5 Reasons Why HubSpot Is Worth the Investment

Feeling hazy about HubSpot? No wonder!

There are so many similar marketing tools to choose from: HubSpot, Salesforce, Insightly and Pipedrive all boast different capabilities and benefits. When the pressure is on choose the best of the bunch, it’s like a pick and mix but without the fun.

Or maybe you’re starry-eyed from all the good vibes surrounding HubSpot. Is it time for a reality check?

Just how much does HubSpot cost? Is it good value for money when compared to competitor products?

You need to know what you’re getting into and how well your marketing needs will be met. We can help.

Buckle up; you’re about to discover if HubSpot’s marketing platform is worth the investment. And which platforms, if any, are worthy contenders.

A Pricey Product?

We can’t sugarcoat one fact: HubSpot’s ‘Free’ and ‘Starter’ packages aren’t right for you if you’re serious about investing in inbound marketing. Both packages are more like samples of the full product.

These packages suit inexperienced teams who are interested in inbound and want to test HubSpot’s functions.

The ‘Starter’ package is £42 per month, and you can only keep 100 contacts. It’s £16 per month per 1k extra.

You get the following features with this product: contact management, team email, contact activity and Facebook and Instagram lead ads, plus several others.

Inbound marketing is all about growing your business. Choose the above package and you’ll be penalised financially for your success as your customer base expands.

Plus, you miss out on some of HubSpot’s best features; all the gadgets that make this platform awesome (as you’ll soon discover).

However, it’s important to make the right decision for your business, so deliberate before taking action.

We recently discussed how to be sure you’re game-ready for HubSpot:

• Your current top priority should be to attract more customers and leads online
• You have to be ready to invest in good quality content for the long-term
• You need a sales team who can close leads in a tactful way
• You should be bringing in between 500k to £5 million

For small to medium-sized business, the ‘Professional’ package is ideal. It costs £655 per month and includes 1000 contacts. For every 1000 further contacts, you have to pay an additional £42 per month.

This price leaps to £1,960 a month for HubSpot’s ‘Enterprise’ package which comes with 10,000 contacts with £8 per month per 1k extra.

Those sounds you’re hearing are gasps from business owners everywhere. Yes, HubSpot is a little pricey… but when you understand what can be gained from this investment, your anxiety levels will drop. Let’s take a closer look.

The Extras

As well as the features mentioned above, HubSpot offers other add-ons for the following price:

• CMS to build fast, secure websites — £245/month
• Custom marketing and sales reports — £165/month
• Tie paid ad spend to leads and customers — £80/month (pro and enterprise)

Premium services (pro and enterprise):

• Consulting services ranging from £290-990/month
• Marketing fundamentals training — £820/one time fee

1. God-Tier Marketing Automation

Generating leads for B2B businesses: this is why HubSpot was created. We’ll let its wealth of inbound-marketing features speak for themselves.

Using this platform you can:

1. Import audience lists and divide them into subcategories
2. Use HubSpot’s workflow tool to organise content into the correct lifecycle stage
3. Be notified when a lead has downloaded an offer (plus a plethora of other actions)
4. Create a lead nurture path, e.g. send a series of emails over a specific timespan
5. Create buyer personas and link them to contacts
6. Build pillar and landing pages

Add content creation and intelligent analytics into the mix and your sales and marketing teams will cry happy tears.

Entire campaigns can be automated and streamlined within a few clicks. Contacts can be distinguished for expert targeted marketing. Leads can be nurtured and closed in one fell swoop.

Is there a better marketing automation platform out there? HubSpot often gets compared to Salesforce Pardot.

Pardot lets you:

1. Create and maintain audience lists for email sends
2. Configure a lead’s score
3. Set up autoresponders
4. Create Salesforce tasks for prospects

Pardot’s biggest asset is its Salesforce integration. Customers get a robust CRM that’s fully customisable, whereas HubSpot’s CRM is more basic. But it costs you.

On its own, Pardot’s ‘Standard’ package is £1,000 per month (billed annually) which includes 10,000 contacts. If you want access to Salesforce’s CRM, you have to add this onto the cost.

The killing blow is that, even for £1,000 per month, you don’t get the type of great features included in HubSpot’s ‘Professional package’ such as live chat and custom user roles. That means you get more insight, tools and customisation options with HubSpot for less.

2. Easy-Peasy Email Marketing

Sending targeted emails en masse using HubSpot is a cakewalk. It’s also an intuitive platform.

You can establish buyer personas for every customer type. And tailor campaigns based on behavioural triggers (e.g. new registrations or app activity) so you can offer customers value based on their actions.

That means they are dictating the emails you send them as opposed to you guessing what they want: over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered emails, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

HubSpot also lets you build templates or use its pre-built ones. Additionally, you can create mobile-responsive HTML emails to ensure those opened via phones aren’t laden with formatting errors.

Crucially, you can integrate email marketing with your wider campaigns, so blogs, emails and other content are dispatched according to your personalised schedule.

Compare HubSpot to a platform that’s specifically for email marketing, like MailChimp, and you’d expect cracks to appear. But the opposite is true.

While MailChimp is a user-friendly, highly-affordable (thanks to its ‘Free Forever’ plan) email marketing platform, it lacks certain advanced features you can find in HubSpot, from progressive profiling to workflow integration.

Also, its range of templates is limited. It’s often better to build HTML templates, which are easy enough to create. But if you want to delight customers with stunning designs, HubSpot can serve you better.

3. Pro at Website Building

It’s incredulous, I know, to say HubSpot is mighty-good at marketing automation, email marketing AND website building.

To convince you, let’s first discuss WordPress - a brilliant tool for out-of-the-box blogging and web development.

With a ‘Business’ account (the only package worth comparing to HubSpot), you can create landing pages, pick from hundreds of professionally designed themes, edit templates and customise page CSS.

How Much Does It Cost?

The cost is £240 per month, which is significantly cheaper than HubSpot’s ‘Professional’ package (£655 per month).

But here’s the catch: you need plugins to optimise your site’s content. On-page SEO is included, but editing meta descriptions and URL naming will only get you so far.

Some plugins are free, but many aren’t and can range between £35-£150.

Also, superior-quality themes are pricey. If you want a highly customisable, stand-out site you’re looking at a £200 additional spend. Add on the cost of a web developer too because building beautiful pages in WordPress isn’t easy.

Zoom back in on HubSpot. You don’t need to purchase any plugins to get your site SEO optimised or add on cool tools (live chat, form creation, A/B testing… this list goes on).

Plus, thanks to the platform’s drag-and-drop feature, modules are easy to integrate and move around; website building isn’t just easy, it’s fun!

4. All the Support You Need… Forever

When marketing is a dark art, HubSpot is a life-saver. Its official learning centre is teeming with marketing value bombs - and it’s free to access!

All you need is an account. Of course, it’s much more valuable when used in conjunction with HubSpot software as most of the lessons provided feature native tools.

Here’s another HubSpot treat for marketing rookies: when you craft content using the platform, you can receive real-time tips as you type. For instance, if you’ve gone overboard with tags, it’ll pop you a polite notice explaining why this is bad practice, offering practical solutions.

There’s more. When you learn something new from this savvy assistant, you can make notes using the platform’s to-do list feature for future reference. Think of it as a digital notebook to help you retain traffic-boosting knowledge.

5. The Whole Caboodle

You might have gathered this from the points above: HubSpot is an all-in-one platform.

That means it includes everything you need — sales, marketing, content creation, CRM, analytics, CMS — to build devastating campaigns.

No other platform on the market offers this. It could have a been a disaster: with so many high-quality marketing tools out there, HubSpot’s mission to pull everything together and still maintain excellence was risky business.

But this smooth operator didn’t fail. And now HubSpot is helping over 50,000 companies revolutionise their inbound marketing campaigns; brands that have experienced a 79% increase in revenue after just one year of use.

One Last Thing

Investing in an inbound marketing platform is a bit like buying an expensive new camera. If you don’t know how to use it properly, your photo-quality could suffer.

It’s the same story with HubSpot. You might be willing to purchase this platform, but to get your money’s worth, you have to set it up in the right way. The good news? You can learn how to do this in our latest blog.