The Cheap Revolution

Review of Hubspot's Inbound Marketing System – An Entrepreneur’s Perspective

A brief history of Hubspot

After meeting at MIT in 2006, Hubspot’s founders created a digital search marketing platform designed to leverage the disruptive effects of the Internet to enable businesses to “get found”.  Just five years later, Hubspot.com ranks as a top 1000 Web Site globally and is in the top 350 most trafficked sites in the US per Alexa. 

I started using Hubspot a few years ago as part of my digital marketing business.  After watching a demo of the tool's capabilities, we decided to try using Hubspot within our company.  We quickly introduced it to some of our entrepreneurial clients as well.   I don't use Hubspot in my Philadelphia marketing consulting business today.  I'll explain why later, but first... 

Our Hubspot Review

In this review of the Hubspot platform, we explore what Hubspot does and how a startup or small business may benefit from using their software.

Hubspot’s message is all about Inbound marketing, a term Hubspot has rallied into a brand phrase.  What does Inbound Marketing do?   It allows you to turn your Website into a lead generation tool for customers.

What is HubSpot?

When I started using Hubspot, the central tools revolved around on-site organic search optimization.   The tool would help you discover a dynamic list of keywords that you could attempt to capture with your site optimization efforts.   You were able to track your competition's performance on those keywords as well, providing valuable insight into how their website's were positioned.   Coupled with the website evaluation tools, you were able to quickly optimize a site for organic search traffic.

The Hubspot platform seeks to take the realm of organic search and digital marketing out of the hands of the Internet marketing insider and put it into the hands of the entrepreneur or small business owner.  It has numerous marketing tools and tricks that allow a business owner to:

• Optimize keyword content on blog posts
• Track visitors and user engagement
• Analyze social media feeds
• Create and manage email marketing
• Nurture web leads
• View reports that measure the effectiveness of your marketing

Hubspot also supports their platform with a variety of training and advice.  They have webinars, downloadable white papers, community forums and conferences that support the Inbound Marketing experience. 

Indeed, you can tell Hubspot eats their own dog food. They offer free eBooks to their customer base on how to improve their marketing initiatives as a way to capture leads. A few worth nothing are:

• The Ultimate How-to Marketing Guide 
• Twitter for Business 
• How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day
• 100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts, and Graphs 
• 101 Awesome Marketing Quotes

How HubSpot Works

Hubspot provides six categories of marketing software capabilities:

1. Search Optimization – Hubspot’s first priority is to get your business found in search engines.  Helping your business to optimize its digital presence for the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing is where Hubspot got started.  When I used Hubspot, I was impressed with the ocean of keyword data that I could sort through.   Hubspot helps you with finding the best keywords for your business, prioritize them and use them effectively on your Web site.  
2. Blogging & Social Media – Social and Search work closely together today with personalized searching that draws on  the rapid growth of people’s social networks. Hubspot provides the tools for integrating blogging and social media monitoring, as well as  analytics  for both, into  your marketing efforts.  
   OTHER OPTIONS: If blogging is a central part of your digital strategy, bloggers may want to consider the popular Wordpress blogging platform.  While it’s nice to have everything in one place with Hubspot, the number of plug-ins and the broad community support make tools like Wordpress a must-have tool for serious blogging strategy.
3. Lead Generation and
4. Lead Management  - These two categories fall into the realm of the digital marketers' secret weapon of conversion optimization.   If you are serious about getting quality business leads from your website and social media presence, you must pay attention to where visitors are landing when they come to your site.  Application of best practices can dramatically improve your number of leads! Hubspot tools allow non-technical business owners to optimize the “Landing Pages” and to track exactly what people did when they visited your site.   Before you call the lead back, wouldn’t it be nice to know which pages they read, which videos they viewed or which whitepapers they downloaded.  Hubspot tells you all of that and more, making it a powerful lead nurturing platform.
5. Email & Automation  - like blogging, if you are looking for a “one stop shop” then you may want to consider Hubspot.  However, the areas of Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing have really matured in the past few years and, depending on your needs,  you might be better served by email marketing alternatives like Constant Contact, iContact or Mailchimp.   Lead Nurturing giants like Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot are worth considering as well.
6. Marketing Analytics – Hubspot’s analytics are organized and focused on driving sales for your business.  Understanding ROI by marketing activities and channels, running comparison tests (A/B analysis) and which channels get the best leads are organized into Hubspot’s “ full-funnel view closed-loop reporting”.  This is a results-driven marketer’s dream!  

Once again, there are big dogs that only do analytics like Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture, but those systems require someone who knows those platforms to craft the equivalent “conversion funnels” and channel analysis. Compared to Hubspot, those platforms are going to provide a broader range of analytics capability, but Hubspot trumps them on providing easy access to the most important numbers.

HubSpot in Real Life

While I used to employ Hubspot for my marketing clients and my company, we used it to manage landing pages and do our SEO research.   More recently, I've come across companies who use Hubspot for the analytics and the drip marketing capabilities.  Given the rich set of features, there are endless combinations of approaches to using HubSpot.  

Did it work?   Take a look at this graph of a client we launched using Hubspot for landing page optimization and search engine optimization.  

Using HubSpot, we helped this client grow their monthly traffic from zero to 15,000 in roughly six months, including a comparable growth in leads. 

We stopped using HubSpot when our client's using HubSpot took their marketing in-house.  From a digital agency perspective, that kind of sucked.  From the entrepreneur's perspective, this was empowerment - and they took full advantage of it.   

We kept HubSpot around for a while, but it requires a monthly fee and, THIS IS IMPORTANT, it requires ongoing attention and time to work.   When we stopped using HubSpot in late 2010, our small band of merry marketers did not have the time to justify the monthly expense.  But the lesson here is that someone - whether an outside agency or your internal team - must be willing to invest the required effort to use HubSpot and keep abreast of their latest additions to the toolkit.

If you're willing to make the investment of time and aren't afraid of the monthly investment (see Pricing below), then HubSpot is worth checking out.  Friend and colleague David Newman of DoItMarketing provided this review of how he walks the walk and talks the talk with Hubspot. 

Hubspot has totally lit up our visibility to our target market, independent consultants and small professional services firm owners who want to grow. We are now much more findable, visible, and credible. We get between 3-4 leads per day through our Hubspot-powered website AND in addition to that, we get several leads each week via email and phone from people saying, "I just found your site and I'm calling to see how you might be able to help us." Working on both sides of the fence (we are also a Hubspot Certified Partner), it is now very easy to share the value with our prospects and clients because we were the first to "eat our own dog food" and we continue to invest in our own inbound marketing efforts as we help our clients do the same!

If you have the technical and business skills to use an online bill payment system (e.g. from your bank),  online accounting system (e.g. Quickbooks) or navigate an online portfolio (.e.g from The Vanguard Group or Fidelity), then you can use Hubspot.  Some Hubspot capabilities will require an investment of time to be able to use them productively, but there are a host of educational resources from Hubspot.  

Hubspot support ranges across online videos, white papers, best practices seminars and an active and responsive community of marketers using the platform.   It is an exceptionally well-supported product.

Why You Should Care About Using HubSpot

Bottom line: if you are a marketer for your company, this is the most cost effective way I know of to get multi-channel, agency-level marketing help with a DIY  approach.   If you can run an email marketing program, or can get around Quickbooks, then you can use Hubspot.

Using HubSpot requires an investment of time and money - and it requires you to adopt the HubSpot methodology and platform for a lot of what you do.  Some companies, particularly larger ones, are better served by a collection of best-in-class tools.  I believe HubSpot is best suited to startups and smaller businesses. 

Try it out and let us know how it worked for you. You can get your free trial by signing up here.

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot has a monthly fee.  As an entrepreneur, this is a strategic investment that you'll need to carefully consider.  For entrepreneurs, you can get started with the Basic, Professional or Enterprise version with $200/month up to $700/month.  

What’s the difference? 

The more advanced levels provide advanced interaction and lead nurturing techniques like A/B testing and custom lead scoring.  These are tools that you can adopt over time.   The Basic package has all of the core offerings and provides an excellent Inbound Marketing starting point.

 

Pricing captured from Hubspot site (www.hubspot.com/pricing) on 01/22/2012.

Even if the pricing doesn't work for you, there are a number of free resources from Hubspot.  Consider checking out the Hubspot Grader for a free Web Site assessment.

In Summary: Our HubSpot Review Conclusion

While HubSpot is straightforward to learn and use for the do-it-yourself marketer, it does require a serious investment of time.  In effect, you are in-sourcing your digital marketing agency.  Be ready to get to work!  If you do, the results can be dramatic. 

If you are using Hubspot, please include your experience in the comments below.   We want to hear your stories – good and bad!   By leaving your experience, you benefit the whole community of entrepreneurs reading this review of Hubspot.

- Skip Shuda

Note: This Review of the HubSpot marketing platform contains affiliate links which may provide the CheapRevolution.com with  compensation.  If you find this blog helpful, please patronize our advertisers using the links you find on the site. 

Moving my desktop to the cloud: A packrat's need for speed

(Cloud Image from wallpaperstock.net) 

My old HP Tablet has had a flickering display lately.  Moving on four years old, it seems that the heart of this old workhorse is about to give out.  However, I always dread moving my desktop from one computer to another. It takes hours of planning and hair-pulling effort.  

I decided to use this opportunity to move as much as I could to the cloud.  For me, the cloud mostly means that I moved to Google, although there are plenty of options out there.  My reasoning?

1) in the future, moves to new computers will be much easier

2) let someone else worry about backing up my data

3) the cloud applications are cheaper (mostly free!)

4) I've found that Google applications are generally faster loading than my desktop apps

So, my business partner and friend, Bechara, found me a sweet deal on FatWallet for a new Hewlett Packard G72 Notebook with sweet 17" display, 4 GB of RAM, 350 GB Hard drive and 2.27 GHz In tel Core i3 CPU.  For less than $500, I had doubled my RAM, tripled my hard-drive space and at least doubled my CPU speed.

Here are some of the key ways that I shed my old desktop turtle shell.  

1) Email.  I moved from Outlook to Gmail.  I actually did this a while ago.  As a packrat, I had years (and Gigabytes) of data accumulated in my Outlook files.  Backing the Outlook data files up takes hours, but worse - it literally took 5 minutes or more to start up Outlook.  Now, I run all of my email accounts on gmail (save one Outlook account that a client requires).   Gmail's philosophy is "don't save and archive, keep everything and use search to find it".   While I make heavy use of the Google Gmail Labels, this works really, really well for me.   With 8 Gb of free storage (and growing), I have what I need for my packrat ways!

2) My calendar.  I've been a faithful user of Franklin Covey's PlanPlus application.  This powerful desktop application rolled my calendar, my todolist and my note-taking (I take a lot of notes) into one sweet application.  I already moved this application across laptops once - and my FranklinCovey files are starting to suffer from the same fate as my big, fat Outlook files.  Time to seek a new calendar.  

I checked out the Franklin Covey online software, but it has a recurrring fee (monthly or annual) and didn't have all of the features I use in the desktop software.   So I moved across to the Google Calendar App, much to the delight of my team-mates who have been asking me to update/synchronize with my Google Calendar on a regular basis so they can figure out when I'm available.  Improved team collaboration is an unanticipated benefit of moving to Google Calendar. 

3) My todolist. Also part of the PlanPlus software, I went online to see what was available.   I looked at things like Tadalist and its sister application Basecamp from 37signals.   One was too simple, the other had a monthly fee and was too much (for the purpose of maintaining lists).  So I settled on Google's answer - the Google task list.  Task lists are integrated right into my Gmail.   The only problem I've had so far is that once I built more than 9 "master lists", I found that the Task list chooser started jumping around.  Okay - I can live with 9 lists for now  (client-work, sales, marketing, infrastructure, household, blog/twitter-ideas, special-project, todays-work, competition).

4) My note-taking. Franklin Covey's note-taking organizer was really central to my work and tracking meeting notes, outcomes, etc.   For this, I stayed off the cloud and opted for a Microsoft's Onenote application. I'm still using Microsoft Office for Word processing, spreadsheets and, now, note-taking.  But I'll keep watching Google Apps and other tools as wireless access becomes a given at all of my workplaces. Not quite there yet.

5) Backups.  There are plenty of cloud-based backup systems emerging like Mozy, Carbonite and Dropbox.  Backing up your files to the cloud means that you won't suffer if there is an office disaster (yes this is a first step in disaster recovery). Tools like Dropbox also let you share with colleagues, doubling both as a backup and a collaboration tool.   I'll keep my eyes on these, but the good people at SmartSync (which I purchased years ago) were good enough to send me a registration key for my new computer.  SmartSync syncs my desktop data with an external drive every night.   This also helped me in moving to my new machine.  I simply plugged the external drive into my new laptop - and copied the directories I wanted to the local disk.  

6) Mobile access. My Droid should be easily synchronized using Google Sync. (I haven't tried this yet.) This means that I can see my calendar, my email and my todo lists on my phone.   It also means that I was able to easily move my browser bookmarks from my old machine to another

7) Contacts database. For most of the past decade, my contacts were squirreled away in an old Palm Desktop application. Since I haven't had a Palm device for nearly 10 years, it seems that it might be time to move on. Exporting in VCard format was simple and I imported my contacts right into Google Contacts. This may be a temporary visit as I look at Social CRM apps like Gist, Salesforce or Landslide.

The result of moving my desktop apps to the cloud is a much faster, more accessible and more collaborative desktop. I can take advantage of Google Chrome's blinding load time as a browser and enter my workplace from anywhere. I can access much of my work from the train on my Droid, my mother's PC or a Kiosk at Burger King. I can share calendars with my colleagues.  

I realize I'm just touching the tip of the iceberg here.  What are your favorite cloud-based applications?  How have you migrated from desktop to cloud ?  How has it helped or hindered your work? 

Find the best freelancers. odesk vs elance vs getafreelancer vs rentacoder (now vWorker)

One of the biggest challenges of a startup or growing small business is to find the right people for the right seat on the bus.   You often find yourself with a part-time need from a very qualified individual.

Can you take advantage of the Global effects of Web to help with your search?   

You bet you can! There are a number of platforms for sourcing freelancers or contract hires.  As you can see from this graphic, many of these platforms are drawing hundreds of thousands of visits each month.  That translates into a ready pool of talent for you. 

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/guru.com+elance.com+odesk.com/

Here is what we can share from personal experience. 

oDesk - This is the latest platform that we tried and we love it.  There are so many ways to search, there is such a rich group of contractors and you can find incredibly cost-effective offerings.  We're going to deep dive into oDesk shortly.  

First, lets take a quick look at some other options.  

Guru - They claim to be the world's largest online freelancer marketplace, with over 1,000,000 freelancers to choose from.  We've used it before and found some great project teams... and some not so great.  For a while, we offered a service to help with freelancer screening process (We did a series of posts on how to effectively screen freelancers ).  Guru was our favorite for a while and we wrote a blog comparing Guru with elance and rentacoder.

eLance, rentacoder (now vWorker.com) and getafreelancer - We've heard of good results for these but haven't used them personally. They appear to be an especially great source for copywriters, coders and web designers. The Compete graph above shows eLance to have the most traffic of the sites that we surveyed in Compete. 

As for oDesk, we were impressed by the ability to search across so many different criteria - areas of expertise, feedback from other clients, number of tests passed, test scores compared to their peer group, experience in hours, rates and more. Take a look at the dashboard below illustrating a search for SEM professionals.

With over 300 qualification tests available on oDesk, there are a wide range of hard skills you can use to sort out the freelancers you'd prefer to work with.

Properly finding a freelancer needs a significant time investment.  Beyond finding your ideal candidate based on qualifications, tests, references and rates, you need to check references.  You should also gauge responsiveness and communication.  We recommend starting with a small project and growing from there.  

Have you used any of these platforms?  If you have, please share your experience with us. Are there other freelance platforms, freelance marketplaces or freelance forums our readers should know about? 

Using Vyew for Real-Time Online Collaboration

Our fourth "Cool Tool of the Week" this week will feature Vyew, a free online conferencing and collaborating tool offered by Simulāt, Inc., a Berkeley, California start-up.

Vyew allows users to collaborate through online work spaces called 'Vyewbooks'. Each user can create up to 20 Vyewbooks and upload up to 50 files for free accounts. The tool allows real-time sharing of your desktop as well as any shared files which you upload. File types supported include not just the usual word documents, excel and powerpoint files - but also GIFs, JPEGs and MP3s. Also, Vyew doesn’t require any client downloads.

The great thing about Vyew is that when you invite people into your Vyew account, you can limit their access to specific Vyewbooks, and even force them to follow you from one Vyewbook to another one in real-time if you are taking them through different content. Collaborators and moderators can also go in anytime after meetings to update any changes that need to be made to the Vyewbooks. 

The free VoIP and teleconferencing is an added bonus, especially for startups on a tight budget for online conferencing or collaborating. A recording and playback function is available in beta release at the moment, and is to be expected to be available in Vyew for general use in the coming month.

In the webcast below, Kyra Zhao of Team and a Dream introduces you to Vyew and walks you through some functions you may find useful for your small business.

 

Other web conferencing tools worth checking out include drop.io, GoToMeeting, and Budget Conferencing. 

Take a look at our previous Cool Tools of the Week!

1. Google Insights

2. Twitter

3. Blending Free Tools to Find your Social Media Mix - Groundswell and Quantcast

  

Blending Free Tools to Find your Social Media Mix

Should you start to Tweet on Twitter?  How about creating a Facebook business page?  What role should YouTube videos play in building your business?   Lately, a lot of Internet Startups are trying to determine the best business strategies for reaching clients through Social Media.  This is a big topic.  However, this screencast takes a look at two easy to use tools that, when combined, can provide you with powerful insights into your market demographics and how they want to be engaged through social media.

The first tool was built using data gathered during research for the book Groundswell from Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.  Forrester is a leading research and strategy firm that follows technology trends.  Groundswell provides a strategic approach to using Social Media, examines case studies of successful use of Social Media and provides frameworks for evaluating your ROI.

The second tool is called Quantcast.  Quantcast was born out of the spirit of traffic tracking sites like Alexa and Compete, but adds an important dimension of providing a best-guess at the demographics of the people visiting your site.  It is exactly this demographic data that the Groundswell tool uses.

Team and a Dream founder Skip Shuda explains how these tools can be used to create a Social Media Business Strategy.

Click on the image below to fire up the screencast (length 4:40).

 

Take a look at our previous Cool Tools of the Week!

1. Google Insights

2. Twitter

How and Why Startups Use Twitter

Our second “Cool Tool of the Week” explores Twitter, a social messaging tool that allows you to connect with others in real time.  It is a very powerful communications tool, similarly to instant messengers, but with a twist: you must convey your message in 140 characters or less.

How can this help your web business?  Part One of the screencast below discusses prime reasons why and how your business can use Twitter effectively for marketing and public relations efforts.

Follow us on Twitter!

Take a look at our previous Cool Tools of the Week!

1. Google Insights

By: Marilyn Moran

Using Google Insights to Test an Idea

Our first “Cool Tool of the Week” screencast takes a look at Google Insights, a free tool from Google that allows you to look at all Google web searches from 2004. It lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames. This allows you to gauge the popularity of a specific search term.

How can this help your web business? The screencast below takes you through a fictional scenario where I want to build a site for vegetarians. I’m not sure what features to add or what type of content I should focus on and I use Google Insights to help me figure it out. 

Besides market testing, check out the other ways you can use the tool. 

By: Yasmine Mustafa

Announcing our "Cool Tool of the Week" Series

We’re excited to announce a new series titled “Cool Tool of the Week.” This weekly series, to be posted every Monday, will feature a brief introduction and screencast on how to use a free or cost-effective tool that can help web startups. Our Team and a Dream staff will record a two to five-minute screencast which will include a brief introduction to the tool, an example of how it’s used, as well as how it can help you with your startup. Make sure to check in with us every Monday and tell us what you think!

Our "Cool Tool of the Week" schedule for December includes:

·         Monday, December 15, 2008 – Yasmine Mustafa will present Google Insights

·         Monday, December 22, 2008 – Marilyn Moran will discuss Twitter

·         Monday, December 29, 2008 – Skip Shuda will showcase Quantcast

By: Yasmine Mustafa

Podcasts and Blogs and Twitter... oh my!

The number of Social Media options available to businesses today is overwhelming.   Should you start a blog?   How about Twitter?  Should you start tweeting?   What about LinkedIn?  Facebook?  MySpace? 

Oh My!  The options can be staggering and time consuming.

This is the second screencast in a series about using Social Media in your business.   In this Screencast (2 min 10 secs), Team and a Dream founder Skip Shuda provides a whirlwind tour of the P.O.S.T. approach to social media in business.