Which HubSpot Marketing Plan is Right for Your Business?
As a marketing agency, we’ve worked with many of the marketing automation software and CRMs out there—Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, Infusionsoft, Zoho, and more.
But there’s a reason why we’re an official HubSpot partner—it’s the best system for sales and marketing for small to midsize businesses. HubSpot is intuitive and powerful. Not only does it keep contacts, marketing, and sales efforts organized, but it marries information across the entire customer lifecycle. It answers the question of what’s working and the automation features make our jobs much easier. Plus, the integrated sales and service options help marketing, sales, and customer service work collaboratively with a single source of truth on contacts and company data.
To see the full list of features, click here.
We talk to businesses every day about HubSpot and one question we often get during the buying process is, “Which HubSpot plan will work best for our business? Do I need the Professional Plan or can we use the Starter Plan?”
While this is an individual decision for each business, it’s important to understand the different features these plans offer and what the capabilities mean for your business.
Below are some clarifications and considerations to make when assessing which package makes the most sense for your business.
There are three apps to consider when assessing HubSpot—Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. For right now, we’re going to focus on the Marketing Hub, since that’s the primary decision we find clients struggling to make.
Marketing Hub Starter vs Professional?
To see the full list of features, click here.
There is a big price difference between the Starter and Professional Plans. The Starter Plan starts at $50 while the Professional Plan starts at $800. That’s obviously a very different investment. It’s important to note that prices do go up as contacts increase and the professional plan does require on boarding fees.
The Starter Plan is fairly bare-bones but can be a good start for small companies. With this plan your business can build and send emails, create a limited number of contact lists, and use live chat. While you’ll be able to send emails, the number of emails you can send is limited, as are the number and types of landing pages you can build. You can use simple forms for lead generation and view reporting dashboards, based on templates created by HubSpot.
What isn’t available in the Starter package are the tools that make up the core of “marketing automation” such as workflows, campaigns, social media scheduling, blogging, calls-to-action, and in-depth reporting
The Professional Plan includes everything that the Starter Plan does, plus these key features:
Marketing Automation
Content and SEO Tools
Reporting and Analysis
Below are the details of these three feature buckets.
Marketing Automation
For those who don’t spend their days marketing, the category of “marketing automation” tools can seem somewhat obscure. We’ll clarify what we’re talking about when we discuss HubSpot marketing automation.
Most commonly businesses start out using HubSpot’s marketing automation tools to organize their data, trigger internal messages and reminders, and create programs to nurture leads, opportunities, and customers.
HubSpot’s marketing automation workflows are one of our favorite and most used tools. Workflows allow marketers to scale ongoing email communication with prospects and automate time-consuming tasks, like data clean up.
As an example, recently we set up an automation that triggered a series of internal and external messages. The client we were working with sells books on their website. We set up a workflow that kicked-off the following actions:
Site visitor buys a book
The customer is added as a contact in HubSpot and assigned the values:
Lifecycle Stage - Customer
Source - Book Purchase
Contact Owner - Sales team
20 points are assigned to the contact’s lead score
An email is sent to the contact owner to notify them of the new customer
The contact is entered into a four-part email series that invites them to engage with the brand over a two-month period
I share this example in an effort to provide more context for the types of automation that can be set up to better organize your data and your communication efforts.
Learn more about marketing automation here and see how we use it to promote webinars here.
Content and SEO Tools
Both the Starter Plan and the Professional Plans include HubSpot landing pages, but the Starter Plan has its limitations. While you can use the drag-and-drop editor, responsive templates, simple forms, and some reporting, calls-to-action are not available, and landing pages cannot be personalized to the same level they can be with the Professional Plan and A/B testing isn’t an option.
With the Professional Plan, marketers can personalize content, calls-to-action, and forms to individual visitors. To increase conversion rates, different content can be shown depending on the visitor’s location, source, device, buying stage, or other contact details stored in the CRM. Dynamic forms can gather more information from prospects and avoid asking for the same information more than once.
Marketers using the Professional Plan can fine tune their landing pages by analyzing, testing, reviewing custom reporting, and optimizing their landing page performance. It’s easy to identify your best performing landing pages and get customized keyword suggestions. A/B testing is only available in the Professional Plan to help marketers optimize every element on the page for better results.
Learn more about landing pages here.
Reporting and Analysis
While the Starter Plan does include some reporting, the custom reporting and in-depth analysis you can get with the Professional Plan has the potential to elevate your marketing and improve your investments.
Dashboards and Custom Reporting: Both the Starter Plan and the Professional Plan offer the ability to build dashboards. In the Starter Plan, users get access to basic pre-built templates, while the Professional Plan allows you to create customized reports and doubles the number of reports available in the dashboard.
Record Properties: Record customization also comes into play when comparing the reporting capabilities of the two plans. The Professional Plan allows users to add additional sections to contact, company, deal, and ticket records increasing your knowledge and ability to personalize marketing to leads and customers.
SEO Capabilities: The Professional Plan provides SEO tools to improve your content strategy. With a Google Search Console integration, marketers can get organic search insights and make more informed content decisions.
Campaign Reporting: Only in the Professional Plan can marketers group-specific pieces of content together to understand how each landing page, blog post, CTA, site page, event, etc. are performing the best.
Website Traffic Analysis: The Professional Plan allows marketers to see how their content is performing within HubSpot. Use detailed filers, like bounce rate, average time on page, and more to evaluate success and areas for improvement.
If you’re deciding between the Starter and the Pro HubSpot Marketing packages, you have to decide how important automation, content and SEO tools, and reporting and analytics are to your business.
If you’re a small company, with one marketer and one salesperson, with no more than 20 to 30 leads coming in per month, you probably don’t need all of the bells and whistles right away. You can likely take a phased approach, adopting the Starter version and then transitioning once you start to feel the feature gaps in your marketing and sales efforts.
But, if you’re a company with multiple salespeople and an active lead and sales pipeline, I suggest that you consider starting with the Pro package. Working with an official HubSpot Solutions partner like Think Better, waives the $4000 onboarding fee that HubSpot charges and gets your entire team set up for success with personalized training.
If you need help evaluating HubSpot and deciding what’s right for you, hit us up! We’d be happy to discuss your needs and advise on the best option for you.
