In the wake of HubSpot’s recent EMEA Partner Summit in Dublin, we’ve put together this round up of the platform’s key features. HubSpot love to continually look for ways to improve their service to users. This year, there are some great new additions that build on what is already a fantastic inbound marketing tool.
Digging into HubSpot’s best bits
A highly-accoladed (and free) CRM
HubSpot is well-known for having a comprehensive CRM that also happens to be free. Recently named Gartner’s Peer Insights Customer Choice for CRM Lead Management, it’s a phenomenal product that’s readily available at no cost. This isn’t surprising to us since work with it every day. But, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, here are just some features that come as standard.
- A robust calendar and reminder system
- Email marketing
- Lead management and scoring
- Lead segmentation
- Task management features
- Marketing automation/integration functionality
The CRM does more than store all your contact information in a secure location. It tracks every interaction between each contact and your website, including page views, conversions and meeting requests, and even shows you when they’ve opened emails.
Every interaction is stored on a timeline allowing you to engage with them when they are most likely to be receptive. This allows your sales and marketing teams to share data and work together to close more business, and to incorporate feedback from the sales process to inform future marketing campaigns.
Once your lead moves towards becoming a customer, the deals section of the CRM allows you to track your sales opportunities, allowing you to forecast with more accuracy on a month-to-month basis.
The original inbound marketing hub built to drive your content strategy
HubSpot’s marketing hub was designed to facilitate every element of a successful inbound marketing campaign. It is filled with features and tools to help you execute well-thought-out marketing strategies.
Inbound marketing centres around content creation, publishing, distribution and promotion and in HubSpot, you’ll find everything you need to create compelling content, optimise it for SEO and share it on social media.
- Easy-to-use blog templates that are responsive on different devices
- Landing pages you can create in minutes
- Stylish email templates that incorporate personalisation elements
- Automation options that can be tailored according to the behaviour of your leads
- Lead management tools
- SEO tools that show you how to optimise your blog posts with keywords
- Calls-to-action templates
- Social media scheduling to make sure you share your content at the optimum times
- Ad monitoring for your AdWords and Facebook ads
- Salesforce integration
- Insightful analytics tools to help you measure your successes and power up future campaigns
The perfect sales hub for tracking deals and closing more business
Imagine your sales team better informed about their leads, with an almost uncanny ability to contact leads right at the moment they are most likely to engage and convert. With HubSpot’s sales hub, your team has access to tools specifically designed to both simplify the sales process and make it more effective.
With HubSpot’s sales tools, your team will benefit from:
- An activity feed that showcases a view of email notifications and other engagements with your leads
- Snippets, which allow your team to reuse short blocks of text when composing emails to save time
- Email templates to save duplicating sales communications
- A documents tool that makes creating a library of sales content possible, and easily shareable, straight from your inbox
- Meetings functionality that integrates with your Google or Office 365 calendar, allowing you to send prospects links to facilitate bookings – and allows prospects to request meetings directly with you
- A sequences tool for personalised, automated interactions instead of you having to remember
- A home for all your prospect information in the prospects tool
- Workflows, which make automating both marketing and sales a cinch
HubSpot’s new services hub boosts your customer service
The services hub is a new addition. It signifies a new approach to the way HubSpot views their overall model, changing from a funnel approach to a flywheel approach, where the sales, marketing and services features circle the CRM.
These features are designed to work together to ensure a holistic and seamless experience for every lead as they become a prospect and then a customer.
These include:
- Better customer feedback options
- Chatbot functionality
- Ticketing (with improved functionality, making it a simple process)
- Conversations dashboard
- Live chat functionality
- A knowledge base that turns FAQs and tickets into a knowledge base of helpful articles and documents
But the features don’t stop there, and the combining of various sales and marketing elements with the new services hub features create a customer-centric approach HubSpot advocates, to the benefit of your clients.
HubSpot is committed to continually improving its offerings to make sure they cover a wide variety of functionalities. They are geared towards helping you improve your marketing, close more sales deals and offer customer service that creates evangelists for your brand.
However, it can be challenging to decide which features and offerings will be the right fit for your business. Certain features are only available at certain levels of licensing, so understanding which HubSpot package will be best for your business can be daunting.
We’re HubSpot Partners and love talking about all things HubSpot. So, if you’ve got any questions at all, get in touch. We’re happy to help.
