HubSpot is a leading brand of CRM system, but is it any good? This HubSpot review will help you decide, as well as offering you a free trial!
In this review…
- What is inbound marketing?
- What is HubSpot and what is CRM?
- How could you benefit from HubSpot?
- Marketing, sales, CMS
- HubSpot review: Pricing
- HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce CRM
- HubSpot online reviews
- Verdict
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a sales technique that pulls in new customers by providing them with engaging content to build better relationships. The aim is to add some form of value to your customers, persuading them to engage with your business and services.
Inbound marketing is 10x more effective than other advertising and marketing techniques and this is why your business should be looking to CRM software like HubSpot to start generating more marketing leads.
What Is HubSpot and What Is CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management, and HubSpot is technically a CRM tool. It’s an inbound marketing and sales tool that helps you build better relationships with your customers. Click here to compare the Top 10 CRM Software.
For now, we’re going to take a deeper dive into HubSpot and its key features!
How Could You Benefit From HubSpot?
HubSpot is a well known, reliable name in the Marketing industry. Over 86,000 businesses currently use HubSpot across 120 countries around the world. Why? Well, because it is one of the best, CRM tools on the web.
It allows you to keep track of all your customer’s information, and implement this information into your inbound marketing strategies, to produce content that is personalised to your customers and will ultimately drive them to make purchases.
Alongside it being one of the best all-in-one sales marketing and client services platforms on the web, it can also offer you a variety of other additional features. These features include email marketing tools, search engine optimisation (SEO) tools, and landing page production tools to help you amplify your business to a wider audience.
Plus HubSpot is tailored to helping small and medium-sized businesses pull in more customers through its easy to use interface, simple data analytics, and free versions. Let’s check out some of HubSpot’s key features.
Marketing, Sales, CMS & Client Services In One
HubSpot has four different packages it offers which you can use separately, or bundle together and use in tandem. FYI they are more powerful when you use them all together.
HubSpot Review: Marketing Hub
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub provides your business with a pretty comprehensive suite of marketing tools. You can create content and pull greater traffic into your site through its SEO tools, landing page production software, and email marketing software.
In a nutshell a landing page is a web page that funnels visitors into clicking on a call to action, usually leading them to a sales checkout. You can use HubSpot’s landing page templates and designs to create a winning page that’ll drive more traffic to your sales pages.
HubSpot marketing will also help you to drive traffic to these pages, through your social media accounts, and email marketing campaigns. But to get the most out of your marketing suite, connect it to HubSpot’s Sales and CRM Hub to see and record all your customer interactions.
HubSpot Review: Sales & CRM Hub
HubSpot is known for its CRM tools. It helps you manage, organise, and track all your leads, keeping them in one easy to read dashboard that includes a variety of reports to help track your businesses’ leads generations. Through this, you can see when it might be best and how best to contact your customers and uncover new leads and sales opportunities.
You can then draft and sequence emails to be delivered to customers which will follow them up when they are for example engaging with something on your website. And when they open these emails, it’ll be logged so you can see which emails are the most effective in your email marketing arsenal. It is full automation in a simple and easy to use platform.
You won’t have to record when a lead clicks an email, a customer’s email address, or how they got to your site in the first place. The CRM software will do that all that for you and will also enable you to chat and organise meetings with customers in real-time that can improve your client’s customer journey.
The User interface is also seriously easy to use, and we loved how easy it is to use for those of us who aren’t that tech-savvy. The CRM Hub will also build easy to understand reports for you which you can then analyze to gain a greater insight into your marketing performance.
Tie this in with HubSpot’s CMS package and you can create winning webpages, personalised for different customers!
HubSpot Review: CMS Hub
CMS stands for content management system. HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform, and you can use its CMS to build landing pages, publish blogs, and ultimately build an optimised website that will pull in more traffic to your site.
Firstly, you can use one of HubSpot’s custom website themes to design the layout of your website. You can then customise that theme, using its easy to use drag and drop editing tool, that empowers even the least tech-savvy people to put together a stunning webpage.
Using your CRM you can then build and personalise landing pages, sales funnels, and other web pages, to cater for your customer’s preferences found in your CRM hub. Once you’ve built and personalised your site, you can then use HubSpot’s SEO recommendation tools to implement better SEO strategies that could help you improve how well you’re ranking on google.
We loved specifically that you can use HubSpots CMS Hub to build multiple variations of a webpage, and test and compare each page to see which one generates the most leads. But all good websites have a good customer support feature, and that’s where you can use HubSpot’s Service Hub, to build a comprehensive support platform to enhance your customer’s journey even more.
Check out this list of 29 best content management systems.
HubSpot Review: Service Hub
60% of customers stop doing business with a brand after one poor customer service experience. It is a vital way to ensure customers keep using your brand as ultimately it is easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer than have to acquisition new ones.
HubSpot’s Service Hub helps you keep your customers happy by providing a friction-less system that can help your customer on any channel through its Conversations inbox. Here you can speak to customers via email, live chat, or on Facebook messenger, and you’ll have HubSpot’s CRM Hub providing you with all the information about the customer, to help you create a more personalised service.
HubSpot definitely offers plenty of features that can help amplify your business and gain you more sales. Joined together, these 4 different hubs can create a powerful inbound marketing tool that can broaden your outreach massively, but you’re probably wondering, how much is this all going to cost me?
HubSpot Review: Pricing
HubSpot has a variety of different pricing options depending on what platform you’re looking for. You can purchase each different up separately, buy them all as a package, or build your own package entirely.
But the best part about HubSpot is that its packages all have a freemium version that will give you access to the base level features of HubSpot’s four main hubs. There is no cap on how many days you can use this feature for, so it’s great for small businesses starting out on their sales and marketing journey.
In the free versions, you’ll be able to manage contacts in your CRM platform, build forms landing pages, and carry out email marketing in your Marketing Hub, use live chat features in the Sales Hub, and issue tickets and schedule calls in the Service Hub. If your business has outgrown these needs you can opt to purchase one of the separate Hubs which vary in price from around £42 per month to £990 per month.
But we recommend investing in one of HubSpot’s packages that will give you the best overall functionality and outreach.
Get started with HubSpot free!
| Price per month | Features | |
| Starter Growth Suite | £42 | A great tool for small businesses looking to step it up from the freemium platforms. This service includes Ad management tools, forms that can gather your customer’s personal information, and offers a suite of answers and FAQ resolutions that your support agents can use or even automate to answer your customer’s queries. |
| Professional Growth Suite | £1,046.25 | A fair bit more expensive, this is definitely for the larger business looking to drive greater traffic to their site. Within this package, you’ll find more data analytics tools, like website performance testing software, create customisable reports on all your CRM data, and special task and marketing automation systems to free up more time to engage with your customer’s queries. |
| Enterprise Growth Suite | £3,453 | The top tier package and a very expensive one too. Best only for large scale businesses. Incorporating HubSpot’s team management tools the system provides you with a sales playbook so you can surface and recommend sales tactics to your team just as they need it when engaging with customers, can define each of your team members roles, and can allow you to hold 10,000 contacts at any time. |
Although the downside of these packages is that they don’t contain HubSpot’s CMS service, which can only be purchased as an extra for either £245 per month or £745 per month. Included in the base plan you’ll get HubSpot’s drag and drop feature, its website themes, and SEO recommendations.
The more expensive tier adds greater adaptive testing functions, multiple currency management facilities on your website, and provides you with better site performance metrics. So how does HubSpot match up against its competitors?
HubSpot CRM vs Salesforce CRM: Who Wins?
Ultimately that depends on what sort of business you’re running. HubSpot is definitely better for small businesses looking for a cheap and easy to use CRM tool, while Salesforce is geared towards larger businesses that have greater marketing needs and a larger customer base.
Here’s why.
HubSpot Review: Pricing
Although HubSpot’s higher-tier plans leave something to be desired, it’s freemium version is a great starting point for any small business looking to get it’s CRM and marketing strategies up and running for as little cost as possible. Even it’s Starter Growth Suite is pretty cheap for what it delivers.
But as you go up the pricing plans, Salesforce provides the better value for money service, with it’s highest priced CRM packages costing just £240 per month, compared to HubSpot’s £990 per month Enterprise CRM Package. Salesforce is better in that sense for businesses looking to grow and invest in their CRM functionality.
User Interface
HubSpot is the easier platform to use and navigate, but it is not as customisable as Salesforce. To unlock its reporting and customisation features, you’ll need to opt into its Professional Growth CRM package, which is not great for small businesses looking to quickly analyse their data in a way that suits them best, the main purpose of CRM.
Both systems are very similar on navigation, but HubSpot is more streamlined and has fewer features or options popping up on you compared to Salesforce, which is a far more complex platform. For the less tech-savvy person, this can be a bit overbearing but for those that need these features, Salesforce can provide a great user experience.
Reporting
Again, HubSpot falls short of the mark here as it doesn’t let you customise your data reports, providing you with its own industry-standard metrics, unlike Salesforce. But again that can be a good thing as it can be hard to read a chart with heaps of data on it, and sometimes as a business, you just need a quick and easy to look at graph to give you an insight and move on.
Salesforce, on the other hand, is much more intricate giving you a whole ton of variables you can view and incorporate in your data charts, which means it’s great for businesses with larger customer data banks.
Lead Generation
HubSpot’s combination of its Marketing, CRM, CMS, and Support Hubs make it the superior package for lead generation, enabling you to easily integrate all four platforms to build a killer webpage that can outreach to customers and create an excellent consumer journey. Salesforce is just a CRM service so it won’t be able to bring in as many leads as HubSpot can.
As a CRM platform, Salesforce definitely edges HubSpot’s CRM, as Salesforce lets you create lead assignment rules, which add your leads to specific marketing lists.
Support
Both platforms offer up great support systems. Salesforce provides more invasive support methods, offering the standard 24/7 phone support similar to HubSpot, but going one step further, providing you with a dedicated success manager and a one-hour response for critical issues. With HubSpot, you can contact their customer support, but they aren’t as responsive as Salesforce, and you’re more likely to find an answer to your query through HubSpot’s online knowledge centre.
HubSpot Online Reviews
Unfortunately, HubSpot does not have the best reviews on Trustpilot with only 3.3 stars out of five and a 42% excellence rating. Ultimately, many customers on the platform are recommending not upgrading to its paid features and simply using the paid version, with main citing the customer service on the platform to be slow and unhelpful.
Others report that the platform is seriously overpriced at the higher end tiers with the platform becoming a bit of a ‘jungle’ of features at times. Despite this many proponents love the functionality and efficiency of the platform, citing HubSpot’s great integration tools and all in one service as one of the best on the market.
Verdict
Inbound marketing is one of the greatest assets an online business has to pull in new customers, and HubSpot certainly can help you amplify your brand and draw in more customers. HubSpot does excellent work of building an all-in-one marketing and CRM platform which is one of the best in the business, but it lets itself down as its premium plans are too expensive and are not very scalable for the small businesses out there.
Larger businesses should definitely look to platforms like Salesforce who can provide better prices and the higher end of the pricing ladder. But for small businesses, HubSpot’s freemium version and perhaps even it’s Starter plans are a perfect option for you to grow your business and generate more traffic coming through your website.
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