by HubSpot is an all-in-one sales and marketing automation platform that allows you to optimize and collect all work processes in one place. With the HubSpot Marketing Hub, you get a unified platform for all your marketing activities – from automation flows and lead generation to blogging and search engine optimization. In short: your daily starting point for all marketing.
HubSpot Marketing Hub allows you to automate emails and build workflows, create blog posts and landing pages, set up forms, pop-ups and live chats, create paid ads and organic posts on social media and Google, and manage your entire search engine optimization.
Marketing Hub helps you attract and convert leads, all the while tracking your visitors’ activities and behavior with the content you send. Of course with a fully integrated CRM that can give you the freedom to create exactly the segmentations and lists you need.
There are various things to consider before investing in a platform like HubSpot.
For example, you need to consider the size of your company, your sales processes, your target group’s buying cycles and the amount of time and effort you can afford to invest. Are you satisfied with your work processes as they look now – or can you gain great synergies by gathering your tools, software and activities in one place?
An important point is that an investment in HubSpot doesn’t just give you new tools. It changes your habits and your work routines.
No matter what your needs are, HubSpot typically has a suitable solution for you who want to collect, automate and improve your activities. HubSpot has several solutions available that ensure any business within most budgets can take advantage of the HubSpot platform. The most important consideration is not in the solution itself, but whether your product or service qualifies for a buying journey where it makes sense to follow a prospect over a given period.
HubSpot makes your everyday life easier
HubSpot offers a number of so-called ‘Hubs’, each of which helps to improve your company’s functions – from marketing and sales to customer service and after sales. In this way, synergies and coherence are ensured across the company and the feared silo effect is attempted to be broken down.
HubSpot’s software consists of:
- HubSpot CRM
- Marketing Hub
- Sales Hub
- HubSpot Service Hub
All parts are integrated on one and the same platform. You can therefore finally say goodbye to a sea of different tools and systems, but instead look forward to a scenario where everything is based on the same platform.
You don’t need to buy into all the ‘Hubs’ just to have one of the parts. The smart thing about HubSpot is that you can purchase the software that suits your company’s needs right now, and add more functions along the way as your company grows.
Individually, the various parts allow you to plan, automate and streamline related areas – e.g. automated emails in marketing. Together, the three parts give you a powerful platform that makes it possible to secure leads that, at all stages of the customer journey, get the best experience of your company, your employees and your products or services.
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What is HubSpot? Learn more in our blog post and read about the inbound marketing, sales and service platform.
Example: Let’s say someone fills out a form on your website to download an eBook you’ve produced. If you use HubSpot, your lead is created immediately in the CRM system. From there you can see which pages the person has visited, which calls-to-action they have clicked on and how many times they have visited your website.
When the person has shown enough buying signals through their behavior, the sales department can take over from marketing and work on closing the customer. After this, customer service comes into play to strengthen the relationship and loyalty.
In this blog post, we will focus on the Marketing Hub, so that you can get under the skin of what package solutions there are and what needs the tools can help you with.
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Why should you consider HubSpot?
What is HubSpot Marketing Hub?
Marketing Hub is basically a browser-based software-as-a-service (SaaS). You get a whole platform at your disposal with tools and functions that gather all your marketing activities in the same place.
Marketing Hub allows you to generate qualified leads. HubSpot often uses the expression: ‘the right content, to the right people, at the right time’. To make this possible, Marketing Hub gives you the tools to follow your potential leads throughout their interaction with you and your business.
The Marketing Hub consists of tools that HubSpot refers to as Marketing Tools. These are tools that help you create content, collect leads and strengthen the relationship with these leads until they become qualified and sales-ready.
One of the great strengths of the HubSpot Marketing Hub is the overall data collection and tracking. This means that you can track user activity on your website and link it directly to your contacts in the free, included CRM. So instead of working blindly and gathering bits from different places or simply making decisions based on assumptions, HubSpot gives you detailed relevant data and therefore actionable decisions.
You can use Marketing Hub’s campaign tool to plan, organize and report on your campaigns, so you can easily monitor and evaluate the objectives and success of your campaigns.
HubSpot Marketing Hub packages
Marketing Hub – like the rest of HubSpot’s software – comes in different packages. Each package has different features, limitations and options.
HubSpot Marketing Hub comes in three different solutions:
Marketing Hub Starter, an all-in-one software that also includes emails and 12 additional features that help businesses grow.
Marketing Hub Pro, for more experienced marketers to run complete inbound campaigns at scale with automation.
Marketing Hub Enterprise, for advanced marketing teams that want to run advanced analytics and reporting and typically have different teams in different markets.
Read below about the different packages, and find out which one covers your needs.
GUIDE
Read about how HubSpot can help your company optimize marketing assets.
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HubSpot CRM Free: Turn visitors into customers
HubSpot CRM goes across all ‘Hubs’ and is the foundation of HubSpot’s entire platform – regardless of whether we are talking about marketing, sales or service.
HubSpot offers a completely free version of their CRM. On the platform, you get a wide range of functions to help you structure and organize your data on leads, customers and companies. As in any other CRM.
Find out more about functions and tools you get in HubSpot CRM below.
Contacts
HubSpot’s contact database is the very foundation of HubSpot’s entire CRM. Inbound marketing is about getting to know your potential leads, and by getting information about their activity, you can create personal and tailored flows.
For this to be possible, you obviously need to have one place, a database where all your potential leads and their activities are gathered, and that’s what HubSpot’s contacts help you with.
HubSpot is easy to integrate into most CRM systems. That’s why it’s easy to synchronize existing information about leads into HubSpot, and you don’t have to start from scratch.
With a contact database that stores information about your leads, it becomes easier for you to tailor and segment the contact, which increases the chance of maturing the lead and making it more sales-ready.
Conversations inbox and chat flows
Conversations are an essential part of making contact with your potential leads. The Conversations inbox at the CRM collects messages from live chat, joint emails, Facebook Messenger and forms. It makes it easier for you to see, manage and answer conversations from leads and customers in one place. Chat flows gives you a basic chat bot that can qualify leads, book meetings and create support tickets.
Agreements and tasks
HubSpot CRM gives you everything you need to manage your sales pipeline and your customers throughout their entire lifecycle. Track and manage offers across the sales process. Organize tasks and assign them to contacts and companies in your database.
Analytical insights, dashboards and reports
You get analytical insight into your marketing e-mails, and can use Prospecting to see which companies’ IP addresses your pages are visited by. You also have access to standard dashboards, where you gain insight into the most common data within marketing, sales and service.
With HubSpot’s free CRM, you have access to 1 dashboard with 10 reports.
In HubSpot CRM, you also get access to:
- Templates and snippets
- Ads
- Tickets
- Documents
- Meetings
Marketing Starter: Take Marketing to the Next Level
In July 2018, HubSpot Hub launched Marketing Hub Starter, seeing a need for a more affordable package that offers lead generation, reports, ads, contact tracking, and email marketing for small and medium-sized business marketers.
It is the smallest package at HubSpot and is aimed at SMEs who would like to try inbound marketing and lead generation, but do not yet have the resources (or skills) to do so at this time.
The package has also been launched with the aim of offering companies that do not work so focused on marketing, an insight into how valuable a focus on inbound marketing can be. And show that it doesn’t have to be fussy or complicated, but that it is easy to create leads and happy customers with the right tools.
To generate leads, you first need tools to help nurture those leads, convert them and turn them into loyal and happy customers. With landing pages and automated emails, you can quickly get in touch with website visitors who fill out a pop-up form.
Read more about which tools and functions you get with Marketing Hub Starter below.
You get that with:
Landing pages and forms
Attract and convert qualified visitors into leads. Easily set up great landing pages and forms that convert visitors. You can track your existing forms that you have on your website. You also get a ‘drag and drop’ tool so you can easily add elements that make your landing page look good. You can design HubSpot’s forms yourself so that all fields suit your lead, whether it is an existing customer or a completely new visitor.
Ads
See the impact of your ads from click to purchase across Facebook, Instagram, Google and LinkedIn. Use audiences to reach people based on their past interactions with you. You can create ads directly in HubSpot, and track their performance. No more having to go to each individual media, create ‘independent’ ads and keep track of data. Instead, you can see the ads’ performance compared to each other, and track which medium converts the most leads.
In the Starter package, there is a limit on which types and how many ads you can make. Unfortunately, your audiences will not be transferred and synced to HubSpot either. But they do that in Pro or Enterprise, where you can target the ads better and the target groups are synchronized.
E-mail marketing
Create automated emails without having either graphic or technical skills. Start with a template, customize your layout and personalize your email to get higher conversion rates. HubSpot’s email allows you to create (and again customize) your emails for your leads.
Using the ‘drag and drop’ function, you can drag and drop elements in your e-mail so that it gets exactly the visual expression you want. It requires no programming training, just time and patience to familiarize yourself with the functions.
Go a step deeper with your email strategy. HubSpot’s email functionality offers a lot of data on open and click rates, heatmaps and much more that you can use to optimize your emails.
Your monthly e-mail limit is increased to 5*your contact level (the maximum number of contacts you can have). HubSpot branding is also removed from both marketing emails and forms. In forms you can now track activity on external forms.
Lists for segmentation
Create static or dynamic lists of contacts based on different segmentation criteria using functions in your CRM. Use them to send more relevant emails to targeted segments of your audience.
Segment your contacts using lists that include or exclude parameters that are just important to the leads on that list. This could be, for example, people who have downloaded a specific content offer, people who have not provided their phone number or use hotmail. Segmented lists make it easier to keep track of your many leads and their activities.
In addition, they provide you with information that allows you to better adapt the communication to them.
Reports
Get all your essential marketing reports in one place. Learn which forms get the most conversions and get important email, ad, contact analytics.
HubSpot is big on data. And believes that data can help optimize companies’ activities and strategies. Therefore, of course, you also get a place where you get a full overview of all your marketing activities – on the HubSpot dashboard. This is where Marketing Hub is really good. You can put together dashboards yourself so that you get an overview of exactly the activities that are most important to your work and that you want to track.
In the Starter package it is possible to have only a single dashboard. But it still gives you a good insight into how dashboards work and shows you the necessary functions. If you want to be able to create and juggle between several dashboards, you must get hold of Pro or Enterprise.
Marketing Pro: Automate and personalize your marketing
Go one step further than just the basic marketing activities and start working with fully optimized and automated campaigns. Marketing Hub Professional has all the tools you need to establish your authority for a given lead. Create search engine optimized blogs and use the inbound marketing tools to structure your website for maximum organic reach. Through integrations like Google Search Console, you can measure your search performance and create a plan to improve your ranking.
With HubSpot Pro, you get everything the Starter package offers, plus some essential features. This package is also the most popular, and for good reason. Read more to find out what wild features you get for your lead generation and automation.
In Pro, you get the ability to A/B test first and foremost, and that’s a great feature. Experimentation is a big part of inbound marketing. To get the best result, the best opening rates, click rates, CTAs, landing pages, interaction, etc., it’s all about trying your hand and finding exactly what makes your leads curious.
This allows you to constantly improve your methods based on how your visitors and contacts respond to things like copy and color. You’ll be able to get better and better at speaking to your company’s personas, and be able to learn from every campaign you do.
GUIDE
Learn more about the fundamentals of inbound marketing.
The other important feature you get with Pro is automation. If you really want to make HubSpot work for you rather than you working in HubSpot, automation is key.
You can create email nurturing workflows that trigger when a visitor turns into a lead or takes a specific action (e.g doesn’t open your email, downloads another offer) that sends emails in sequence, without that you ever need to do anything.
This is an incredibly powerful tool that allows a small marketing team to nurture a large volume of contacts in a very personal way.
The Pro package is a good tool for companies that want to go all-in with inbound marketing – and have the resources to do so. The individual person’s work process is made more efficient and automation also makes everyday life easier. So if you don’t have endless money for marketing, Pro is an effective way to optimize work with inbound marketing.
Blogging
Publish relevant, engaging, conversion-optimized content with tools that speed up creation, keep formatting consistent, and make it easy to optimize for search.
Inbound marketing is focused on building trust and delivering content that is important to the target audience. Blogs are an important piece of inbound marketing that should help the customer through the buying journey. HubSpot’s blog makes it easy to create and optimize content with recommendations and metrics on which articles make a difference.
As mentioned earlier, HubSpot loves data, and this joy is also seen in their functions for the blog. You can get a lot of statistics about your blog post, which can help you optimize the next posts.
Landing pages
Create landing pages that look perfect across devices and get responsive landing pages that are built to convert. Add forms optimized for one-click filling and automatically change content based on who is viewing your page.
The purpose of landing pages is to get your visitors to provide new information about them. In Pro, it becomes easy for you to create a new landing page where you can add relevant forms.
The smart thing about the landing page function is that there is a built-in SEO module, so you get suggestions on how you can optimize the landing page and thereby increase traffic.
The genius of Pro is i.a. that you can now run A/B tests (or split tests) to improve open rates and click-through rates. In this way, you can test which titles, content, CTAs and graphic expressions capture the interest of your recipients and interact with your content.
Marketing automation
Let your prospects find their own path to purchase to close more deals. With marketing automation, you can use each lead’s behavior to tailor emails, content, offers and outreach at scale.
Lead scoring
Access each contact’s information and see all the interactions you’ve already had. Use this data to create hyper-targeted campaigns that close more deals.
What differentiates HubSpot from other CRM systems is that there is a built-in points function. This is called lead scoring. It helps you to prioritize and keep track of your leads, and gives you the opportunity to increase productivity and efficiency when you have to deal with leads. Points are awarded or deducted based on your contacts’ engagement and interaction with your content.
By keeping score on your leads, it’s easier for your sales team to know who and how to address those hot leads.
Analytics
Gain insight into your entire customer journey to see which marketing activities are working the hardest. Use multi-touch revenue attribution to show how marketing impacts the bottom line.
Partitioning
Segregate all your marketing assets by team so that every user has access to the right content.
Social Media
Monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations. Automatically track engagements and schedule your social posts to go live when the right people see them.
Social takes up a lot of space in companies, which is why social media in the Pro package is an important function to work with when dealing with inbound marketing.
From the same platform, you can create, plan and publish posts on all media. It makes it so easy for you, instead of having to log into both Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. It saves time to have everything together in one place.
By automating and scheduling postings, you can also be at the forefront of your work (a function that is good when postings are to be published during holidays).
See all interactions with your messages and create custom keyword monitors for everyone on your team to monitor interactions. With Marketing Hub Professional, you can connect 50 accounts from social media, post up to 10,000 posts per month, and plan posts 3 years into the future.
SEO
Generate more qualified traffic and increase your influence with tools that help you plan and execute a content strategy built for the way modern search engines work. Get advice on optimization when creating content and measure real SEO ROI with integrated analytics.
CTA – Call-to-action
Design CTAs that visitors can’t avoid clicking on. Find out who clicks on which CTA`s and measure performance to optimize click-through rates over time.
Optimize with A/B testing to select the best versions, track visitor actions across pages and add smart personalization.
Personalization is a big part of the Pro package, and in their CTA`s feature, HubSpot shows how much it means and what an advantage it is to have an understanding of inbound marketing.
It is possible to personalize CTAs, so the chance of visitors clicking on it is even greater.
In addition, you can also create a SMART CTA that looks different depending on who sees it and where they are in the buying journey.
Ads
Track the ROI of your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google advertising with precision and stop struggling to justify your paid ad spend. Advertising now also allows retargeting via Facebook, LinkedIn and Google.
Maximum advertising amount is increased to $10,000 and you can now add 5 audiences based on your contact lists.
Salesforce integration
Two-way sync with Salesforce means a record of all email opens, CTA clicks and form submissions is at your fingertips. Use this data to score leads and create segmented lists.
Marketing Enterprise: Powerful and advanced marketing capabilities for larger businesses
HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise is the tough guy in the class. The package has been specially developed for companies that need extra control and that work with hardcore lead scoring and advanced analytics and reporting.
You get the same features in Marketing Enterprise as you do in Pro. The extra features you get with Enterprise are primarily reporting and lead scoring, which are greatly improved. It allows you to create customized advanced reports that help you track and analyze almost all of your inbound marketing efforts. It also allows you to score leads based on actions your leads take on your website, helping your sales team identify and prioritize the best leads.
Most companies that use Enterprise choose it for one simple reason: Contacts. Each HubSpot level has a contact limit (100 for Starter, 1,000 for Pro, and 10,000 for Enterprise), and an additional fee per contact. 1,000 additional contacts you have in your database above your tier limit ($100/month for Starter, $50/month for Pro, and $10/month for Enterprise).
If your business (regardless of size) has a large contact database that you cannot live without, Enterprise may be the most economical option for you. Features like advanced reporting and predictive lead scoring will give you lots of value if you have a lot of customers.
But in addition to getting a larger contact database, all the existing tools from Pro are upgraded x 100. It is possible to link even more accounts to social media, get more reports, create thousands of workflows – and much more.
Team-based partitioning
Better organization means a cleaner database and a more productive team. Assign all your marketing assets by team so that every user has access to the right content.
In teams, you can assign specific and different rights to whole groups of users. You can create up to 200 teams in the Enterprise package, and it is also possible to create smaller teams, such as ‘parent’ and ‘child’ teams.
Adaptive testing
No more need for manual test setup or measurement. Use advanced ‘machine learning‘ to continuously and automatically run tests and optimize your website’s conversion rate.
Account Based Marketing
Get your ABM strategy up and running in minutes. You get all the basic tools you need, such as ‘company scoring’, ‘properties’, templates and ‘out-of-the-box’ reports. Are you interested in knowing more about Account Based Marketing? So read more here.
Chatbots / Conversational Marketing
Make the chat box on your website and Facebook Messenger a pleasure to use. Extend beyond the basic chat functionality using powerful pieces of automations and webhooks – and feed all that data back to your contacts.
Increase chat engagement rates by giving visitors a more relevant and personalized experience. Create unique and customized chat flows based on the visitor’s location and referral sources.
Revenue-based attribution
Giving your marketing activities a concrete value can be difficult – really difficult! How is the management convinced that marketing activities actually contribute to the bottom line, and what is the concrete value of a given activity? Don’t you worry no more! With HubSpot’s ‘Revenue-based attribution‘, you get full transparency and the opportunity to attribute value to your customer’s entire customer journey.
Greater capacity
HubSpot has doubled the boundaries across workflows, lists and more. Create up to 200 custom reports, 25 custom dashboards, 1,000 workflows and more. HubSpot Enterprise is for businesses that need much more than Pro can offer.
YouTube Integration
With HubSpot Enterprise, you can now keep track of the activity of your YouTube videos, directly from HubSpot.
HubSpot Marketing Hub is the platform with the right tools to turn visitors into leads and into potential buyers.
Which HubSpot Marketing Hub Should You Choose?
It all depends on company size, functions, objectives and needs. First of all, you must have some considerations in place before choosing a Marketing Hub package.
Some questions might be:
- What budget do you have available?
- How many are involved in marketing?
- How many are sitting with sales?
- Do you work with inbound marketing?
- What are the future possibilities?
These questions and scenarios are probably not something you can get a handle on right away. But work through them and talk to the rest of your team and your company about the future possibilities. Because HubSpot is clearly part of the future – it helps you nurture and strengthen contact with your leads through automated and efficient processes.
