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The B2B customer journey has changed tremendously over the years. Customers independently research their pain points and potential solutions, resulting in multiple touchpoints with brands across a variety of platforms.
According to Gartner, the average B2B decision-making team will include 6 to 10 people, each bringing multiple pieces of their own research to the group. This is especially true in the B2B technology space. For brands to create a lasting impression on these buyers, and position their company to bring in the customer, they need a strong martech stack to work for them.
HubSpot's Marketing Hub™ is a popular option for B2B companies interested in improving their ability to engage with customers across the internet. Each team needs to carefully evaluate the benefits of these capabilities and the ROI they can receive from this type of platform to determine if the investment is worth it for their organization. Likewise, this analysis can help companies choose which level of Marketing Hub™ is right for their team.
What Does Marketing Hub™ Offer B2B Marketers?
HubSpot is a company that offers a platform for managing inbound marketing, sales, and customer service for businesses. It regularly deploys new features and tools to help brands keep pace with changes in the online world. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub™ offers capabilities such as:
- Marketing automation
- CRM
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Website and blogging features
- Analytics
For many businesses, the automation tools offered create an excellent solution for staying abreast of the different marketing platforms and channels that organizations need to manage. For example, nurturing emails can be triggered by particular actions, team members can receive notifications when it is time to reach out to particular leads, and internal tasks and data collection are simplified.
For the business working to maintain a strong digital presence online, the ability to manage the different marketing platforms — such as their website, email, and social media — from a single source can also make digital marketing as a whole significantly easier.
The Marketing Hub™ offers scalable packages — Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise — so that businesses can tailor the features they receive with their needs, helping to keep costs more affordable for smaller organizations. Enterprise is the most expensive of the four packages at $3,200/month, but it also has the most features.
Should You Invest in Marketing Hub™ Enterprise?
More features is always better, right? Not necessarily.
As you evaluate your B2B technology business’s martech stack, ROI should be your primary objective. Ask yourself: will this particular investment allow me to accomplish my goals and grow my business? Will my team be able to leverage all of the tools at our disposal, or will we be paying for features we can’t use yet? These questions are worth answering before investing in something like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub™ Enterprise.
Other excellent platforms, such as Oracle’s Eloqua, are also on the market and should be considered before making a decision. Here are some areas that businesses should evaluate.
Pricing
For many smaller businesses, the Marketing Hub™ Enterprise price tag can be intimidating.
Before investing in this service, your company will need to consider whether it fits into their budget. Likewise, since each Marketing Hub™ package offers different features, you will need to determine what’s most important to your business and make sure the package that’s within your budget also has the marketing automation tools you need.
As previously mentioned, though, there are other packages available that may still fit your marketing needs. When compared to Oracle, though, HubSpot pricing comes out on top. Oracle can be more expensive, particularly for smaller businesses that might not need the largest packages.
Energy & Time Investment
Both HubSpot and Oracle will require brands to consider the time and energy needed to get the platform fully set up and customized to their needs as well. The brand representatives will also need to educate the rest of the team to ensure they get the full benefit of the platform and package selected.
Integration
Your martech stack works best when you can integrate your different platforms and software so that everything works together seamlessly. HubSpot Marketing Hub™ Enterprise offers a variety of different popular integrations including SurveyMonkey, Zoom, EventBrite, and ZenDesk. However, these integrations are also available with other HubSpot packages.
Other platforms, including Eloqua, also offer integrations, though their integrations largely center around other Oracle products. Those who employ the Oracle systems already will find this simple and straightforward.
Content Management Capabilities
Since digital marketing revolves around content marketing, businesses also need to consider the importance of content management capabilities. Eloqua has a strong focus on email marketing campaigns, which can work well for businesses that also use this as a core part of their marketing.
The HubSpot Marketing Hub™, however, has a far greater focus on creating and optimizing content for websites. They help with keyword research, optimizing content, and quickly publishing it through straightforward tools. Analytics then makes it easy to track content success. Still, B2B tech marketers will just need to make sure they purchase the right package for their needs — and budget.
Making a Decision About HubSpot Marketing Hub™ Enterprise
For businesses preparing to make a decision about HubSpot and its value to their organization, they will want to carefully consider what their business and their martech stack needs at this point. Consider budgetary constraints, goals moving forward, and how a strong marketing automation platform can help you achieve those goals. While you might not be ready for Enterprise just yet, the Free, Starter, and Professional packages still offer a variety of great tools to help you optimize your marketing strategy.
When businesses bring their marketing automation strategy together with an excellent digital presence, they can accomplish incredible things. Want to learn more about what is possible with marketing automation? Download our case study to learn how one of our B2B technology clients, Kinettix, was able to generate $10M revenue in their first three years of business.
