HubSpot is not a Marketing Automation Tool

HubSpot is known to many marketers as a marketing automation tool. This is not for nothing because HubSpot still scores high in all areas when compared to other marketing automation tools (check out the independent international comparison sites based on real user reviews such as Trustradius, G2crowd or Gartner Peer review).

Very nice, those high user review scores of HubSpot, but marketers still miss many opportunities to use HubSpot and their own knowledge and skills to add more value in the entire commercial process within their own organization.

Take off your marketing only glasses and put on the customer centricity glasses

With HubSpot, a marketer now has the tool in their hands to bring the rest of the commercial organization into the inbound methodology. You have to take off your marketing only glasses and put on the customer centricity glasses. For some marketers very welcome but for others perhaps still a bridge too far.

HubSpot has listened carefully to its customers in recent years and has now bundled not only the fragmented marketing landscape into smart and useful functionalities, but the entire commercial process. Or better, if you start from the customer, the entire customer journey.

In addition to the Marketing Hub, with the full-fledged HubSpot CRM, the Sales Hub, and the Customer Service Hub as a basis, you can now perfectly shape the total customer journey in one and the same platform. Especially in combination with more than 300 integrations with external applications such as Eventbrite, Salesforce, and bv Outlook. And all these Hubs have the same intuitive interface and convenient functionalities in both app and desktop -That's awesome! American HubSpot itself would say.

But there's more...

HubSpot found out that some overzealous and technically savvy marketers were building entire functional websites based on the landing page functionality in the Marketing Hub. Even though a limited CMS was available in HubSpot as of 2012, few found their way into it. This was because this CMS had very limited functionality, barely different in landing page functionality.

When Webs started helping clients optimize their commercial process in 2015, we still stayed far away from HubSpot in terms of building new websites for clients. In fact; it was not even possible given customers' requirements!

Now we are 5 years on and today we only build websites with the CMS on the HubSpot platform. Not because we have no other choice, but because it saves so much for us. And more importantly, for our clients. It's almost a criminal act to have our clients develop a website on another CMS.

Switching between, say, a Wordpress site, an additional hosting party, the internet agency with the specific Wordpress knowledge and then HubSpot is a thing of the past. Everything under one roof with the same look and feel.

Previously a big lie...

Just 3 years ago there were some agencies still honking around that if you chose HubSpot Marketing Automation you should also create your website in HubSpot. That was a big fat lie but an understandable argument from their point of view to move customers for something other than HubSpot. After all, who wants to completely revamp their website if they choose HubSpot. That's pure capital destruction. Your boss sees you coming. I want to get into marketing automation for 10,000 euros, and, by the way, our website developed last year, which was created with a lot of effort and pain also needs to be revamped a la 25,000 or 50,000 euros. Cake Cake!!!

HubSpot CMS can now easily withstand any comparison with CMS parties.

Today we state that we can serve 99% of all our customers excellently with HubSpot CMS. Not 100% yet but that will soon be possible given the roadmap presented to us by HubSpot's management. HubSpot's CMS can pass any comparison with Joomla, Drupal, Sitecore, TYPO3 and others without fail. You have to start looking at CMSs in particular with a different set of glasses.

Other glasses

In CMS choices, we still too often encounter IT department-driven selection processes. There are still a lot of requirement lists that consist for more than half of technical requirements. This is unfortunate because as far as Webs is concerned, the choice for a CMS should never be determined by IT. IT will never claim to make this choice alone, but in many cases they do control the selection process. Not surprisingly, in the past a CMS was part of the local IT landscape, because it had to remain controllable and manageable.

Choosing a CMS today should be a business-driven process

However, today a modern CMS system is mostly a cloud solution and instead of being controllable and manageable, it should be scalable and flexible. This in order to solve/answer the questions in the market through a multichannel approach because the customer journey is central. In short, a choice for a CMS today should be a business-driven process. And where we say business, we don't mean the product-driven managers but the customer-driven manager who takes the customer journey as a starting point.

Suppose that you would really occupy your core value "customer centric," you would not quickly come to the choice of a CMS system that are excellent from a technical perspective. This is because a customer doesn't care where something is made in, where it resides on a server, whether it links easily to your ERP system or otherwise.

That's an Inside-Out approach. With an Outside-In approach, you no longer speak of a Content Management System but a so-called Customer Engagement Platform. This allows you to best help the customer across all customer disciplines such as marketing, sales and customer service and that is exactly the vision HubSpot promotes - Grow Better.