Back in 2012, we bought HubSpot after a renewed interest in content marketing for our agency. We were doing some content marketing for clients, and they were seeing the benefit, and I didn’t want us to be left out.
I bought the HubSpot software for our business with a good bit of skepticism:
When you make a business investment like that, though, you use it. A lot. And what I found pleasantly surprised me.
I’ve found that many of the complaints I had as a marketer for our company are common to those I hear regularly from awesome marketers like you. So here are some of the marketing problems HubSpot can solve for you from my own experience of over a decade and a half using the software.
Traditional media has trained us to spray a message, wait…and wonder if it worked. Then, if you’re like me, you wondered if you were measuring the right things.
“When we sent that mailer last time, our business was up, right?”
Also, all of the email, social media, blogging, and website tools I was using didn't "talk" to each other, so there was some guesswork when it came to reporting.
I prefer HubSpot for this problem because the reporting connects the work to the records in the CRM. I can see which campaigns, forms, emails, pages, ads and calls to action helped create contacts, deals and revenue, then drill into the details when a number needs explaining.
I can track the overall conversion rate of my website to see what percentage of visitors become warm leads, and then see where visitors and leads are compared with last month, year-over-year and progress toward my goal on one screen.
I can see submission rates on landing pages, measure the impact of changes, and use attribution reports to understand which touches helped create a contact, deal, or customer.
HubSpot helps me craft mini case studies to know that my marketing is working. Seeing those small wins on a regular basis reminds me that the investment is worth it.
“It’s a lot to keep up with!”
We've been trained to think that there's a different software tool for everything. You’ve got a spreadsheet to keep up with logins for your website, social media profiles (personal and company profiles), email marketing, your CRM, Google Analytics and more. Whew...
“A login for this, a login for that.”
Plenty of individual tools can do one thing well, and many are more budget-friendly than HubSpot. The problem is that the burden of connecting the software tools usually falls back on your team. You have to do a lot of work to find out if a specific person on your mailing list actually filled out your landing page, became a sales-qualified lead, or visited key pages after the email click.
That all changed when we started using HubSpot. Because email, forms, landing pages, social posts, ads, website activity, and CRM records can live in the same system, it’s easier to see who’s opening and clicking, then follow that specific person page-by-page through our website. A timeline of marketing and sales activity is in one place, and each individual lead can be attributed to a source when the tracking is configured correctly.
It’s just easier, too. I log into one system to plan campaigns, write blog posts, manage landing pages, send email newsletters, review form submissions, and gather sales context.
Does that sound familiar?
I'm very familiar with managing websites, and even used to build them. I even make changes to client websites from time to time. You’d think that I’d be able to change things on our company website, but I was more comfortable having someone on our team do it. We needed to create new page layouts for some of the things I wanted, and it took us weeks in some cases.
If you don’t like your content management system, you’re not alone.
HubSpot’s CMS was underdeveloped in 2012. That product has changed a lot as you might imagine. Today, HubSpot’s Content Hub gives marketing teams a friendlier way to manage website pages, landing pages and blog content when they want the website, forms, CRM and reporting to work together.
The user interface is a breeze, and it gives me recommendations for page optimization, including SEO. It gives it to me in layman’s terms and gives me some context for the recommendation, too. As a business owner, that advice comes in handy at 9pm when my brain has shut down and I forget what I know about SEO.
HubSpot is not automatically the right CMS for every B2B website. WordPress, Webflow and other platforms can be excellent choices. HubSpot is most useful when the marketing team needs to publish, test, capture leads, and report on pipeline without asking a developer to wire together a stack of disconnected tools.
While traditional marketing approaches, or just buying a list, can generate many leads, the per centage ofpeople who actually want to talk to sales is often low.
Sales reps I interview tell me that they spend a lot of time reaching out to people who don’t want to talk to them. Cold call success rates are low even for cold call masters. I don’t cold call because I know that it would yield little success for my time investment.
But because we produce a lot of content on our website and other places, we attract prospects to our website. They fill out lead forms to download things, and we get good feedback from it.
That does not mean every lead is ready for a sales conversation. That’s where HubSpot comes to the rescue. I automate much of our follow-up via email. Rather than waste my time treating every contact the same way, I’ve built workflows in HubSpot to send useful follow-up, route leads, update lifecycle stages, and alert me to high-intent behavior.
As I’m researching our leads, I can see which emails they were sent, which they opened, which they clicked, and which pages they visited on our website. With lead scoring and alerts, HubSpot can show when behavior indicates that someone might be interested. I spend my time calling and emailing people who are actually interested in a conversation.
When you're actively engaged in successful content marketing, prospects will use your website to research your company and reach out. But these aren't always people who fill out the "contact us" form or request a phone call, so many companies are hesitant to reach out.
But you should.
Whether marketing or sales should be in charge of the outreach is often a question. Some businesses have salespeople who will want to do their thing. Other salespeople want to spend time working leads that "raise their hand" by first initiating the sales process.
HubSpot allows you to automatically send a follow-up email using workflows or form automation, depending on your subscription and setup. This doesn't need to be a fancy, well-designed email, but rather a text-only note introducing a key member of your team and asking the contact if the download worked and if they needed to speak with someone.
These emails can be customized for all of your content, so you can write a relevant email that is specific to the content someone has downloaded. You can also use lead scoring, lists and internal notifications so that when someone browses key service pages or comes back repeatedly, the right person on your team knows to follow up.
Back when I first wrote this article, it was tough to stay current on SEO trends. But not that AI has entered the picture, it's increasingly difficult.
If you rely on your company website to deliver new visits to win new customers, not staying current can cost you a little or a lot.
For me, I run our business, and I do sales and marketing. Staying current with SEO and AEO is a small part of my job. It probably is for you, too.
HubSpot is no longer just about watching a keyword list. Its SEO tools can scan pages for issues that affect search visibility, flag missing metadata and broken links, show internal-link opportunities, and connect Google Search Console query data when the integration is set up.
It can also track if your brand appears in AI tools like ChatGPT. That’s more useful for a B2B team than chasing every algorithm rumor.
AI search makes this even more important. If buyers ask Google, ChatGPT or another AI assistant about your company, a challenge you solve, or a product/service you offer, your content needs clear answers, specific service-fit language and evidence that your team has a suitable solution. HubSpot allows you to track your brand's appearance for AI prompts and questions, then suggest ideas to make your brand more visible.
HubSpot solves a lot of operational problems, but it will not fix weak positioning, thin content, poor sales follow-up, or a website that gives buyers no reason to trust you. The software works best when your strategy is already pointed in the right direction: clear audience, useful content, clean data, practical workflows, and a sales team that agrees on what a qualified lead looks like.
If your biggest problem is strategy, start with the strategy. If your biggest problem is execution across too many disconnected tools, HubSpot may be the system that helps you scale it.
But I know there are other options, and I know you’re looking at those and comparing costs, too, just as I did. HubSpot may be a good match for you, or maybe there’s a better option. How will you know?
If you’re going to invest in marketing software (or even CRM/sales software), you might benefit from talking to a HubSpot partner like us that can assess your situation and see if it’s a fit. If you’d like to understand if the software is a good match for your needs, talk to a partner.
If what you read above is similar to your situation, let’s talk. If you bought HubSpot already and need help implementing the system effectively to get better results for your company, we’re good at that, too.