Is your company considering a move to HubSpot Business Units, giving you the ability to manage multiple businesses in one portal?
If so, you might be wondering how much this little quest will add up to.
The short answer is you will likely spend at least $59,000 in the first year on tools and onboarding fees. If you decide to bring on an agency partner to help with the project, you might spend $8,000 to $10,000 on top of that.
Let’s break down the costs and discuss how you might find ways to save money throughout the project.
Cost of Getting Started With HubSpot Business Units
HubSpot Business Units is an add-on available with a subscription to Marketing Hub Enterprise, which costs $3,600/month. It allows you to add and manage more than one brand in a shared HubSpot portal, eliminating the need to create a separate account for each brand.
HubSpot also requires a one-time fee of $6,000 for onboarding, which can be managed by either a HubSpot agency partner or by HubSpot’s internal team.
Your subscription will include 10,000 marketing contacts, with an option to add extra tiers as needed:
- 10,001-50,000: $100 per month
- 50,001-100,000: $90 per month
- 100,001-200,000: $80 per month
- 200,001-500,000: $70 per month
- 500,001+: $60 per month
A Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription is good for one domain and business unit, which will be your “parent account.” For each additional unit you add to your portal, your account will be charged $800 per month.
{{cta(‘b48f1dec-0c0f-4f84-a003-d9a60918239a’)}}
Implementation Costs of Business Units
After budgeting for the tools, you will need to calculate the cost of implementation.
This can be a little tricky since the work involved will depend on whether you are starting a brand-new portal or adapting an existing one to a new environment. In the latter case, you could have hundreds of existing assets that need to be renamed and managed differently.
The work could be insourced or outsourced to a HubSpot partner agency, but either way, this is not a time to cut corners. Your implementation needs to be carefully planned to avoid confusing and potentially embarrassing mishaps down the road.
Here are a few costs you may encounter with an agency partner:
1. HubSpot Audit – $3,000 one-time fee
Your implementation team needs a thorough understanding of which assets have been created and how your HubSpot instance is used before setting up your portal for managing two or more separate businesses.
They will need to document existing users and teams, CRM objects, lists, blog articles, landing pages, CTAs, and other assets and processes, ensuring everything will be managed correctly going forward.
2. Business Units Implementation – $4,500-$6,000 one-time fee
After your assets are accounted for, the implementation team should use a checklist to make sure they are assigned to the right business unit and identify any issues that need to be addressed.
For instance, will each business unit have its own cookie policy? Is every campaign associated with the correct unit? As you start to dig into the work, you will find many small details that need to be addressed.
You will also need to come up with standard naming conventions to use going forward, making it’s easy for all teams to apply a business unit designation to their assets in a uniform way. This is why we also recommend creating a “HubSpot User Protocol” that explains how users should use the tools while staying in compliance with your business unit setup.
Ways to Save Money on HubSpot Business Units
You might reduce your implementation expense by volunteering members of your team to help with some of the mundane tasks like going through lists, emails, and other assets and renaming them. Believe me, there is more than enough tedious work to go around.
When it comes to budgeting for the tools themselves, it’s important to remember you can earn discounts from HubSpot in a few ways.
Incentives vary from month to month, but HubSpot reps will often offer discounts when you add more tools to your plan, pay annually, or make longer-term commitments to your contract. If you explore one of these options, you might be able to save a little cash on your way to getting your business units set up.
Business units with HubSpot is an innovative way to grow several different brands while keeping everything neatly organized under one roof. By investing in the tools and the right team to manage the setup, you can create a multi-brand growth strategy with clear guardrails between each.
{{cta(‘df613a9f-369d-4416-aba5-63e977467c9f’)}}
