We have just switched our website to Hubspot and in this post we want to share with you why we chose Hubspot
Our story
We started Resonate Marketing Agency as a digital advertising agency for B2B companies. Since most of ad campaigns require good content to advertise, we quickly diversified into a full-service digital marketing boutique: advertising cannot work without good content, and content needs websites that meet specific requirements, such as optimized landing pages, forms, popups, tools for tracking user behavior, etc.
Last year, we created dozens of websites on Wordpress, which proved to be a great free platform. Most of our websites were based on a robust technology stack: Wordpress (plus 15-20 various plugins) + OptinMonster for lead capture and optimizations + Active Campaign for Email automation + Hubspot CRM Free for lead management; nevertheless, we were still looking for a better solution.
Hubspot served well as a free CRM system for our customers and for our own needs. After taking a closer look at their Marketing product, I thought, "That is exactly what we need for at least half of our projects – a solid marketing platform and a CRM system with CMS on top of it.”
We played with the Hubspot CMS last year, but were not impressed by its page builder. At first, it felt outdated comparing with visual landing page builders, like Instapage or Unbounce, and it seemed very expensive. Another side of the product – Lead management, Email marketing, Workflow and Blog Engine – felt just right, but we decided to put it on hold for a few months.
A new year started, and Hubspot reset all its free trials, so we got 30 days to test more. We gave a severe test to its Template Designer and Landing Page Editor, and this time, I was blown away by how well it fits our customers’ processes. It was a very cool idea to have a separate space for developers (or an agency) to develop a page template and another space for marketers (or an agency's copywriter) to put actual content in the visual editor.
I decided we should have another conversation with Hubspot to discuss our partnership with them. While evaluating their partnership program, I spoke to various happy and unhappy Hubspot users and here's what I found out.
What Is Inbound Marketing and Why Do Some People Say It Doesn't Work?
With happy users everything is clear – they love the all-in-one platform. For them, the real business value comes not from specific features, but from the overall value of knowledge – from knowing what is going on at your website and with your leads and prospects. In a very easy visual way, it connects the dots of your digital presence, marketing and sales.
On the other side, there were people complaining that they jumped into the Inbound Marketing methodology, wrote lots of content, did everything their agencies and Hubspot told them to do – but they don't have any effect.
I will write another article why Inbound marketing doesn't work for some businesses and how to fix it. The key thing here is that most of people who use Hubspot didn't complain about the system. They complained about their inability to get the ROI on their Inbound marketing efforts and on the pricing (learn how to save on Hubspot here).
Why Hubspot?
So... why Hubspot and not Wordpress.
Let's put it simply: Hubspot is a professional tool for marketers. Wordpress is not. Period.
Wordpress is not a bad system, it just was not developed for marketers.
Starting from development of your content strategy to distribution of your content and advertising, or setting up a HubSpot CMS Theme – Hubspot puts all the pieces together. With its content creation tools, marketing automation, a website engine and a CRM system, it gives you insights that no other system can provide. When you know how all aspects of your marketing and sales perform, you understand what to tweak in your funnels. With this knowledge, is so easy to act quicker than you would with all that spread across different systems.
Have you just found out that your new free white paper performs better than another? Or your recent blog post gets lots of traffic? Why not link those together and launch a quick ad campaign on Facebook, Linkedin or Adwords to get even more traffic to high performing pages... Easy and effective!
Knowing which parts of your marketing strategy work and which don't – this alone justifies the full cost of Hubspot.
