The chances are, if you're reading this piece, you're thinking about using HubSpot but you aren't sure whether the investment is right for you. This piece aims to explain how HubSpot works, its key features and benefits, and give you the clarity to decide whether HubSpot is the right investment for your business growth.
The HubSpot Platform
Let's start by taking a look at what HubSpot actually is. HubSpot is a 'business growth management platform', or more straightforwardly, a Customer/Contact Relationship Management tool (CRM) that not only manages your contacts, but also your sales, pipeline, digital marketing and lead nurture too.
It's made up of multiple tools and 'hubs' that can be bought separately or together.
Let's explore each hub and how they work together to power your business growth.
Innovation Visual holds both CRM Data Migration and Onboarding accreditations.
The Six HubSpot Hubs
CRM
At the heart of everything, HubSpot is a CRM platform which allows you to keep track of leads and customers at different stages in their journey. HubSpot's CRM is actually free and comes with a selection of tools, including live chat, dynamic lists, forms for lead capture and email marketing.
Proper migration and population allow you to have a single customer view that tracks their association with the relevant company, colleagues, activity, correspondence, list membership and engagement, website activity… the list goes on. This single customer view and the way it integrates across the platform is one of HubSpot's greatest strengths. As a HubSpot Certified Platinum Partner Agency with Data Migration Accreditation, Innovation Visual's detailed approach guarantees precision and efficiency, minimising disruptions and ensuring your data integrates smoothly into your new HubSpot environment.
Forms are the backbone of HubSpot, enabling data capture into the CRM from your website, social media platform or landing page. HubSpot allows you to capture and store just about any piece of data you could want to know about your prospects and customers, including their behaviour on your website, personal information and a historic record of their engagement with your brand.
However, HubSpot doesn't get truly exciting until you add in one or more of the paid versions of the tools known as 'hubs', according to your need.
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Marketing Hub
Once you've got your CRM foundation sorted, that's when the real magic begins. The Marketing Hub introduces more advanced tools (depending on which package you buy), including logic-based automated workflows and chatbots. These tools allow you to automate the processes of segmenting, nurturing and qualifying leads within the CRM.
Workflows are one of the key tools in HubSpot and enable everything from complex content-driven nurture programmes to automating internal tasks like lead assignment and audience segmentation.
Key HubSpot Marketing Tools:
- Email automation
- Lead capture forms
- Live chat and chatbots
- Attribution reporting
- Lead nurture
- Lead scoring and qualification
- Data enrichment
- Audience segmentation
Sales Hub
As with Marketing Hub, Sales Hub also introduces more advanced tools, including the ability to automate processes based on your sales pipeline. Instead of working directly with contacts, Sales Hub is based around deals at different stages, which are then associated with both contacts and companies within your CRM.
This is where HubSpot really comes into its own; by having a single source of truth, you can build intelligent automated programmes that link together the efforts of your sales and marketing teams and enable complete transparency throughout your organisation.
Key HubSpot Sales Tools:
- Manage multiple sales pipelines
- Sales performance dashboards
- Automated 1 to 1 email sequences
- Integrated calendars and emails
- Centralised view of prospects
- Account-based marketing tools
- Automated task management
Service Hub
By including Service Hub in your package, you can ensure that your sales representatives can see a complete picture of a contact when reaching out and making contact. Service Hub also allows you to apply automation to elements, including customer satisfaction surveys and ticket assignment. It's worth remembering again about the single customer view here. Each customer will have associated Service Hub interactions as part of their view, along with every other interaction with your brand that you choose to record, including logged calls, emails, sign-ups etc.
Key HubSpot Service Tools:
- Centralised inbox
- Automated ticketing
- Service performance dashboards
- Automated feedback surveys
- Knowledge base
- Centralised view of customers
Content Hub
The latest addition to the HubSpot family is Content Hub, HubSpot's powerful content management system that goes far beyond traditional website hosting. HubSpot Content Hub comes fully connected to HubSpot CRM and Marketing Hub, giving your marketing, sales, and service teams a single source of truth. Unlike WordPress, which requires multiple third-party plugins, Content Hub delivers enterprise-grade security, built-in SEO tools, and advanced personalisation capabilities all in one integrated platform.
With AI-powered features like Content Remix for omnichannel campaigns and AI Blog Writer for rapid content creation, Content Hub eliminates the maintenance headaches of traditional CMS platforms whilst providing fast, conversion-optimised websites that scale with your business growth.
Find out more about Content Hub by watching our podcast episode.
Operations Hub
Operations Hub completes HubSpot's comprehensive suite, designed to automate and enhance effective customer data management. This powerful hub focuses on three key areas: enhanced integrations, data cleansing, and programmable automation. Operations Hub brings native integrations for over 100 commonly used apps, allowing you to sync data seamlessly across your tech stack with minimum setup time or effort.
The hub's data quality automation saves hours of manual data cleansing by automatically standardising formats, capitalising names, and removing inconsistencies. Perhaps most exciting is the programmable automation feature, which allows you to create custom JavaScript actions within workflows, opening up limitless possibilities for advanced business process automation. From sophisticated lead assignment rules to automated updates across external platforms, Operations Hub transforms how you manage and utilise your data.
Business Benefits of Using HubSpot
Now you understand what HubSpot includes, let's explore why this matters for your business and how these tools can drive real growth.
Helping Businesses Grow Better
The most common misconception we hear about HubSpot is that it's 'just an email platform'. Whilst the Marketing Hub does include an intuitive drag and drop email builder, HubSpot is a full suite of enterprise-grade marketing and sales applications designed to help you scale your business. Their real power is the integration across functions, though.
Marketing Automation
One of the key elements to help your business grow is marketing automation. Using HubSpot tools, including Workflows and Sequences, you can send personalised communications to your prospects and customers on a 1 to many scale. In other words, you can segment your audience using data captured and stored in the CRM to trigger automated processes and send personalised messaging to your contacts. There are a number of very good reasons to utilise this functionality, not least in your lead nurture, but also in administrative processes to save time and free up your teams to focus on building business.
Reporting
One of the biggest benefits of adopting all of the HubSpot hubs is the reporting tools that you'll get access to. Unlike platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot has the added benefit of having direct access to your leads. This means you can easily dig into a report, see all of the contacts' touchpoints and get a full picture of their customer journey.
Integrating HubSpot with Your Existing Tech Stack
HubSpot will likely replace the functionality of some of your existing SaaS products, systems and processes. However, it can also integrate with a wide range of apps and platforms, meaning you can keep systems that are fundamental to your organisation and integrate them with HubSpot.
That's where Innovation Visual comes in, we can audit your existing tech stack, look for gaps in your existing systems and processes and then advise you which product is right for your organisation.
Adding HubSpot to the mix can actually help you get more out of your existing systems. By introducing a single source of truth for all of your divisions, HubSpot can help centralise data for your organisation and simplify processes across your business.
Get in touch with us today to find out how HubSpot could help your business grow.
Why Work with a HubSpot Partner?
Whilst HubSpot offers powerful tools, getting the most from your investment often requires expert guidance. Working with a certified HubSpot partner like Innovation Visual ensures you harness the full power of HubSpot to drive tangible business growth. Our innovative and down-to-earth approach ensures better alignment of your goals, processes, and systems, whilst uncovering latent value in your existing data and technology.
As a Certified HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency, we hold HubSpot's highest technical accreditations for both Onboarding and Data Migration that only a tiny number of HubSpot's partners worldwide hold. Over the past 7+ years, 98.6% of HubSpot instances we've onboarded continue to be actively used, demonstrating the quality of our implementations and the long-term support we provide. This track record reflects our commitment to setting up your HubSpot portal to work seamlessly for your unique needs.
