These days, the person in charge of marketing in a company has to carry out an increasingly varied range of tasks. Tasks such as :
Customer interaction management
Marketing automation
Campaign creation and management
Landing page creation
Search engine optimization
So you'll agree that giving this employee a boost might be a good idea. This is where the notion of CRM becomes relevant. A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, refers to a software that centralizes all customer interactions and information on a single platform. In some cases, as in the case of HubSpot, a CRM may be specialized in a particular field.
HubSpot is specialized in marketing and sales software, making it the ideal CRM for managing and improving sales and marketing activities. In this article, we'll review the main features of this software, to see how it can help the marketing person in any company.
What does HubSpot offer?
Although HubSpot is generally known for its customer relationship management software, it shouldn't be reduced to just that. It's an all-in-one marketing, sales and customer service platform. With HubSpot, you can track every step of the customer journey, from first contact to closing the deal. It offers robust marketing and sales tools, an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, excellent customer growth and retention tools, email and marketing automation, as well as content marketing and social media capabilities.
HubSpot - Marketing Hub
This hub enables you to generate leads and implement targeted actions to convert them, while tracking each step of the conversion process in detail. HubSpot's marketing hub makes it possible :
Lead generation with forms
Building landing pages
Use of live chat
Manage your contacts and campaigns
And all in one place!
Let's take a look at the ability to create automated mailing campaigns. This feature allows you to capture leads, create targeted content and messages and send them at specific times. You can choose to send these messages according to different triggers. (A behavior, an interest or a stage in the buying process).
With HubSpot's marketing hub, you can also automate tasks that are usually time-consuming and repetitive, such as :
Prospects evaluation
Segmentation
Contacts management
All you have to do is enter your chosen criteria, and the CRM takes care of evaluating, segmenting and managing these actions for you, just as if you'd done it yourself.
HubSpot - Sales Hub
The Sales hub puts a number of tools at your disposal, so let's start by listing the most relevant ones:
Creating and tracking e-mails.
Setting up e-mail automation
Call follow-up
Writing e-mails with the help of artificial intelligence.
Creation of attractive call-to-actions (CTAs). (Here too, you can benefit from the help of artificial intelligence).
To continue with the important features of HubSpot Sales, let's return to the CRM section. Indeed, HubSpot's CRM is one of the solution's key assets. Its ease-of-use/capabilities ratio is one of the best on the market. It will enable any company to manage and boost its entire sales flow. Thanks to HubSpot's highly intuitive reports, you'll also gain powerful insights into your company's sales activities, enabling you to measure their success. As a result, you can quickly and easily fine-tune each of your actions, with full knowledge of key information. HubSpot CRM software lets you create and manage contracts, tasks and notes, which can help you keep control of your sales and convert more prospects into customers. Note that a CRM that guarantees you access to customer information at all times, gives you a distinct advantage in successfully converting a prospect or closing a sale.
HubSpot - Services Hub
The main benefit of HubSpot's Hub Service is to bring the company closer to its customers. Thanks to its services, the CRM offers tools that guarantee a level of proximity never achieved before. Here is a list of some of the services offered by HubSpot:
Access to a dedicated customer portal
Omnichannel messaging
Live chat
Fully integrated CRM.
One of HubSpot's strengths is its excellent customer service, whatever the size of your business. Large or small, you can select the features that are right for you, and you can also call on a CRM consultant to support you.
Let's take a look at one of the most compelling tools in the services hub, the shared inbox. With this incredible tool, you can track all your customer engagements, including discussions with them, answers to their questions, creation of support tickets, and much more. You can also create a customer knowledge base, which allows customers to search for answers to potential questions. The service hub also features a promotion tool, which helps you gather customer feedback, address their concerns and turn them into loyal promoters of your business.
HubSpot - CMS Hub
Hub CMS is designed to help companies develop their web presence with a focus on the creation and management of marketing content. Website content, lead gathering and analytics are integrated with HubSpot's CRM, making it easy to create personalized visitor experiences and integrate these experiences with the rest of the business.
The resident idea at the heart of Hub CMS is to work as content enablers rather than content creators. As such, the CMS Hub has been designed to balance the needs of developers and content creators through its system of themes and modules, as well as its drag-and-drop zones.
HubSpot CMS automatically captures and tracks visitors to your website, turning them into leads. You can create customizable pop-up forms that appear anywhere on your site, including by clicking on a specific page or spending time browsing your site.
HubSpot takes care of CMS hosting and maintenance. So you don't have to worry about managing plug-ins, updates, hosting, scaling or security. The trade-off here is that the system places a few more restrictions on what else you can do than self-hosted CMSes. For example, you can't modify or extend system fundamentals manually or via plug-ins, nor manipulate low-level rendering, nor directly access and modify database content.
Developer-designed content (e.g. themes, templates, modules, JavaScript and CSS) is created in a developer file system, while page content (pages, blog posts) is designed and built in a powerful WYSIWYG editor, and multimedia files (images created by the content creator, PDFs, etc.) are stored in a web application-based file manager. However, suppose you prefer another platform, such as WordPress. In this case, HubSpot offers an excellent WordPress plugin that bridges the gap between one of the world's best content management systems and a powerful CRM and marketing platform.
The main types of content offered by the CMS hub:
Website pages and landing pages. (Website pages are designed to present information that is part of your website and intended to be found organically, while a landing page is usually associated with a specific offer or marketing campaign).
Blogs. (HubSpot blogs have two views: one for the listing page and one for the individual article page, then each blog post is fed into each).
E-mails. (E-mails can be created in several ways in HubSpot: classic e-mails and drag-and-drop e-mails).s dans HubSpot : E-mails classiques et les E-mail en glisser-déposer.)
We end our overview with the most relevant aspects and features of HubSpot.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the main products, our review of HubSpot will move on to two elements that we'd like to highlight. The HubSpot interface and Academy!
"User Friendly" Interface
HubSpot's interface is one of its greatest strengths. Indeed, its intuitive interface makes the tool easily accessible to any user, whether a company or an individual. You don't need to have a great deal of knowledge of CRM as a whole, or of similar software, to be able to use it effectively. The layout of sections and pages makes navigation fairly straightforward. Users will find it easy to understand and navigate smoothly between HubSpot's various hubs and functionalities. As a result, the time saved in training end-users is considerable. However, don't expect to master HubSpot immediately or very easily, as it remains a complex and rich tool. We'd like to emphasize its ease of use and the quality of its interface in comparison with other tools of the same type, which may give new users a harder time. Compared to what the software has to offer, it's relatively easy to get to grips with.
HubSpot AcademyÂ
In keeping with our "user-friendly" user interface, HubSpot's Academy is an invaluable aid for those wishing to learn how to use the software effectively. This resource base is packed with clear, enjoyable videos. All these resources are available to learners and are arranged by theme, with an order of progression indicated. A choice of languages is also available. The training courses are free of charge, and enable you to obtain a large number of certifications to test and prove your skills. These training modules are designed not only to help you understand the tool, but also to provide you with ongoing training to learn more about the software, its capabilities and future developments.
In conclusion, we'd say that HubSpot software is an excellent solution for people looking to streamline their marketing efforts. Mastery of their products is easily accessible to novices, at the level of basic functionality. However, complete, or shall we say in-depth, mastery of the products and the ability to make them work together requires considerable effort. In such cases, the HubSpot Academy is a valuable ally: the quality of its content makes learning easier. For professional use, we recommend upgrading to the paid version. However, the free version allows you to explore the software's main features and make up your own mind before going any further. This version is also ideal for private users, as well as small businesses. It's a tool we highly recommend if you want to structure and develop your marketing and sales strategy. Used properly, there's no doubt that HubSpot will help you grow. Its ability to bring together marketing, sales, service and CMS all in one place means that each of your day-to-day activities is more solid than ever.