The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with HubSpot

HubSpot’s marketing automation platform takes the guesswork out of identifying which campaigns and marketing channels successfully attract quality leads, convert customers, and engage clients. Learn more about how marketing automation platforms help you integrate all of your marketing efforts and view their performance in one place. This article will walk you through the features and pricing of HubSpot’s three different Marketing Hub plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise and how to use HubSpot’s marketing features to help you decide which option best fits the needs of your marketing team.

Features

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub offers three plans for inbound marketing tools, from Free to Premium price points and all of them include features for content creation, SEO, lead generation, email marketing and analytics. The customer relationship management (CRM) database is free for all plans and is the cornerstone of the marketing hub, allowing you to build long-term relationships with your contacts through personalized and relevant messaging. The CRM shares contact information and interactions from the Sales and Service hub to Marketing Hub, aligning your marketing team with the company’s sales and customer service efforts and allowing you to customize content for individual contacts. Every plan for HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes: 

Content Creation

• Email Marketing: Send bulk emails that you can preview on different devices and optimize for email clients and inboxes. Personalize greetings and subject lines with tokens that align to the information HubSpot’s CRM collects.

• Web and Landing Pages: Create responsive landing pages optimized for conversion using HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor, add forms to the landing pages that allow you to gather leads, and work with a network of many predesigned templates or HubSpot CMS partners who can design easy-to-use, custom, widgeted templates that drag and drop.

• Ad Management: Connect your Facebook Ad account and other supported ad networks to your HubSpot account. Create audiences from your HubSpot CRM, and easily view which ads are converting customers.

• Ad Retargeting: Show ads to contacts that have left your site based on the content they've consumed. Retarget ads on Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.

Analytics

• Reporting Dashboard: HubSpot’s integrated sales, marketing, and CRM platform allow you to create customized reports and dashboards to quickly determine the performance of their marketing campaigns. You can view the traffic analytics of individual pages on your website and blog and also identify which channels led visitors to the page.

• Custom Properties: You can save additional data information to HubSpot’s default properties which include contacts, companies, and deals. This ensures that you have the right information to properly segment, automate, and report data for your specific business. 

Lead Nurturing

• Forms: Create standalone, pop-up, embedded, and collected forms to gather the contact details that your business needs. This is the first step to getting critical information to segment your customers to send each persona the relevant messaging. 

• List Segmentation: Create email lists based on where your customers are in the buyer's journey or past interactions with your brand. This is a huge benefit in seeing an ROI on your targeted email marketing campaigns. Other options for list segmentation include form submissions, workflows, page views, events, and surveys. A list can be active or static. Static lists are updated manually when you add or remove contacts. Active lists are updated continuously based on the rules you create. It’s easy to create personalized content in email and on your website using the data from HubSpot’s CRM.

• Chat Flows: Use a bot to connect website visitors to the right rep, lead users to the most helpful content, and scale one-on-one communications.

• Messenger Integration: Automatically capture contact information, have two-way communications with your audience, create chatbots, and report on chat volume through Facebook Messenger.

Pricing 

The base price for the Starter plan is $50 a month with 1,000 contacts included. Expect to pay $50 a month more per 1,000 additional contacts. This can be especially challenging for larger companies who have built an online database of leads and customers and has to pay to import 50-200K+ contacts. We have worked with some of our clients where the first year, they started marketing within HubSpot on a “whatever is new and comes in” basis, and then worked in year two to upload and pay for all past contacts once they were ready to start communicating with customers.

For the Professional plan, 1,000 contacts are included at $800 a month. You can pay an extra $50 a month for every 1k additional contacts for up to 60k in total contacts. This is the plan that offers the best value for SaaS and technology companies in order to get additional features including smart content, salesforce integration, and attribution reporting. 

The Enterprise plan starts at $3,200 a month and includes tools to rank how likely your leads will convert with predictive lead scoring, customizable chatbots, and adaptive testing to automatically optimize your website’s conversion rate. 

Which HubSpot Marketing Plan Is Right for You?

First Page recommends tech companies start with the Marketing Hub Pro plan to access powerful features like custom reporting, automated workflows, SEO recommendations, CTAs, social media account integration and website traffic analytics. We also recommend that your blog, at minimum, is built on HubSpot CMS (and really recommend transferring the whole site over if you want to take advantage of the rich integration from having the entire system on one platform and all forms, fields, CRM contacts, processes working together

One of my favorite HubSpot Pro Marketing tools is the blog feature, which helps your business publish search-engine optimized content so your brand is discovered by potential customers online. It also allows you to insert call-to-action buttons on many different topics (lead generation content, signup or upsell products) that track when a viewer converts to a lead by filling out a form. The CMS can automatically post on your connected social platforms like Facebook, so your followers are notified when new content goes live on your blog.

As a HubSpot partner, First Page follows the inbound marketing methodology to help your brand grow traffic and convert leads.  If you need a high-converting content marketing strategy but don’t have the time to learn HubSpot’s marketing platform, then we can help.