HubSpot Review, Features, Use Cases + How To Get Started

HubSpot helps develop cloud-based, inbound marketing software that allows businesses to transform the way that they market online.

The American developer and marketer of software products for customer service, sales and inbound marketing were founded by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan in 2006.

HubSpot offers consulting services and has an online resource academy for learning inbound marketing tactics. It also has third-party services such as extensions and templates; HubSpot also offers integration features for NetSuite and SugarCRM. Salesforce.com and others.

The platform’s total funding amounts to $100.5 million. They stand out by promoting their own marketing concepts through their own marketing and as a result, they’ve been called a prolific creator of content.

HubSpot’s CRM platform makes it easy for your team/company to work together through their marketing, sales, customer, service and operation services.

HubSpot	Ratings
Ease of Use	4.8
Pricing	4.3
Automation	4.8
Integration	4.8
Analytics	4.8

Getting Started with HubSpot

1. Create an account by selecting Start free or get a demo at the right side of the homepage.

2. You are directed to a new page that gives you the option of getting started for free or getting a demo.

At the bottom of the page, select which platform you wish to use, and select free tools to get you access to all 5 services. Select Get started free.

3. Create your free account by continuing with Google or manually inputting your name and email address.

Select Next and input your industry (ranging from Leisure, Travel & Tourism, Education, Architecture, and Building Materials), select Next and input your job role, company name, number of people working in your company and company website.

A code will be sent to your email to verify, input it and select verify email, create your password and choose where your data would be hosted and select Create Account.

The next stage is to help in personalizing your experiences.

Pricing Plan

This section covers all of HubSpot’s pricing plans and bundles. Given that HubSpot has 5 services and platforms, each section has a different pricing and bundle plan. They include:

A. Marketing

This plan has everything you need to capture leads and turn them into customers.

i. Starter Plan: starts from $20 per month ($18 when you pay upfront to save 10%) for 1000 marketing contacts, $40 per month ($36 to save 10%) for 2000 marketing contacts and $1611 per month ($1454 to save 10%) for 100,000 marketing contacts.

The plan comes with incentives in the free plan including automation (form and email automation), in-app chat support, forms, landing pages, and email marketing.

b. Professional Plan starts from $890 per month ($800 to save 10%) for 2000 contacts, $1140 per month ($1025 to save 10%) for 7000 contacts, $1390 per month ($1249 to save 10%) for 12,000 contacts and $4440 per month ($3991 to save 10%) for 87,000 contacts.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with all incentives in the started plan including ABM tools and automation, social media, A/B testing, collaboration tools, custom reporting, salesforce integration, Ad conversion events, multi-language content, video hosting & management, teams and custom reporting.

c. Enterprise Plan starts from $3,600 for 10,000 marketing contacts, $3,700 for 20,000 marketing contacts, $4,090 for 60,000 marketing contacts and $4530 for 111,000 contacts.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with all incentives in the professional plan including hierarchical teams, single sign-on, custom objects, sandboxes, adaptive testing, permission sets, partitioning, behavioural events, triggers and reporting.

B. Sales

Sales pricing plan has all you need to organise your data and close more deals.

i. Starter Plan starts at $20 per month ($18 to save 10%) for 2 paid users, $100 per month ($90 to save $10) for 10 paid users, $200 per month ($180 to save 10%) for 20 paid users, $500 per month ($450 to save $10) for 50 paid users and $1000 per month ($900 to save $10) for 100 paid users.

This plan comes with a live chat, 1 – to – 1 email, Stripe integration, conversation outing, meeting scheduling, Goals, and simple automation.

ii. Professional Plan starts at $500 per month ($450 to save 10%) for 5 paid users, $1000 per month ($900 to save 10%) for 10 paid users, $2000 per month ($1800 to save $10) for 20 paid users and $4000 per month ($3600 to save 10%) for 40 paid users.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with everything in the starter plan including forecasting, sales analytics, custom reporting, product library, ABM tools & automation, eSignature, Teams, standard CRM interface configuration, and smart send times.

iii. Enterprise Plan starts at $1200 for 10 users, $2400 for 30 users, $6000 for 50 users and $8400 for 70 users.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with all incentives in the professional plan including advanced permissions, sandboxes, hierarchical teams, custom objects, playbooks, conversation intelligence, and predictive lead scoring.

C. Customer Service

This plan entails everything you need to put customers first.

i. Starter Plan starts at $20 per month ($18 to save 10%) for 2 paid users, $100 per month ($90 to save 10%) for 10 paid users, $250 per month ($225 to save 10%) for 25 paid users and $500 per month ($450 to save 10%) for 50 paid users.

This plan comes with all the free tools including shared inbox, team email, conversational bots, email tracking and notifications, email templates, reporting dashboard, mobile inbox, Documents, 1-to-1 email, simple ticket automation, canned snippets, and Slack integrations.

ii. Professional Plan starts at $500 per month ($450 to save 10%) for 5 paid users, $1500 per month ($1350 to save 10%) for 15 paid users, $3000 per month ($2700 to save 10%) for 30 paid users and $6000 per month ($5400 to save 10%) for 60 paid users.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with all incentives in the starter plan including SLAs, help desk automation, customer portal, service analytics, customer feedback surveys, channel switching, phone support, and ticket routing.

iii. Enterprise Plan starts at $1200 for 10 paid users, $3000 for 25 paid users, $7200 for 60 paid users and $8640 for 72 paid users.

This plan has a free 14-day trial and comes with all incentives in the professional plan including playbooks, goals, sandboxes, custom objects, permission sets, field-level permissions, calculated properties, standard CRM interface configuration, hierarchical teams, and conversation intelligence.

D. CMS

This plan has everything you need to build and scale a data-driven website and grow your business.

i. Starter plan starts at $25 per month. It has a Standard SSL certificate, premium hosting, website development, live chat, reporting dashboard, content delivery network (CDN), website themes, app & asset marketplace, and drag-and-drop editor.

ii. Professional plan starts at $400 per month, has a free 14-day trial and comes with everything in the starter plan including password-protected pages, A/B testing, content strategy and staging, custom reporting, dynamic personalization, SEO recommendation and optimizations, Google Search Console Integration.

iii. Enterprise plan starts at $1200 per month with a free 14-day trial and comes with every incentive in the professional plan including code alerts, web apps, custom objects, additional root domains, activity logging, adaptive testing, content partitioning, multi-domain traffic, memberships, single sign-on.

E. Operations

Has everything you need to connect your apps, sync and clean customer data and automate business processes.

i. Starter plan starts at $20 per month ($18 to save 10%). It comes with incentives in the free plan including list segmentation, custom properties, custom field mappings, reporting dashboard, list segmentation, and multiple currencies.

ii. Professional plan starts at $800 per month ($720 to save 10%). It comes with a free 14-day trial and every incentive in the starter plan including webhooks, data health trends, scheduled workflow triggers, data quality automation and command, list segmentation, standard CRM interface, configuration, programmable automation, and required fields.

iii. Enterprise plan starts at $2000 per month and has a free 14-day trial and comes with everything in the professional plan including sandboxes, datasets, custom objects, advanced data calculations and prep, and snowflake data share.

How HubSpot’s Dashboard Works          

HubSpot’s dashboard also doubles as a reporting dashboard for analysis, marketing, sales and service data. Custom reports ad dashboards are easily made on HubSpot.

1. The Contacts icon is for having a database of your contacts/customers. You have access to their activity and status.

2. The Conversation icon is for messaging, connecting and replying to website visitors and customers. You can initiate a conversation with an email, a chat, forms and/or Facebook Messenger. You can also create customised welcome messages for websites and Facebook pages.

3. The Marketing icon helps with ads, email, landing pages, website, SEO and social tools. It also has a design manager that has design tools and non-HubSpot forms.

4. The Sales icon helps with deals, playbooks, documents, quotes, meetings, tasks and forecasts that aids you in having a winning sales process.

5. The Service icon helps keep track of your customers issues. These issues can be prioritised and made use of the customer portal, feedback surveys, knowledge base and tickets.

6. The Automation icon assists with your follow-ups. It works by having your personalized follow-up email (or tasks or to-do lists) and get delivered at the right time.

7. The Reports icon helps track both traffic analytics and custom behavioural events. It also has a reporting dashboard – that can be created from scratch or from a template.

Features of HubSpot

To get the best out of HubSpot features, you start by setting up each of the platform’s hub services – ie marketing, sales, service, operations and CMS.

1. Website Builder

HubSpot’s website builder has an easy free drag-and-drop editor that helps you create insightful content.

How It Works

Select Marketing at the top of the dashboard and click on the website. Select the website page. A new page that is on the website pages is displayed, select start setting up. The next page entails you doing some tasks that involve selecting a theme for your website.

Select Browse themes, select view themes in the marketplace to view more themes that are available or scroll to the end of the page to set the theme shown as an active theme.

In this article, I selected the Apex theme. If you select a theme from the marketplace, you install it (for free) and either set it as your active theme and start building or edit the theme settings.

You select and insert your page name and select Create page. The next step involves you choosing a template for all pages. You change/select templates by selecting select templates on each page. If you don’t want to change templates, select preview templates and select use template.

The next task is to explore the drag-and-drop editor. A pop-up message is displayed, select Let’s go and follow the tour or you can skip the tour. Each tour tells you what to do and it can be personalised.

The next step is for you to create your blog by inputting your blog title, blog URL, blog language and meta description. When done inputting the details, select next and choose a template for your blog post and blog listing page, then select create a blog. You’ve finished this task and you proceed to the next task which entails you to publish and manage your pages, when you’re done editing and managing your page, select publishing options to choose either publish now or schedule for later and you can also schedule to unpublish a page on a specific date and select save.

The next task is to connect your custom domain. Ensure you’ve selected Domains and select connect a domain. Note: these steps are very technical, so ensure you have an idea of how domains work, where your content will be hosted and how to verify the URLs.

When done working on the domains, select verify and the next step involves customising your theme’s setting if you made some changes. Select Apply changes at the left side of the screen. To change and edit a page, select the arrow beside view on at the top of the screen to work on a page.

When done working/editing a page, select apply changes. When done with all those tasks, you are ready and your screen looks like this.

Select Marketing > website > website pages to see your website pages and make more changes (if need be).

2. Landing Page Builder

This feature helps in quickly designing and launching custom landing pages.

How It Works

Select Marketing > landing pages. Make sure you have selected Landing Pages and click on Get Started. This is a bit technical as it entails you have a domain available.  

3. Online Form Builder

Custom forms are created with HubSpot’s free form builder. You don’t need technical expertise.

How It Works

Select Marketing > Forms. Select Create Form at the right side of the screen and click on any form you wish to work on. In this article, I chose the pop-up box and selected Next.

When you choose the pop-up form, you can either create a call-out form, a form or a thank-you form. I chose the thank you form. By the left side is a worksheet to work on and edit. You can change the thank you message or leave it if it’s okay. I edited mine to thank you for signing up and made it bold ad slanted (Italics).

I selected Next and was directed to a section called Targeting to select when the form should pop up and enable triggers. When done, select Next to a new page Options to select where notifications go when contacts are captured and select Next and automate what happens when a form is submitted.

You automate what happens by creating a workflow. You need to be on a paid plan to set triggers. When done setting triggers, select Next. You preview it and see how it looks on both tablet and mobile views and select Publish.

Note: this is a bit advanced as you have to install the tracking code to enable your pop-up form.

To create a new form, select Create Form and select a form to work on (I chose Embedded form) and select Next. Choose from the template on the left side of the screen to work on. I chose Newsletter sign-up and selected Start.

You are directed to your form editor and this section lets you add and delete what displays on your embedded form. You can choose to add a phone number, company name or street address (basically add properties or fields you deem fit for your embedded form)

Most of the properties or fields you choose can be made required to fill. When done, select Update and Publish. Moving to Options, you choose what happens when a respondent submits this form and select Update and Publish. Moving to Style & Preview, you select how the embedded form should look (I chose Round) and can be previewed on mobile and tablet mode; when done, select Update and Publish.

4. Sales Email Template

With over 25 email templates, you are able to get through to your clients.

How It Works

Select Conversations > Templates and you have 5 email templates for different reasons. Select one template (I chose the Follow-up email that follows through) and make the necessary edits.

At the bottom of the email, there are prompts for inserting, a meeting link, snippets and documents, prompts for changing fonts and aligning the email and prompts for personalizing your contact activity.

When done, select Update existing template at the bottom of the email. At the top of the page is a button tagged New Folder, select it to create and name your folder. When you hover over any email template, there’s an Action drop-down tag that lets you move that particular email to your created folder, there’s an option to share or delete it.

If you want to share an email, hover over any email and select the action tag, select the manage selection and select who can see this template. Select only me and select save.

You need to upgrade to HubSpot’s Starter CRM Suite or talk to HubSpot’s sales team to make a new template.

5. Tasks

This feature helps you create, share and prioritise objectives among teammates.  

How It Works

Select Sales > Tasks > Create Task to make a new task. Input the task title, indicate the type of task, its priority, who is the task assigned to, due date, set a reminder if there’s a need, add notes (optional) and select Create.

The newly created task is seen at the bottom of the page. Before you are able to start a task, you need to upgrade to the Starter CRM suite plan. At the right side of your screen, you can view your tasks via insights, feed and schedule.

Your task is viewed under All. You can categorise your task via due date today, overdue or upcoming. These views can be pinned and made the default view. You can choose to add a new view by selecting +Add view or select create a new view to name a view and who it can be shared with. Select manage views to have a broader view.

6. Analytics Tools

These tools help in tracking customer behaviours on a website, page or app.

How It Works

This helps in tracking all activities done by visitors either on an app, website, pages or campaigns. To use the analytic tools, you have to upgrade to the Marketing Hub Enterprise and Marketing Hub Professionals. Select Reports > Analytic Tools.

7. Dashboard  

This gives your team an overall overview of their activities, deals and reports.

How It Works

Select Reports > Dashboard to have an overview of your activities. You can see your teams’ activity tools, total deals closed vs goals. These reports can be customised, renamed and emailed.

Select Create Dashboard to create a dashboard from scratch or select dashboards from templates.

If you select +New Dashboard, input your dashboard name and who has access to this dashboard, when done, select Create Dashboard. Select Exit at the top left corner, select Sales and select your newly created dashboard and start adding reports to this dashboard.

Select add reports to this dashboard and choose to create a new report or used saved reports. I selected create report. You have to be on the Marketing Hub Bundle to enjoy this feature. You can select Data Sources and Visualization types.

Scroll down the page to create a report from available templates.

If you select Create a dashboard from templates, select a template and begin customizing. (I chose Lead Generation).

8. Integrations

Over a thousand apps can be integrated into HubSpot. Popular apps that are integrated include Gmail, Canva, Google Meet, Type form, Slack, Mailchimp, Twitter, Salesforce, Hotjar, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Shopify, and Instagram.

The latest apps include Vidalytics, Billspot, Magneterix, and Viva City. Integrated apps fall under various categories including Productivity, Finance, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service.

9. Ads

It helps you create optimized target marketing campaigns.

How It Works

Select Marketing and click on Ads. You need to connect your ad account (Facebook, Google Ads or LinkedIn). If you have no idea on how to run ads or how it works, select See a quick demo.

Choose the option that sounds like you (I chose it, I’ve never run ads before) and a pop-up is displayed, select start demo. A little tour is organised for you to find your way around this feature.

10. Campaigns  

This includes a group of marketing content and marketing assets that helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and tactics.

How It Works

You need to be on HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Professional Plan. It comes with a free 14-day trial or you can contact the Sales team.

This feature has everything you need to optimise, plan and deliver scalable campaigns ranging from lead management, email analytics, marketing automation, landing pages, SEO, social media, calls-to-action, ads, salesforce integration and partitioning.

11. Automation with Sequences  

Uses workflows to automate task creation and follow-up.

How It Works

With this feature, you have the ability to automate your meetings, scheduling of emails, track emails, live chats, salesforce integration, predictive lead scoring and customisable reports.

HubSpot Rankings & Why We Recommend This Product

Now that we are aware of HubSpot being a social media management tool, does it stack against specific user-centric parameters? These are what we found.

1. Reporting/Analytics

HubSpot’s reporting and analytics feature help you with tracking your customer’s activities on websites, apps or pages. You are also able to measure your marketing campaign’s performance.

On a scale of 1-5, Product Curve ranked it

2. Salesforce Forecasting

This feature helps you get a holistic overview of your entire pipeline and dive into details with your team. You are able to have real insights to have accurate predictions to enable businesses to create effective plans, make proactive decisions and develop a corrective course of action.

On a scale of 1-5, Product Curve ranked it

3. HubSpot Contact Management

This feature helps you manage your contacts, and add company & contact records, Gmail and Outlook integrations help automatically log the emails you send to clients.

4. Email Integration

HubSpot’s email integration helps you connect your personal email with the HubSpot CRM to trigger scheduled email sequences, you can also improve response tasks with tailored (responses) emails.

5. Document Management

This feature helps in tracking documents and also building a library of helpful sales content for your entire team.

6. Quotes/proposal management

HubSpot has some quotes and proposal templates that can be customised. They are easy to sign and clients pay with integrated e-signatures and payments.

Comparative Analysis: HubSpot Review vs Keap            

This section takes a look at Keap as an alternative CRM tool. We’ll cover Keap’s pricing plan and features.

Keap, formerly known as Infusionsoft, is a private company that’s based in Chandler, Arizona.

Keap offers sales and email marketing platforms for small businesses including products to manage e-commerce, customers, marketing & customer relationship management.

Infusionsoft was founded by brothers Eric & Scott Martineau and is now with CEO Clate Mask. As of 2023, the company has received $ 54 million in venture capital from Goldman Sachs and they’ve generated over $125 million in funding. As of January 2019, they were known as Keap.

Keap’s Features & Services

1. Reports & Analytics

Keap’s reports and analytics feature helps you visualize sales information and statistics gotten using the platform’s CRM analytics dashboard.

2. Sales Pipeline

The easy-to-use, drag-and-drop sales pipeline feature helps close more deals, move deals faster, and know the status of every deal in one place.

3. Email Marketing

4. Text Marketing

With a 94% open rate for texts, Keap has the ideal tool to pair with your email marketing.

5. Keap Business Line

6. Appointment

Keap Pricing

1. Pro Plan

Starts at $169 per month ($139 to save 20%) for 1500 contacts, $199 per month ($153 to save 20%) for 1600 contacts and $239 per month ($184 to save 20%) for 3000 contacts.

The plan comes with email marketing, appointments, sales & marketing automation, automated lead capture & follow-up, sales pipeline and analysis.

2. Max Plan

Starts at $249 per month ($199 to save 20%) for 2500 contacts, $279 per month ($223 to save 20%) for 3500 contacts and $374 ($299 to save 20%) for 7000 contacts.

The plan incentives are similar to the pro plan.

3. Max Plan

You have to contact Keap’s sales team

Benefits That Make HubSpot Stand Out

1. It’s the best software for inbound strategy and marketing.

2. Multiple App Integrations

3. Ease of use

4. Detailed reports with comprehension

5. Creating and sharing meeting links

Conclusion

We’ve come to the end of this article and have covered HubSpot and some features that makes it a product worth trying out. Do try it out and we’ll be in the comment section to hear your feedback(s).