I’ve been working with HubSpot for just under 4 years now, and boy is it a powerful tool. It keeps developing and expanding as well, which is exciting. In the right hands, HubSpot can be a transformational marketing tool. Would I recommend it to your average kiwi business? No – and here’s why:
Time
HubSpot has a great, intuitive interface with more tools on offer than you can shake a stick at. I’ve helped clients use HubSpot for blogging, as a CRM, as a CMS, for social media management, even as a sales tool – and the biggest challenge has always been finding the time to set it up, monitor it and continuously tweak it to keep getting ROI. Marketers (probably every working person, tbh) are time poor, and what people need are tools that save them time. HubSpot will not do this – however if you feed it time, you will reap rewards (assuming appropriate use! Which should be easy enough to achieve, because HubSpot offer brilliant training resources).
Cost
Compared to other tools that offer similar functionality, HubSpot is prohibitively expensive for a SME. To make it really worth your while, you want to be actively using it for at least 3 or 4 things (e.g. EDMs, blogging, social, CRM). In essence, it is super OP for what most SMEs want it for – e.g. if you’re only looking for an EDM system, HubSpot will do a really nice job, but cost-wise you’re better off using MailChimp, which offers that same subset of functionality at as lesser cost because that’s (more or less) all that it offers.
Conclusion
HubSpot is a great tool – don’t get me wrong. And you can access their “marketing hub” product for free (with restrictions, and they will do their best to push you up to the $50/month plan!), so you should definitely take a look and see if they are right for you. But during the process of selecting a tool, be very honest with yourself about how much time you are willing to put into whichever tool you sign up for – if it takes a back seat, how many subscription dollars will be wasted?
Check out HubSpot’s site for more info: https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/marketing?edition=starter&term=monthly