Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

Top 10 Reasons We Recommend Hubspot by Bay Area Inbound in SF

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Sat, Feb 25, 2012 @ 04:22 PM

Our company has gone through the migration, training, and have been using Hubspot's Integrated Inbound Marketing Software for 4 months now.

While there are a few tiny things that don't work as well as one would hope, by in-large the software delivers as promised all the functionaility of 8 best-of-breed inbound marketing software programs, AND has the added benefit of being integrated.

Which brings me to the number one on our list of why we recommend Hubspot:

1) It's Effective.

•Our Web Traffic has steadily risen we're bounding around a 400% increase in people visiting our site from month-to-month
•Our leads have steadily increased 6 leads per month on month from web traffic, we also get a lot of leads off our email programs that don't show up in our analytics because they just email back that they are interested (2 to 6 inquiries per email blast)
•As has our closure rate since we installed the tools.
 
2) Closed-Loop Marketing Analytics.

You can see everyhthing in this program, prospects who visit your site, how they got there via organic search (which words they searched for), social networking (facebook, linkedin, twitter, and more), or email campaign, referral from another site, direct traffic.

You can see who came to the site, what specific page brought them to the site, how long they visited each page, if they looked at or filled a landing page and the percentage of all prospects that did.

You can do a lot of this using Google Analytics with Etrigue you say, yes, but can you do it from anywhere while you are analyzing your individual leads, managing your email campaigns, evaluating your blog's analytics, and your competitors keyword strategy and inbound links? Can you get graphs showing your website traffic patterns, then drill down on anything on any page you have a question about between the different tools?

3) Everything is Integrated which Saves us about 70 to a 100 Hours of Work a Week

 
•No more transferring blocks of leads as .csv (comma seperated values) from this program to that program, ie. Etrigue to Salesforce.com.
•No more logging into different programs and manually doing the math to get analytics of the big picture.
•Tools like Social Media Manager let us auto push blogs to all our social media at once which saves at least 2 man hours every week.
•Lead nurturing campaigns that auto send more information to move leads down the sales funnel after a lead downloads from a landing page, let's call that 5 hours a week.
•The call-to-action button builder and landing page wizard save 40 hours a week by themselves of web developer time and allows us to quickly build the huge number of them we need to get the leads our company needs without going broke.
•Hubspot lets us know which leads are actually ready to buy based on how many of the informational pieces they read and how much time they spend, which makes their readiness to buy score go up, saving 40 hours a week of Inside Sales/Lead Gen time dialing.
•The HTML preformatted email stationary that our web developer says he spent 2 months to get right for his biggest retainer client, Kimpton Hotels, he just didn't need to build for us and test on every email platform because hubspot has already done that. So, that's 2 months of developer time saved. Those are just a few of the ways the tools saves us time and money.

4) It's Cloud-based.

Halleluiah, My Notebook was attacked by a virus a week ago so severe that several trusted IT Consultants told me to swipe my hard drive and start over. Hadn't backed up in more than a month (now I have autobackup).

Since 3 of us were working long hours simultaneously we could have lost half-a-man-year in work. Fortunately all our work was on Hubspot (Content Creation, Blogs, Graphics, Calls-to-Action, Landing Pages, Thank you Pages, Email Nurturing Campaigns etc).

Since Hubspot resides in the cloud, it was only a minor nuisance to swipe my harddrive and reload Microsoft, Adobe and my other software. All our work was safe.

Hubspot remained unaffected. And being cloud-based our clients and/or we can work on all of their inbound marketing from wherever we are whenever we want. But you probably already know the benefits of being cloud-based.

5) Make Your Own Changes to Website-Free.

Make them whenever you want. No meetings to collaborate with the Web Designer over and over to get it just right. No waiting for or paying for creative or business driven changes. Add pages or take them away, change the smallest detail or the whole look and feel.

Saves you a bundle and let's the lay person be in control of their website. Most people tell me they pay at least $100 every time they make minor changes to their website and at least several thousand when they want a whole new look and feel.

I've made tons of website changes without bothering our Web Design Guy, that's at least 50 hours of work saved for him and 25 for each of us because we don't have to go back and forth on what I want.

6) No Mistakes Blogging

You may have blogged, I certainly had before I started inbound marketing consulting, but what I didn't know before is that there are so many fields you need to fill in properly to get the highest ranking authority out of your efforts. And that's one of the big reasons to blog. Hubspot's Blogging tool reminds you every step of the way if you forget one of those key fields.

7) No Guessing on SEO or paying $5000 to an SEO-optimization company.

Now we have Hubspot's Keyword Grader, PageGrader, and Link Grader Tools to make sure we do it all right.

Commonly companies who could afford it paid SEO-optimization companies to get them to come up in a search. When you look at this fact alone, Hubspot is actually cheaper than paying for this service at the 1000 lead mark and all the other tools are just gravy.

And when you make changes, you are warned by the tool, if you are making a change that will affect SEO.

8) Works with all the Major CRMs seamlessly.

Such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamic and Sugar CRMs. You can migrate your website to Hubspot CMS or you can work in parallel.

9) Consulting Hours to Get You Going and Unlimited Tech Support.

Our clients always have an 800# and a whole room full of people at Hubspot to answer their questions, if for some wierd reason all six of us are not available to help.

10) Acts like an Army of Inbound Marketers because it's automated.

To be honest, I didn't want to throw down the $1575 down and $300 bucks a month for the first year which includes your first 8 hours of consulting and $300 a month for 1,000 leads in the auto-nurturing email campaign.

We already knew all the older inbound marketing tools and we knew what we were doing. We have a wide array of expertise on our team, so we tried to muscle through without Hubspot for a while. But without Hubspot, we just couldn't focus on our core business which is Inbound Marketing for our clients, and get all of our own inbound marketing done too.

Summary

Leads generated through inbound marketing are 62% cheaper than leads generated through pay-per-clique adwords from google or yellow page ads. They have a higher conversion rate to actual sales (14%) than Pay Per Click at 1.6%.

And with Hubspot Inbound Marketing Software we get the whole enchilada instead just of a few ad words driving traffic to our site and now what do we do if they don't call us cause they thought our site and messaging was cooler than our competitors?

Chances are if your prospects are planning on making a big purchase they are going to need a lot more convincing than one trip to your site. And chances are your competitor is taking advantage of ALL the tricks of inbound marketing to make sure they actually educate and convert those prospects into leads and leads into sales.

So you can hire an army of people and buy a lot of software and move .csv lists around between them, or you can do what we did and buy Hubspot and get an all-in-one solution to Win that business.  Can you really afford not to?

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Bay Area Inbound is a full-service inboound marketing agency in the San Francisco Bay area that specializes in content creation and lead generation. We are a Value-Added Reseller of Hubspot Integrated Inbound Marketing Software. Hubspot is the 2nd fastest growing software company world-wide and received $10 million of their $38 million first round funding from Google.

For more information on inbound marketing, contact Laurie@bayareainbound.com or 510-543-7593. Get a free copy of our whitepaper, "7 Steps to Turn Your Website into a Lean, Mean, Lead-Generating Machine," by clicking the orange button at the bottom of this blog article:

Hubspot Integrated Inbound Marketing Software Get a Free Copy of: "7 Steps toMake

Topics: Inbound Marketing in SF, automate marketing, Bay Area Inbound Marketing, integrated marketing software