Is your company looking for a marketing automation solution and considering HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional?
As a HubSpot agency, we know a thing or two about this platform. We love it like chocolate and peanut butter, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great fit for every business out there.
Some of our best clients hired us months or years after investing in HubSpot’s signature platform and struggling to get results from it.
It’s a good idea to review a few considerations, including the resources you have in-house, company culture, revenue goals, and the KPIs you are tracking now before investing in the software.
We will explore these in greater detail here. First, let’s go over what Marketing Hub is and what it includes.
What is HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional?
HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional is a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to manage a variety of digital marketing and automation tasks together in one “hub.” The platform also integrates with the HubSpot CRM.
It offers a toolset that helps businesses attract visitors to their website, convert them into leads, and nurture them into customers using unique content your brand creates.
Starting at $9,600 a year with 2,000 marketing contacts included, Marketing Hub Pro offers comprehensive features and analytics for companies that are serious about growth.
HubSpot Marketing Professional Features
Marketing Hub Professional includes everything in the Marketing Starter plan, plus:
Content Creation Tools
- Blog is included, although you will need a template created by a HubSpot developer.
Marketing Contacts & Email Marketing
- Includes 2,000 contacts. You can add more contacts in increments of 5,000.
- Send emails equal to 10x the number of contacts you have every month.
- Up to 1,000 active lists and 1,000 static lists
Live and Conversational Chat
- Includes ability to route chat notifications to users or teams
- Chatbot includes ability to add if/then branches for information gathering
Automation & Personalization
- Automated workflows for lead nurturing and other marketing, sales, or service processes
- Includes scoring tool for qualifying leads
- Account-based marketing tools and automation
- Smart content and calls-to-action for optimizing conversions with specific personas
- Multi-language content
- Social media management
- Video hosting
- Lead scoring for contacts and companies
Campaign Management Tools
- Create custom designed or templated calls-to-action buttons for pages and emails
- Teams
Conversion Optimization
- A/B testing
- Ads dashboard and optimization features
- Contact attribution data
Custom Reporting
- Website and landing page traffic analytics
- Campaign reporting
- Custom reporting
- Salesforce integration
Advanced Technical Support
- Phone, chat, and email support
HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional Pricing
HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro costs $800 a month, which includes up to 2,000 contacts. Additional contacts may be purchased in increments of 5,000 from $224.72 per month. Contracts are one-year minimum commitments.
You may earn discounts off the sticker price by making multi-year commitment, or bundling in other “hubs” that will enhance your growth strategy, including Sales, Service, or Operations Hub.
Key Considerations Before Purchasing
1. You may need to expand your marketing team.
It’s easy to underestimate the skills and effort involved in a successful inbound marketing strategy.
The complexity of the work we do as marketers has increased dramatically over the last ten years. New tools, tactics, and best practices arrive on the scene every month, making it hard for even the most adaptable marketer to keep up with.
And Even on the most fundamental level, digital marketing requires a vast array of skillsets and expertise. But many companies are still try to get by with one or two employees that are expected to do everything!
It just doesn’t work.
Even if a small team had enough experience to do all these tasks well, there simply aren’t enough hours in a day to do them.
Many of our client relationships started after they signed up for Marketing Hub Professional HubSpot and realized they lacked the resources to manage the campaigns using only their internal team.
So, before investing in the platform, it’s a good idea to think about how the work is going to get done.
There are a few ways to solve this challenge. You can rely on your in-house team, or bring in a HubSpot marketing agency or freelancers to help them.
It’s important to know many agencies offer flexible solutions for clients with specific needs. If you already have an amazing social media team – and I hope you do! – there’s no reason to pay an agency to do that work for you. Instead, your agency partner should craft a solution that fills in the gaps among your staff.
For example, your company may need help with Marketing Hub implementation and fulfilling the HubSpot’s mandatory onboarding.
HubSpot reps will be the first to admit, partner agencies usually provide a better, more comprehensive and personalized experience to businesses than they can from within the HS ranks.
If you need long term help with strategy, campaign tracking, and creating content to reach your predefined goals, the right agency will provide a plan that meets your requirements without trying to lump in services your team is already managing well.
HubSpot agencies charge a range of $3,000 to $10,000+ a month for services on retainer, depending on the a size and scope of the solution.
2. Cultural fit is important.
Organizations that achieve real success with Marketing Hub Professional all share one thing in common: a culture that embraces inbound marketing and selling.
What does this mean?
The entire staff – not just the marketing department – believes in and lives by the principle of helping customers and prospects solve their challenges. They are willing to create transparent and helpful content that teaches people what they do.
Marketers understand inbound methodology almost instinctively. They’ve seen how educational content can build website traffic and convert visitors into prospects.
But other departments don’t always buy in so easily. The people in the finance and IT departments might think, “This is a marketing thing. I don’t need to bother with this.”
But they do.
It’s important that your entire organization understands the value of teaching others and participates when needed. Any customer-facing employee will have a good sense of the questions clients have every day. Even if your colleagues aren’t good at writing blog posts or shooting videos – they can help by brainstorming topics or sharing their expertise with your content creators.
Here is a good litmus test that shows how well your company culture aligns with inbound strategy.
Would senior leadership be comfortable with content that explains what your services cost, and why?
Sometimes they are not keen on this idea. They are more concerned about competitors seeing what you charge than helping potential customers understand your pricing.
But, when someone is looking for the services you offer, what is the first question they search for on Google? “What does [SERVICE] cost.”
If you produce content that answers the “cost question” (even if the answer starts with “it depends”), you will set a realistic expectation of why your products and services cost what they do, and give people perspective on how your pricing works.
You will weed out price shoppers and tire kickers, and focus your attention on prospects you’ve already built trust with.
Sharing helpful content about topics your competitors are too afraid to touch is a huge opportunity. Check out the example below, where we produced an article about what metal structures cost for one of our clients.
Within a few weeks, the article was ranking near the top of Google search results, and has brought in more than 10,000 views from organic (unpaid) traffic from Google to date since March, 2021.
“Would senior leadership be comfortable with content that explains what your services cost, and why?
Sometimes they are more concerned about competitors seeing what you charge than helping potential customers understand your pricing.”
3. You will need to set the right goals.
Marketing Hub Professional is not cheap.
You will spend $9,600 or more a year, depending on how many contacts you plan to market to in your database. That’s a real investment for most small-to-medium sized businesses, but it’s one that can pay off if your goals are realistic, attainable, and worthwhile.
A realistic and attainable growth goal for most companies is 15 to 25 percent growth over 12 months. In our experience, that’s a good number to shoot for.
But ultimately, your investment in HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro will only make sense of the potential gain in revenue all marketing expenses are worthwhile, including outsourced services, advertising costs, and any other line items.
For example, your annual marketing investment might look like this:
$10,500 for Marketing Hub tools
$66,000 for services from a HubSpot agency
$24,000 for advertising on Google and/or social media
It’s not uncommon to invest $100,000 or more annually if you plan to use outside help, which makes the ROI question even more important.
A growth goal of $250,000-$500,000 would probably not justify the investment outlined above.
In that case, you might want to rethink your needs, and whether your in-house team can manage more of the work on their own.
If there isn’t a good way to make the numbers work, Marketing Hub Pro might not be a great fit for your company at this stage.
If your revenue goal is greater though, and it’s realistic and attainable based on average customer spend and other factors, an investment in Marketing Hub Pro could be a home run!
Either way, it’s a good idea to chat with a HubSpot agency partner before deciding which way to go. They will ask insightful questions about your business objectives and help you determine whether HubSpot is right for your company.
4. Know your company’s “numbers.”
You won’t know if the company’s growth objectives are realistic and attainable without factoring in a few KPIs related to your business today. Here are a few things you’ll want to consider:
Average new customer spend – When your sales team closes a new client, what will they spend in a year? It’s important to understand how many new customers it will take to nail the revenue goal you’ve set. Use a number that’s conservative, yet close to the mark.
Closing rate – What is your sales team’s closing rate today? This is important because you’ll need to know how many qualified leads are needed to achieve the net new customers your plan requires.
Website traffic – Once you know how many qualified leads are required, you can come up with a rough estimate of how much your website traffic needs to grow. When just starting out with HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro, most businesses have a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of anywhere from 0.12 to 1-percent. As the campaign matures, conversion rates will likely increase, but you have to start from somewhere.
Knowing how much your site traffic needs to grow will tell you how much content your team will need to create, and how much money you will need to dedicate to organic and paid distribution channels.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional is an amazing set of tools. It has completely transformed our business and who we work with. But like any tool, the benefit is in how you use it.
By considering your company’s resources, goals, culture, and KPIs before signing up, you are much more likely to figure out if HubSpot is really a good fit for your needs.
Talk to one of our HubSpot specialists about whether Marketing Hub Professional is right for your company.
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