HubSpot Marketing Hub Reviews

CMS, social media tool, and analytics reporting.

I work for a marketing agency. We use the platform for a number of our clients. We typically run our client blogs and their social media programs through HubSpot. For some clients, their websites and reporting also goes through HubSpot. We don't typically rely on the HubSpot CRM or sales tools. The tools we do use are very user-friendly and incredibly scalable while allowing for intelligent automation. Scalability is hugely important to our clients and for me. As the person executing the marketing plan, it's very helpful to a have such a breadth of functionality accessible at one central portal.

Most of HubSpot's shortcomings come in functionality that is stopped just shy of the finish line, so to speak. For example, the social calendar tool should have a multi-select drag-and-drop functionality. The social scheduling tool similarly should be able to handle more than 15 unique messages at a time. The LinkedIn API seems to be somehow limited, as the social inbox tool often fails to pick up interactions/conversations on LinkedIn and frequently cannot retrieve the names of those individuals interacting with user messaging.

That said, there are some real issues, especially in the analytics reporting, where unexplainable gaps tend to show up. For example, the discrepancy between the number of social clicks reported and the number of social-media-generated visits reported often cannot be explained by the usual suspects - clicks directing to third-party content, partially-loaded page bounces, filtering, double clicks, etc. In fact, I've encountered instances where the reported number of social media generated visits exceeded the reported number of social clicks which makes for a real head scratcher. HubSpot support is usually of little help in explaining these discrepancies.

Another example can be found in the page performance reporting tool. In this view, the user is presented with a list of pages and some information associated with those pages - information like publish date, views, CTA %, etc. The problem is the figures presented under the CTA % column almost never match up with the numbers found if you click through to the individual page's reporting environment and divide the number of CTA clicks by the number of page views. In running AdWords campaigns, we've also found enormous discrepancies between the AdWords and HubSpot reporting. For these and other reasons, we tend to prefer data from Google Analytics.

Another feature leaving tremendous room for improvement is the keyword tool. This provides data on keyword difficulty and search volume that is frankly not very reliable, often contradicting more authoritative tools such as MOZ and Keyword Planner, as well as basic intuition.

Over two years.

For a web application, HubSpot runs fairly heavy, which can cause stability issues on the side of the user (due to processing issues). While effectively the same, it should be noted that when these problems occur, they are not technically issues with the stability of the platform.

No.

Fair, a seven out of 10.

As an agency, we have to work with many CMS, marketing automation, and social media tools. In these capacities, I find that HubSpot tends to provide for a superior user experience while allowing for a more effective, scalable digital marketing program. In terms of analytics and SEO, HubSpot offers a subpar solution. As a CRM, HubSpot is infinitely more user-friendly than Salesforce but considerably less robust in its offering.

In my experience, this depends more on the DNS you use than on HubSpot. I've been part of extremely smooth and easy setups and extremely difficult setups.

The Pro package should be adequate for most operations.

As an agency, we don't chose the solutions employed; our clients do.

I'd offer my strong endorsement. This is a very powerful tool that gets better each year.

We use the solution for marketing automation. It's used by the marketing team. For example, we use it to send emails automatically to customers. The main purpose is to have a hub for all marketing outreach and to keep track of members.

The workflows on offer are very useful.

It's a pretty flexible product.

There are customizable templates and we can easily make the templates more dynamic.

It is fairly straightforward to set up.

It's a good CRM tool.  

There aren't any missing features.

Sometimes we've had issues with the usability of the product. It's more of a user problem than a technology problem. The way the staff uses the system sometimes leads to processes not being followed. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

I'd rate the initial setup seven out of ten in terms of ease of use. It's okay to set up. It isn't overly complex.

We're a customer and end-user and use it for our CRM.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's an important tool to have in a company, and this solution meets all of our business requirements. 

• Helping to create client websites
• Adding content
• Minor template tweaks
• Custom website and landing pages
• Blogs
• Templates
• Widgets
• Workflows
• Email

• Overall speed and ease of use.
• Sandbox environment allows for real-time examples to test and share with clients on the environment. 
• It allows us to shine with a deep understanding of the platform.
  

• Sandbox environment: Provides a great way to test new templates and create content in the environment, then share it with the client for real-time evaluation.
• Great file manager: Easy to work with, edit images, and organize files. 
• Design Manager: Ease of editing and creating templates after initial development.
• HubDB: Great for modules, tables, resources and beautiful dynamic pages

HubSpot is constantly working to improve and innovate. A downside to this is that sometimes it can be disorienting when they put out a new release/beta test without informing us. It can be a bit disorienting to have to figure out how to access and adjust things in a new layout unexpectedly. 

Customer support is helpful and responsive. 

We use this solution for marketing. 

It’s a tool which works well to evaluate leads journey and conversion

The valuable feature I have found in this solution are:

• Lead generation is very helpful overall.
  
• Lead generation monthly email scheduling is very good.
  
• Email drafts at any point in time can be edited, even if you schedule it for tomorrow you can edit it easily.
  
• You can embed images in emails.
  
• There is integration with social sites.
  
• Integrates with other platforms, such as Salesforce. The data flow from HubSpot to Salesforce is very good. It is very powerful in automatically adding the data and the field you want into the dashboard.
• Very light solution with many types of marketing automation.

HubSpot is mainly for enterprise clients and there is a lot of competition. There are better solutions, such as Eloqua and Marketo. This solution needs to improve the analytics for social media monitoring to a level that it can compete with other solutions available in the market. There are some limitations with the features compared to other solutions.

The email recipients sometimes do not receive some of the call-to-action images that are not downloading and this happens no matter what browsers are being used. This should improve in a future release.

I have been using this solution within the last 12 months.

The solution is reliable.

The solution is scalable with the use of customer relationship tools with CRM solutions.

If we are having any difficulties, I can easily reach out to support executives and have a resolution. I am not sure if we paid for the technical support.

The help section on HubSpot's website has a lot of documents, there is no need to go to an external site. There is a search box you can input what exactly you want and the related information will come up. It is not a community-type forum that some other vendors have, such as Salesforce where the community adds the information to your question to assist you. I think HubSpot's support team took a lot of use cases and then provided the information for their customers online which has been a benefit. The help section is comprehensive and you can find what you need.

I have used Eloqua and Marketo previously. Eloqua has some specialized features, such as
radial fix for social media monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are on an annual license for this solution. There have many different versions to meet the needs of their customers, such as professional enterprise and basic versions. They charge for the particular feature or components which are available in the license you have.

I have evaluated other solutions.

I rate HubSpot Marketing Hub a seven out of ten.

I use HubSpot for lead management, funnel management, and marketing.

The most valuable features are the reports, overall usability, and ease of use.

Being able to send emails from within it, and the email campaigns are good features.

It is very flexible.

When using this product, improvements often have to be made at the corporate level, such as improving their overall best practices. The reason for this is the flexibility that the solution provides. For example, when different people are talking about a certain sales stage, there should be certain qualifications. One person might refer to a deal at the commit stage, whereas another one considers it to be at the qualification stage.

Although the interface is good, it is not very intuitive. I usually have to go to the admin to look for help with certain functions. The search and questions aren't as intuitive as I would expect from a platform like this. However, it may just be me getting up to speed with it.

I have been using HubSpot Marketing Hub since I joined this company, several months ago.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

As far as I know, the scalability is good. We have perhaps 30 users in the company.

I have not been in touch with technical support.

I have used Salesforce for close to 20 years, and it's fairly similar, but there are some little idiosyncrasies that differentiate them.

My advice for anybody who is implementing HubSpot is to have corporate best practices defined, or at least evolving in parallel with the implementation and bringing on new users. You want to make sure that everyone is using it the same way.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Sales enablement, where it has been hard to manage leads and forgetting following up with clients, as we manage multiple geographies and managing data in a worksheet can be hard. 

It has eased managing the sales team and the sales journey right from setting up appointments. The best thing is the ease to customize per our needs. 

• Deals and closing
• Task reminders
• Call logs

We can choose the necessary stages as per the lead, and update it accordingly, then proceed it further.

They should integrate a bot, as it would be easier to get the status to the management team without logging into the CRM to get all the required details. I would recommend trying to use ElliQ, which is an excellent smart bot that can be used for automation.

The most important features are email marketing and lead scoring. We attend a lot of trade shows, host webinars, etc., so email marketing is a key part of our inbound marketing strategy.

Lead scoring helps us track our leads when we’re determining which ones are hotter and should be followed up. It allows marketing to pass more qualified leads to sales, so that the sales team can prioritize.

Before using HubSpot, we weren’t able to track our database activity as much. We were using MailChimp, which is a great beginner tool for email marketing and marketing automation. However, HubSpot is your all-in-one inbound platform. It allows us to track visitors' web views, download history, and more. Since using HubSpot, we’ve at least doubled our leads generated.

Sometimes the product can be glitchy in the email marketing and landing page creation and I find myself having to refresh the page. It’s not often and it usually fixes itself, but it can be frustrating if you need to turn something around quickly

For example, when building a new email or landing page, sometimes when I insert something like an image or Call-to-Action, it won’t show up - it’s blank. I have to try multiple times and usually have to refresh and/or leave the page entirely and come back to it later. .

I also wish there were more capabilities with the new Lead Flow tool. I believe they are working on some upgrades since it’s still a new product as of today.

We have used the solution since August, 2015.

We didn't really have any stability issues, but I’ve encountered some glitches that usually fix themselves. Overall, it’s a very reliable platform and their support is very helpful and responsive if you have any issues.

We didn't have any scalability issues. That’s the best part about HubSpot. It allows you to scale your business.

We have multiple users in HubSpot for various reasons. I manage the email marketing piece and lead scoring, where our web person manages landing page creation and SEO reports. As we add more people to our team and grow our business, it’s very easy to manage.

I would rate the technical support as 10/10. I’ve never had a problem they couldn’t fix.

Usually, most issues are fixed within a day or two. I’ve had some larger scale technical problems, but their team is very thorough and even if it takes a week or so, they figure it out and get it right.

We previously used MailChimp, but we needed a more all-in-one platform. MailChimp was only offering email marketing services and we needed to add lead scoring, landing page creation, SEO, reporting, etc.

The initial setup was a big task, but HubSpot sets you up with an on-boarding specialist for your first three months. This is in addition to your customer success rep. They really focus on getting you started.

My on-boarding specialist was awesome. She really helped get me set up and she guided me through all the tools. We met on a weekly basis and I took action items away each week. She answered any questions I had when executing, and was very helpful.

It’s a costly product and it takes a little while to get set up. We didn’t see leads increase until about six months into using the product, but we’ve been increasing ever since. While it isn’t a cheap tool, we definitely see the value it brings.

We looked at Marketo. HubSpot seemed to be a more user-friendly interface, incorporated more of what we needed, and in the end, it was more affordable.

Take advantage of the free trial to take a look at the product. Once you start, really take advantage of your on-boarding specialist and ask a million questions.

HubSpot is a really robust tool, so there are a lot of features. Try to master one at a time (email marketing first, landing pages second, etc.).

HubSpot has a lot of great sources. Their online academy has video tutorials and example projects for you to master tools. They also offer certifications so you can take a test to check your knowledge. It’s a great way to study up and learn things about tools you might not have known existed.

There’s also a yearly conference called Inbound, which I attended as a new HubSpot user. It was really helpful in learning all about the product/service, making connections both at HubSpot and with other marketers to bounce around ideas.

I’ve also attended local trainings in my city which have been really helpful. I encourage everyone to go to at least one. The classes are usually 10-20 people, so you can really focus on what you need.

I use it to monitor leads and engage in sales automation processes. We use it to identify certain leads or potential clients, and we use it to maintain contact with them, post-sale.

The most valuable feature is probably automating the system. I can send mass emails to pretty much all my contacts or certain ones that meet the demographic requirements. I've used this one and one other CRM with an auto sales company. From my experience, just the ease of use and the user interface on HubSpot is phenomenal. It's really simple and easy to navigate the program. The functionality is phenomenal, and not just the Microsoft Office part but also with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It's pretty nice.

The upcoming tasks feature could be better. With HubSpot, whenever I put the contact information into Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook, it automatically inputs it into HubSpot. For example, it keeps telling me to contact my Solaris representative as an upcoming task. I've tried changing the contact in it to "not a lead," but it keeps sending me that notification.

I have been dealing with HubSpot Marketing Hub for about four months.

It has been pretty stable. I haven't had that many issues with this.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HubSpot Marketing Hub a nine.