important as the other two techniques we’ve already mentioned. You can use HubSpot Marketing Center’s social monitoring tools to monitor your customers, hear what they have to say, and continue the conversation whenever you want. Respond instantly to customer complaints or compliments from social media. You can also post to your various social networks and automatically send them to your email. This includes the most important ones, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
HubSpot also includes contact management for the most popular social networks, allowing you to integrate your followers into your CRM for tracking, loyalty rewards, and communications. You can also use this tool to collect customer reviews and automatically push them to your website for solid social proof.
Website Design
The basic HubSpot Marketing Center plan offers limited features for creating landing pages and designing your website. You’ll find page templates, responsive layouts, and basic reporting. More advanced plans include more in-depth features. However, web design isn’t the main focus of this product, so don’t expect incredibly advanced features.
HubSpot Marketing Hub also has marketing tools that you can incorporate into your website design. For example, you can create and customize calls to action to suit your target audience, conduct A/B testing, and promote seasonal products.
Chatbot
HubSpot Marketing Hub can also be used with HubSpot’s customer service software so that businesses can provide comprehensive support to their customers. This is important because people often turn to chatbots for quick answers and immediate decisions.
Even the free plan allows you to perform some basic chatbot actions, such as creating tickets and booking appointments. More advanced plans include custom branching logic, programmable bots, and webhooks.
Lead generation
HubSpot Marketing Hub excels at generating and managing leads. The entire system is built on a comprehensive CRM, so you can manage every aspect of your leads from the moment they share their email address. HubSpot Marketing Center impressed us with its comprehensive analytics and real-time reporting. You can see up-to-date data about any potential customer, such as the pages they visited on your website, who they are, and where they work.
From there, HubSpot Marketing Hub lets you automate your email responses so you can communicate with prospects as they move through the decision-making process. For example, you can set up rules to send a personalized email as soon as a prospect reviews an article on your website. Contact forms, brochures, and other direct communication tools are very useful for collecting and following up on leads.
Live Chat Software
HubSpot Marketing Center also integrates live chat. So, when you acquire a new or returning customer, you can immediately contact them. And, by the way, this feature is available even on the free plan.
Pricing
HubSpot Marketing Center offers three tiers (or four, if you consider the free plan), which we’ll explain in more detail below. Quite generously, all HubSpot Marketing Center plans include the full HubSpot CRM suite, which is a huge plus. You’ll get tools like:
- Communication Management
- Website Activity
- Email Marketing (limited)
- Ad Management
- List Segmentation
- Ticket Sales
- Landing Pages, Blogs, and Other Types of Content
- Personalization Techniques Like Calls to Action and Smart Content
- SEO and Content Strategy
- Live Chat Functionality
- Chatbots
- Shapers
And Much More. So, there’s a lot to offer before you even start paying. When you start to analyze the paid plans, and specifically the Marketing Center plans, you’ll notice some differences between them. Here’s a quick rundown of the three Marketing Center plans:
HubSpot also offers a free Marketing Hub plan, which gives you access to all of the features of HubSpot CRM, a form builder, 2,000 emails per month, ad management, list sharing, team emails, and more. That’s an impressive list for a free plan, and some small to medium-sized businesses will be able to get by just fine with this option.
However, if you’re looking for more advanced features like ad retargeting, SEO and content strategy, Google integration, social media support, and more, we recommend the more advanced plans. The Basic plan includes a lot of marketing tools you’ll love, like email marketing, social media engagement, and chatbots. And while the jump from Basic to Pro is significant, the good news is that the Pro plan will appeal to all but the largest businesses.
This second-tier plan includes a host of marketing tools, including a full suite of marketing automation, lead nurturing, A/B testing, custom workflows, and more. The Enterprise plan, on the other hand, offers deeper features like event automation triggers, company-wide campaign reporting, revenue reporting, and more.
In addition to any plan, HubSpot lets you pay for additional features to get more granular functionality in a specific area (sales, customer service, CMS).
Customer Service
HubSpot Marketing Hub offers award-winning customer support via email or phone. You can also chat with a live representative to ask questions directly or explore an extensive library of help documents and training articles. HubSpot Marketing Hub also has a community forum that allows other users to review how the solutions work to find more practical solutions.
Bottom Line
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive, full-featured marketing automation solution. While it’s more expensive than other options, it offers a lot for the price. It still beats competitors like Salesforce’s Pardot. HubSpot Marketing Hub includes all the marketing tools you need, including email, SEO, social media, and analytics. So if you’re looking for a complete solution, this is the place to be.