Founded in 2006, by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot is much more than just a marketing tool. It is in fact a one-stop shop and a complete CRM platform with all the tools and integrations that your business is ever going to need. Whether it is that you want to accelerate your sales, increase your marketing efforts, streamline your customer service or just build a power website, HubSpot does it all. The CRM platform is made up of four major hubs named;
- Service Hub
- Sales Hub
- CMS Hub
- Marketing Hub
The service hub is a customer service software that helps business owners connect with their customers, helps build brand loyalty turning those customers into promoters who help grow your business. Similarly, the sales hub is primarily a CRM software, which helps you automate all the boring tasks, gives you deeper insight into your potential clients and helps you close deals faster. It comes equipped with features like advanced CRM, quotes and meeting scheduling options. The third one is a content management software, which helps you create a website that leaves a lasting impression. With tools like drag-and-drop editor, SEO recommendations and a multitude of themes, you are bound to give your customers a personalized and safe experience. Finally the one most relevant to our cause is the marketing hub, which entails a marketing software which helps you do a ton of things to promote your brand online. Since today we are only talking about digital marketing, we will go into the details of tools and features that the marketing hub of HubSpot is equipped with.
The HubSpot Marketing Hub is actually a marketing automation software designed to help you reach out to the right audience, convert your website traffic into sales and run effective and inbound marketing campaigns at a scale. All of this is done under a single roof using the powerful yet easy-to-use platform. The major functionalities of the marketing hub are divided into three parts and each part comes loaded with features;
Attract Attention
The first and foremost focus of the HubSpot marketing hub is at creating content that your potential customers are looking forward to, and is impossible to miss. Marketing hub helps you publish content that helps your site get discovered in search engines, social media platforms and beyond. By adding calls to action, it converts readers into customers. Similarly, the SEO tool helps your website build its search authority to outrank competitors. The SEO tools integrated into the platform not only help you plan your content strategy but also optimize your content as you type.
The Ad tracking and management feature helps you cut down on your ad spend. You no longer have to struggle between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google ads, instead you can run ad campaigns, manage and track them right inside HubSpot. It also lets you see which ads are turning prospects into actual sales. The integrated social media management platform lets you do everything else as well such as publishing on social media platforms, the same ad campaigns you created using HubSpot. It also helps you monitor each and every interaction with a customer on any of your platforms. HubSpot also supports video files by storing them right inside HubSpot and embedding them on your website or social media platforms when needed and as needed. Finally, it lets you connect with your customers in live chat and uses bots to qualify leads and save you some precious human hours.
Figure 6: HubSpot – Creating Content that your prospects crave
Converting More Leads
The second major functionality that HubSpot focuses on is converting leads into actual customers with personalized strategy. HubSpot carries out a number of carefully curated actions to convert those leads into prospects. The first one is the design and launch of an appealing landing page. It lets you choose from pre-configured templates, which you can customize to the exact needs of your business, or you can always start from scratch. An appealing landing page is the key to retaining customers. The tool also helps you build easily customizable forms, which you can add to your website to convert your anonymous visitors into leads.
Figure 7: HubSpot: Lead Conversion
The best part of all is that it completely automates all these processes not only saving you time but also helping you scale up your efforts on things that matter the most. When cross-functional operations are automated and bulk data is being managed, you can work on nurturing leads and personalizing emails. Email marketing is an important aspect of digital marketing. HubSpot lets you create mobile-optimized email campaigns that look the same as a professionally designed email and gives you the window to personalize the message as per each recipient. This helps you build deeper relationships with your customers and utilize collaborative and intuitive account based marketing tools for your highest value targets.
Finally, with lead tracking and management, you are always on top of your lead game, getting a full picture on the status of every lead in an integrated database. Then you can proceed to segment leads based on the data available and nurture each one of them at a different pace.
Report & Customize
Finally, the focus is on customizing your platform in order to give marketing the credit it deserves. HubSpot is equipped with built-in marketing analytics, reports and dashboards, which help you make smarter, data-backed decisions. Based on these decisions, you can then customize your platform in a way that it is in coherence with what data indicates and indirectly what the customer wants.
Figure 8: HubSpot – Marketing Analytics
Lastly, given that HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform, it allows the integration of Salesforce for bi-directional yet faster sync, thus allowing you to send all this lead intelligence to your sales team so they not only have the information about who is your prospect customer but also the complete context on how to approach them.
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