Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
Andrew Royal - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at Full Stack RevOps
Real User
Top 5
An efficient solution for startups that helps to track leads
Pros and Cons
  • "HubSpot Marketing Hub is efficient and offers visibility. It also helps to track leads. I like the tool's Gmail functionality."
  • "The tool should improve email marketing solution. It is behind its competitors for bulk campaigns."

What is our primary use case?

We use the tool for prospecting. 

What is most valuable?

HubSpot Marketing Hub is efficient and offers visibility. It also helps to track leads. I like the tool's Gmail functionality. 

What needs improvement?

The tool should improve email marketing solution. It is behind its competitors for bulk campaigns. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution since 2019. 

Buyer's Guide
HubSpot Marketing Hub
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about HubSpot Marketing Hub. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

HubSpot Marketing Hub is scalable. 

How are customer service and support?

HubSpot Marketing Hub has solid and knowledgeable technical support. They are quick to reply. 

How was the initial setup?

The tool's deployment is complex, and configuration took time to complete. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

HubSpot Marketing Hub's pricing is reasonable. It is about 800-900 dollars a month. It may be pricey for smaller clients, but for the bigger ones, it's only a small part of their monthly revenue. 

What other advice do I have?

HubSpot is better than Salesforce for smaller startups and others in the funding phase. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Joe Sharp - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder/COO at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
It does a good job of tracking and updating client records
Pros and Cons
  • "Marketing Hub does an incredible job of tracking and updating client records. The reporting has been enhanced, so you can do just about any type of reporting with it and export to Excel if necessary. They just came out with a considerable upgrade a few months ago, which really helped on the reporting side."
  • "They're not the cheapest."

What is our primary use case?

Marketing Hub manages all your contacts. You can create any type of static and or list for email blasts and outreach. 

What is most valuable?

Marketing Hub does an incredible job of tracking and updating client records. The reporting has been enhanced, so you can do just about any type of reporting with it and export to Excel if necessary. They just came out with a considerable upgrade a few months ago, which really helped on the reporting side. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Marketing Hub is highly stable within the cloud. They also have a mobile app that mirrors the portal. They've done an incredible job of continuing to enhance the product.

How are customer service and support?

Tech support is almost instant. They do a great job of customer and tech support.

How was the initial setup?

Marketing Hub is simple to set up.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

All the CRMs we work with are in the same range. They're not the most expensive, but they're not the cheapest. They have a free version for people to try, and they can start adding more features to it. 

They have specials with bundles for small and medium-sized businesses that combine marketing, sales, and customer support. They have bundles to help companies get going. They give you lots of options and work with you.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Marketing Hub 10 out of 10. It's a solid platform that's straightforward to set up and extremely easy to use. They've done a fantastic job. Any time we've run into problems, they've rolled out enhancements. It just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Their sweet spot is small and medium-sized businesses.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
HubSpot Marketing Hub
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about HubSpot Marketing Hub. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2315163 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Demand Generation at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Offers good scalability but need for additional levers or add-ons for more customized reach outs
Pros and Cons
  • "As a CRM tool, it looks good."
  • "Some customized reachouts might need additional levers or add-ons, especially when automating at scale for specific buying personas. That's when you might need some additional help, in my opinion."

What is our primary use case?


What needs improvement?

I'm looking at the provision of advanced hyper-personalization, automated Gen AI-based campaign script generation, and automation to reduce guesswork. Traditional products have gaps here, and I need enhancements for more focused targeting in messaging.

The output needs some adjustments for more tangible leads and targeted messaging. There are some gaps here, and this product needs improvement.

In future releases, I would like to see hyper-personalization and JMAI-based automation, such as generating automated scripts. For example, for campaign reachouts of other sales operations. Because the entire world is talking about AI. So, more automation and even further personalization.

For how long have I used the solution?

I'm fairly new to this product. So, it has been a couple of months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. However, the output needs some adjustments for more tangible leads and targeted messaging.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are 20-odd end users using this solution in our enterprise. It is easy to scale because our requirements are slightly less at this time. But, as we try to scale it down the line, which is part of the plan. That's where the apprehensions are.  

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I'm looking to augment the lead generation mechanism and apply hyper-personalization. Some AI-based solutions are emerging, providing highly personalized buying persona information at one click. This interests me for the lead-to-opportunity cycle. 

I checked out products that could be added to this existing platform. Therefore, we have yet to choose any specific product. It's all currently in progress.

What other advice do I have?

As a CRM tool, it looks good. In terms of overall packaging CRM, but for some customized reachouts, it might need additional levers or add-ons, especially when automating at scale for specific buying personas. That's when you might need some additional help, in my opinion.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Sadiq H - PeerSpot reviewer
Sadiq HCampaign Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Top 10Real User

HubSpot CRM offers robust scalability and a user-friendly interface, making it a solid choice for growing businesses. Its core features are powerful and effective, but achieving highly customized outreach may require additional tools or add-ons. The platform excels in providing valuable insights and streamlining customer interactions. Overall, it delivers strong value for its cost, especially when tailored to specific business needs.

PeerSpot user
Senior Business Analyst - CRM at Kumara Lloyd Associates
Real User
How to Improve Sales Using Hubspot

There is much hype around the “inbound marketing process” and a product called Hubspot.  I wanted to find out how effective it was and what type of businesses might benefit from it. I took up Hubspot’s offer of a 30 day free trial to try it out in anger, using inbound marketing for my own business as a template for the trial.

What is Hubspot?

Hubspot is an inbound marketing tool for generating sales leads for a business.

The ‘inbound marketing business process’ was invented by Hubspot, so with Hubspot you are buying into the philosophy and business process alongside the software tool itself. The process is built on established web marketing techniques like blogs, search engine optimisation, social media and email marketing. Hubspot's process brings these techniques together to create a single methodology and tool to generate leads for your business.

Wikipedia definition: “Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospect's attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.”

Hubspot helps you automate most of the elements connected with inbound marketing (web pages, free offers, contacts management, etc.) by bringing them together into a single integrated software tool. To some extent Hubspot is marketing eating itself. Once you sign up to their mailing list, you get bombarded with their inbound marking offers of free material on how to do inbound marketing!

How did I get on with the trial?

The trial proved to be a very useful exercise for testing various marketing ideas for promoting my company.

Most of Hubspot’s functions were available during the trial with the exception of being able to send emails. On line help was also promised in the software during the trial but although messages to technical support were answered, my more general questions were not (for example an offer to help me send the test emails).

What did I think about Hubspot as a marketing tool?

This might sound obvious, but Hubspot is only suitable for companies intending to have an inbound marketing strategy. You should only consider Hubspot of you are serious about using inbound marketing. You need to put in considerable amount of marketing effort to make it work. It did not seem to be easily adaptable to other marketing methods.

However on the premise that you are serious about inbound marketing, you should seriously consider it due to the increased efficiency it can bring you.

What did you like about it?

I found it very simple to use. Help and tips of how to get the best out of the tool were close to hand. Web pages, landing pages, calls to action and emails were very easy to set up, edit to experiment with and update without the need for specialist website editing skills (a big productivity gain).

All the major elements of inbound marketing were integrated together in one place. This saved time over dealing with all the inbound marketing activities separately. This frees you to experiment to develop the best ways attracting new customers and improve your content.

Being able to control all you branding in the same place also gives you better control over it.

Finally I liked the ability to easily measure your overall marketing success and test the outcomes of different marketing and advertising tactics. Thus you can determine your marketing cost per lead generated and thus fully justify your marketing expenditure.

What was disappointing?

To get the most from the tool, you will need to transfer your web site into Hubspot. This is a big ask for many organisations who have other stakeholders using their website (like recruitment and investor relations). You will also need to pay Hubspot at extra cost to transfer your website. It is possible to run your website separately from Hubspot and tools are in place to help you do this, but it results in more work for you and is less neat in terms of reporting.

It is expensive! The basic package will set your back approximately £2,100 in the first year. Functionality is limited to 100 contacts in the database and useful CRM integration and automation is not available in this package. Although this package is enough to get you started, I would anticipate that most companies would end up using the professional package costing £8,200 in the first year.

You can however measure your success with Hubspot and thus easily justify this expenditure against the additional sales you will gain! You also need to consider the additional cost in light of your overall marketing budget. Other marketing expenditure may no longer be needed to gain the same level of awareness and number of leads thus offsetting the cost.

What was average?

The standard reports I would only rate as average. I had difficulty setting up “tracking URLs” to appear correctly - I eventually worked it out but it was very complicated!

The web publishing tool was nothing special either. As we do not use Facebook, we already publish on LinkedIn and Twitter at the same time and I find LinkedIn better for this. Larger marketing teams would however benefit from being able to monitor all of their social media interactions from different people on different social networks all in one place.

I found the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) keywords report good for finding and improving my keywords. However I still needed Google Ads, to help me find additional suitable keywords - Hubspot did not work for me in isolation.

Conclusions

The main benefit I found from Hubspot is that it makes inbound marketing much more efficient. However to get to this point you need to:

a) Establish that inbound marketing process is suitable for your own business

b) Seriously invest in social media and website marketing for it to be worth the money in terms of improved productivity (expenditure inclusive of cost of staff time of more than £10,000 a year)

For my own company, our web presence is not yet mature enough to make an immediate return on our investment from the functionality on offer. Most of the tools in Hubspot are available elsewhere cheaper (e.g. Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Jimdo, etc.) which will enable us to develop our web presence using inbound marketing without having to buy Hubspot. There will however come a time when the time saving offered by having all these things linked together within one tool will justify us moving over to Hubspot.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2536929 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Software Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Offers good automation capabilities to users
Pros and Cons
  • "The product's initial setup phase was pretty easy."
  • "The tool could concentrate on improving the analytics and the overall user experience with AI."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution in my company for marketing and tracking leads and traffic on our website. In my company, we tracked how many traffic speeds we have on our website, all the lead generation, and so on. We were tracking various metrics with the tool, like how many total customers are viewing our website for the first time, how many are actively participating, how many are converting to, and maybe trying to use a product. We were tracking different metrics.

What is most valuable?

HubSpot was integrated into our website. We found HubSpot to be efficient, performing very well compared to other web analytical tools. Our whole website was deeply integrated through HubSpot, which is why we were using it. Though there might be other analytical tools as well, like Google Analytics, we found that HubSpot is good since it was deeply integrated within our website, so we were able to get clearer metrics, and we were able to track real-time data pretty well.

What needs improvement?

In some cases, the data might not be updated. We had a few instances where we had to reach out to HubSpot's team in order to get it sorted so that they could update the data as often. The updates were not reflecting properly.

In the future, the tool could use AI to improve the analytics. Maybe the product could use AI to make it easy for users to use it for the first time. New users could use the tool's AI chatbot to get help navigating the product for the first time. The tool could concentrate on improving the analytics and the overall user experience with AI.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using HubSpot Marketing Hub for ten months. My company has a partnership with HubSpot. We are also users of the tool.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The tool sometimes experienced delays in updating the metrics. Latency-wise, I can't comment on the tool's 100 percent quality. The tool is sometimes not properly updated, so we can keep it around 95 to 96 percent stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The tool's scalability was pretty good. We were able to get the tool integrated into our website, and we were able to scale it across our organization pretty well. Many of the folks from the marketing team were using it, so scalability was good.

I work in an enterprise-level company.

How are customer service and support?

The solution's technical support was good. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Google Analytics. If I compare HubSpot to Google, only the integration part differs in both solutions. If not for the integration part, Google and HubSpot are similar.

How was the initial setup?

The product's initial setup phase was pretty easy.

I was not involved in the tool's deployment. The tool's deployment was taken care of by my IT team.

There was no need for me to maintain the solution. The overall maintenance was not required at all.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

For our organization, HubSpot was pretty affordable compared to Google Analytics.

What other advice do I have?

The automation capability in HubSpot is pretty good. I know we were able to generate reports. We could automate a little of the data in the tool, and we were able to get data, send reports on a daily or, a frequency that we can set. Based on the frequency, we are able to get reports. We automated some of the metrics over there.

When I was using the tool four months ago, no AI features were embedded in it. Some features would have been implemented when I was using the tool.

I rate the tool as eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Flag as inappropriate
PeerSpot user
Frank Welsch-Lehmann - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales CRM Consultant at Taipan Consulting GmbH
Real User
Top 10
The solution is very stable and very reliable, and the onboarding process is well documented
Pros and Cons
  • "The tool is very stable and very reliable."
  • "The product is not cheap."

What is our primary use case?

The solution is used for generating leads as part of the inbound campaign.

What is most valuable?

The joint database shared between all the HubSpot modules is valuable.

What needs improvement?

The product is not cheap.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for more than four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The tool is very stable and very reliable. No software is without glitches or errors. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Our customers are medium-sized businesses. The tool is scalable. We can scale it up to whatever level we want. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is complex, but it is manageable. The onboarding process is well documented. The ease of setup depends on the environment. It is a SaaS solution. The initial deployment takes approximately three months.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is an upmarket solution, but it is not the most expensive tool. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten on a scale where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The product is better than other alternatives.

What other advice do I have?

I recommend the product. Implementing a marketing automation solution must be well-planned and well-thought-through. Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Marketing Executive | Strategy | Automation | Digital | Social | Content | Ops | VOC | CRM | CX | at DZone/AnswerHub
Real User
Great for content curation and dissemination
Pros and Cons
  • "We are now able to manage and measure content (blogs, CTAs, and landing pages)."
  • "Increase the CRM size for sole proprietors before increasing the fee."

What is our primary use case?

I continue to use HubSpot for content curation and dissemination. I have written more than 500 blog posts on marketing, employee, and customer engagement, and also more than 1000 articles on the state of different aspects of IT. I have a lot of information on the value of various constituencies. As such, that is what I am using HubSpot to do at least three times a day. 

The analytics enable me to see which content is driving the most page views and click-throughs.              

How has it helped my organization?

We are now able to manage and measure content (blogs, CTAs, and landing pages). HubSpot serves as my Content Management Network for more than 500 of my own articles and gives me access to those that I have written for DZone.

What is most valuable?

Content creation and dissemination. I love that I am able to access the 500 plus blog posts on my site, as well as the more than 800 articles I have written for DZone.com.

What needs improvement?

Increase the CRM size for sole proprietors before increasing the fee. As an employee working to get some consulting projects, in addition to my full-time work, I am not in a position to accumulate a large number of MQLs. These are unlikely to nurture into SQLs given their geography.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It has not been an issue.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

What about the implementation team?

In-house; myself.

What was our ROI?

Undetermined.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Have sufficient content before signing up for the 30-day trial.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes. Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On

What other advice do I have?

Great customer support and information of value on the site.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2137596 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Specialist and Marketing Expert at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Unique and very user-friendly
Pros and Cons
  • "Very user-friendly."
  • "An expensive solution."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution for analytics for our marketing campaigns and the basic CRM.
I'm a web and digital marketing expert. We are an industrial company and customers of HubSpot. 

What is most valuable?

This product is unique and very user-friendly. It's very helpful for our needs. 

What needs improvement?

This product is quite expensive. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for a few weeks.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. 

How was the initial setup?

We worked with an agency that assisted us with the implementation. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing costs are expensive but it's worth the money. I believe we paid for a professional license.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We didn't evaluate any other options. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user