Blog | InboundAV Insights

What is HubSpot and how will it supercharge your marketing efforts?

Written by InboundAV | Feb 8, 2021 6:55:22 AM

Want to Learn More About HubSpot for Marketing?

Whether it’s your first time exploring digital marketing for your business or you are an experienced marketer looking to upgrade your efforts, then it’s likely that you’ve come across the most prolific players in the game: HubSpot.

But with such a wide selection of features and services, it can be difficult to assess if it’s worth the investment.

Luckily, we’re here to break it down so you can get an idea of whether or not it’s right for you.

Table of contents

  1. What is HubSpot?
  2. What tools does HubSpot provide?
  3. Why did we choose to partner with HubSpot?
  4. What HubSpot can do for our clients?

What is HubSpot? 

HubSpot brands itself as a CRM software stack with marketing, sales, service, and CMS solutions all tucked neatly into an all-in-one platform that your business can use to grow better.

But what does that really mean?

To fully appreciate what HubSpot has to offer, we have to take a look at their primary strategic value-add: CRM, or customer relationship management.

At the heart of any effective marketing effort is the ability to build a strong level of trust with your customers and clientele.

Trust is such a critical consideration for businesses that Edelman reported 81% of consumers make purchasing decisions based on how much they trust the brand.

Now, what HubSpot did with this principle, was to make what is essentially an entire category of science on its own. 

Enter inbound marketing. HubSpot coined the term back in 2005, and ever since, it has become an essential methodology to understand for any digital marketer worth their salt.

Split into the three phases of attract, engage, and delight, the discipline allows you to test, analyze, and improve your marketing efforts consistently using almost any of the software solutions on the market.

But as the original purveyor of the process, HubSpot has had a lot of time to improve what it can deliver to its users. Today, each one of HubSpot’s four solutions offer a range of powerful tools you can use to build better trust with your customers.

And while each software is a beast of its own, for the purposes of this article we’ll be going over the two that directly impact your marketing results: the Marketing Hub and the Content Management System (CMS) Hub.

HubSpot Tools

Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub is a solution that you can use to:

Attract traffic to your website and social pages

  • Blogging – One of the key ways to build trust with your consumer is to provide them a value-adding experience as soon as they interact with you online. The best way to do this is through the content you provide, and blogging is one of the most comprehensive ways of delivering value through content. 
  • Search engine optimization – What good is your compelling and capacity-building content if it cannot be found by users? SEO will continue to drive brand awareness in 2021 and HubSpot will help you maximize this effort. 
  • Ad tracking & management – All paid digital advertisements for social media pages and Google ads can be managed and analyzed from the HubSpot dashboard.
  • Social media management – Social media is the main battlefield for driving awareness, and with HubSpot, you can manage all your pages and posts while also monitoring customer conversations. 
  • Video – Video has overtaken all other content types as the #1 form of media used in content strategy
  • Live chat – Not only can you directly connect with your visitors, you can use HubSpot bots that still provide a humanized experience. In fact, 47% of consumers are open to buying items through a chatbot.

Convert leads

  • Landing page builder – Landing pages were formerly the domain of IT and developers, but with HubSpot, users have a variety of templates and easy-to-install modules to design an effective page. 
  • Form builder – The most essential tool for generating leads, HubSpot forms can be added directly to your website and link the data back to the HubSpot CRM database.
  • Email marketing – Email marketing is a critical aspect of nurturing leads, especially when leads generally need to be engaged for 18-24 months before they make a purchase. Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads.
  • Marketing automation – Marketing automation can result in a potential 250% increase in purchase frequency and 90% higher customer retention rates. HubSpot provides an easy-to-learn workflow tool that will allow you to build and monitor automations.

Report better

  • Marketing analytics – This is one of the ingredients in HubSpot’s secret sauce. The reporting dashboard ties in closed-loop reporting for all of your activities in a single space. The catch? To fully utilize the feature, you have to be conducting your efforts from HubSpot’s platform.
  • Custom objects – All of your data can be stored and customized how you like. With HubSpot, you can ensure that what’s reported and how it’s reported is tailored specifically to your business needs. 

CMS Hub

The newest of HubSpot’s software selection, the CMS Hub empowers users with tools that allow you to create and manage one of your main drivers of growth: content strategy.

  • SEO recommendations – HubSpot relies on existing data to help you optimize your website and its content so that you can drive more traffic to your business.
  • Website themes – More than a pre-built design framework, HubSpot’s website themes also allow you to post content with consistent branding. 
  • Multi-language content creation – HubSpot allows you to toggle between managing multiple language domains.
  • Drag & drop editor – No coding skills? No problem! The drag & drop editor lets you build and update pages without the help of a developer.

Why did we choose to partner with HubSpot?

While we are equipped to help businesses build and execute digital marketing solutions, what we provide at the very core is strategic consultancy. In other words, we help you plan and then we help you realize those plans.

To do this, we dive deep into what your business needs at any given time, assess where it is best to drive growth, and provide the tools to make it happen.

HubSpot is one of those tools. But make no mistake, it is not always the go-to solution, especially considering the sizeable monthly price tag that comes with it.

That’s why we chose to join their partner program, because it allows us to offer the use of HubSpot’s features to smaller businesses at a more affordable rate.

Not only does this help lower costs for our clients, but it also allows us to implement laser-focused efforts that don’t overwhelm with the ten-thousand-and-one different features, many of which might not suit your business at this time.

And on the other hand, HubSpot is a powerful tool when coupled with the right content strategy. So if we could make the service more accessible to people with tighter budgets, then it was really a no-brainer to join the partnership program.

So what can HubSpot do for our clients?

We cannot stress enough how valuable HubSpot’s all-in-one aspect is. It goes way beyond making things easier to navigate and execute.

Yes, you can ensure more consistent content creation that is well optimized. Sure, you can manage contacts, generate leads, and nurture them through automated workflows all in one place. Of course, you can monitor and post on all of your social accounts with the dashboard.

But where the single-point-of-contact principle really shines is the data.

You see, to maximize HubSpot, the key is to ensure that you are using as many of the tools as possible because all of the activity will feed back into the CRM database and generate valuable insights that you can analyze to improve your efforts.

And just to scratch the surface of how this can transform your business, remember that there are two other solutions for sales and customer service that each have their own software.

Data is collected and shared across all four Hubs on the CRM platform, allowing you to create stronger synergy between your marketing, sales, and service teams. 

For our clients, HubSpot is much more than a one-stop-shop, it’s a path to empowerment and growth.