Imagine a world where people communicated and branding was consistent. A world where the sales department appreciated the marketing department, and the marketing department drove quality leads for the sales department…and the service department was able to super-serve customers with relevant, fast, and helpful information that solved their problems and turned them into raving fans. Imagine the ibuprofen we’d save!
In our utopian marketing world, sales, marketing, and service would all be on the SAME TEAM. Plus marketing people could prepare data-driven reports that showed actual ROI to analytical executives.
(Cue the slide projector) Back in 2015, we were introduced to a software program called Hubspot that professed to have a way of integrating not just sales, marketing, and service but also the different aspects of marketing: social, digital, email, content, SEO, etc. Being the good Missourians that we are, our response was simply, “Show me.”
And they did. We were blown away by Hubspot and how it
You see, as a marketing agency, we battle against a chronic lack of consistency every day. Most clients come to us because they want help coordinating disjointed efforts that are bringing in lackluster results. We consider ourselves warriors battling against spotty and erratic advertising that leaves consumers confused and frustrated. A radio campaign that doesn’t match the digital campaign, and a website that has a different theme than the printed materials. There’s no email marketing at all, and any social posts are mostly memes. The sales team doesn’t know what the marketing team is doing, and the service department is the last to know anything.
Ugh. Where’s that Advil?
SO, you can imagine our excitement when we were presented with the opportunity to partner with a marketing software company that fuzes everything together (see what we did there? fuze?). We found a partner in Hubspot that made marketing a cohesive process, not just between the social team, the digital team, and the inbound team…but between sales, service, and marketing.
Face it. There are so many options available! Email marketing programs and SEO programs and social media programs and digital marketing programs and inbound marketing programs. Sure, you COULD invest in each individual program. Many of them are really good.
Prospective clients ask us regularly what makes Hubspot so important? They’ve been using a hodgepodge of other programs, and want to know why they are being asked to foot the bill for a tool they’ve never heard of.
Fair question. So we came up with a list. Without further ado, here you go...
Who doesn’t need easy? With Hubspot, there is almost always more than one way to do multiple things. It’s all integrated, and it’s all plug and play. There are developer options, to be sure, but if you don’t have a developer, it’s no problem. The finished products are flexible and look professional, and you don’t have to know code to do good work.
6. Goals
Everything is goal-driven, and for us…it’s all about ROI. With Hubspot, marketing has places to set goals. Sales CRM has places to set goals. And reporting shows you how one supports the other. It also makes it easy to show clients where and how we’re meeting goals.As warriors against a chronic lack of marketing consistency, Hubspot enables us to create a seamless strategy with social media managers, writers, designers, developers, digital marketers, SEO geeks, sales managers, email marketers, salespeople, service techs, customers, and prospects. Consistency builds trust, and trust is what it’s all about.
Lastly, is Hubspot perfect? No. No one is. Are there things we wish they’d add to their capabilities profile? Absolutely. But none of those things is a deal-breaker for us. Where Hubspot needs customizing, if their service team can’t take care of it for whatever reason, our internal team can.
Full Transparency: We did not get paid to write this blog. We’re truly raving fans. We use Marketing Pro and Sales Pro. We don’t have a Service department, per se…so we don't use Service Pro ourselves, but we have worked with that platform on behalf of our clients.
It's simple. We love Hubspot because it helps us get what our clients are paying for...results.