Hubspot CRM – Ultimate Guide 2024
HubSpot remains a cornerstone of modern digital marketing and sales strategy for seasoned marketers and budding entrepreneurs. It empowers businesses to attract, engage, and delight customers with its integrated tools for marketing, sales, service and CRM.
This blog will explore everything youāll need to know about HubSpot, from its fundamental concepts and features to all the latest advancements and best practices.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot CRM is an intuitive cloud-based platform for businesses of all types, serving both B2B and B2C customers. It aligns sales, marketing and customer service departments to promote business growth and improve revenue. At its core, HubSpot offers marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations and commerce.
The platform offers various tools and features to attract, convert and delight customers at scale by merging social media, SEO, and customer relationship management into one cohesive platform. Collaborating with various platforms provides a seamless flow of customer data to improve business efficiency and deal closure rates.
What is HubSpot CRM used for?
HubSpot CRM is a customer relationship management platform that streamlines your entire business operations by connecting sales, marketing, services, and content management. The platform aims at improving the efficiency, productivity and profitability of your business. This platform can be used by a wide array of industries, including education, manufacturing, retail, financial services and many more.
Historical view of HubSpot
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, both MIT graduate students, founded HubSpot in 2006. They observed that people’s shopping and product purchases had changed significantly. They want reasonable information to focus on something other than commercials, leading to crafting inbound marketing, which focuses on creating reasonable content and attracting the right audience.
Today, HubSpot has evolved beyond the marketing suite, creating a seamless customer experience. It uses a platform built on AI-powered CRM, helping numerous businesses grow.
Key features of HubSpot
1. Free CRM
HubSpot offers a free CRM platform that streamlines your entire business operations. It helps you manage your customer data, track deal journeys, manage ads and live chat and build and customise forms. The platform enables sales and marketing teams to improve the productivity and efficiency of the business. The system allows tracking, reporting and third-party integrations as per your requirements. You can build and customise your forms to generate free leads. The platform enables businesses to leverage over 1500 integrations in its free CRM.
2. Live Chat
This feature allows you to connect with website visitors to connect, engage, convert to new leads, close more deals and provide better support to their customers in real-time. The system auto-assigns customers to the right person, improving the response time and providing real-time customer service. You can customise chat widgets to match the look and feel of their brand and create targeted welcome messages for different webpages or segments of their customers. You can also create bots to simplify the deal qualification funnel, book meetings, and provide answers to common questions.
3. AI content writer
The AI content generator is a free tool by HubSpot to create optimised content with AI-assisted writing. You can generate website blogs, website copy, and social media posts to scale your content output without additional budget or resources. Creating optimised and engaging content helps drive brand awareness and attract leads. This free tool is available with HubSpot marketing, sales and content features, which allow your team to create content with simple prompts to draft the subsequent prospecting email, landing page or blog post.
4. Website Builder
With this free website builder, you can create and customise your business website with a drag-and-drop feature. You can edit and build your website without any technical knowledge or skills. The platform offers pre-defined themes that help you publish your website faster. You can also customise the modules for a seamless user experience. HubSpot tracks website performance and sees your business grow.
5. Understanding Hubspot hubs
HubSpot has various hubs that categorise and organise different business operations to provide specialised tools and features to manage sales and marketing strategies. Each hub focuses on a specific area to optimise business processes, improving your business efficiency, productivity and profitability. The HubSpot hubs include a marketing hub, sales hub, service hub, CMS hub, operations hub, and commerce hub.
6. Hubspot Marketing Hub
The marketing hub allows you to attract the right audience, convert more prospects into customers and run inbound marketing campaigns. The features of Marketing Hub target campaigns and Google Ads and track their performance. You can create customised pop-up forms without the need for coding or technical skills.
7. Hubspot Sales Hub
The sales hub is a powerful tool that helps your sales team close more deals, develop customer relationships and manage their deal pipeline. The sales hub connects your email to trigger email sequences, log responses, and update contact records. Your sales team can create new deals, assign tasks and follow sales. You can improve your selling process and decrease the deal closure lifecycle with configure, price and quote software (CPQ).
8. Hubspot Service Hub
The customer service hub helps you conduct seamless onboarding, enable flexible customer support, and deepen your customer relationship at scale to drive team efficiency. Deliver efficient and authentic service with insights about industry standard service. Provide automated customer service, eliminating manual work and focusing on solving customer issues faster.
9. Hubspot CMS Hub
The CMS hub is content management software, a flexible tool for marketers and developers to provide a personalised and secured customer experience. The tool helps you create and optimise your digital content, enabling you to create landing pages, website pages, and blog posts to captivate audiences and align with SEO practices.
10. Hubspot Operations Hub
The operations software of HubSpot synchronises, cleans, and curates customer data and business operations. The platform allows you to create custom programmable automation with JavaScript. This two-way data sync converges all your customer data into a single platform, keeping your data clean, clear and under control.
12. Hubspot Commerce Hub
The commerce hub is a dynamic platform specifically curated for e-commerce businesses that helps you bill your customers and collect revenue. You can manage your quoting, payments, reporting, and customer data on a single platform. Improve your positive cash flow with features like payment links, auto-generated invoices, and quotes. Collect, manage and report on subscription payments to grow your revenue for subscription services.
Types of Hubspot services
HubSpot provides services that address various facets of sales, customer relationship management, and digital marketing. Depending on the requirements and objectives of the company, these services can be used alone or in combination. HubSpot also provides training and support options to ensure customers get the most out of their services,
Here are some of the types of services offered by HubSpot:
1. HubSpot CRM Implementation
The implementation services for HubSpot CRM include installing the software, preparing the data for migration, importing customer data, integrating with previous services, setting the sales funnel, and adding users. For the company to easily manage both present and potential customers by their needs, the process entails setting up HubSpot hubs.
2. Hubspot Onboarding Services
The onboarding services configure your HubSpot software and train your team on using the platform to maximise productivity. The onboarding experts help analyse your business model and set goals, plans, challenges and timelines (GPCT). These experts also document strategies to assist you in achieving a targeted result.
3. Hubspot CRM Customisation
CRM customisation includes modifying the features of the platform based on business requirements. The HubSpot experts help you use custom objects, properties, and associations to organise specific data models. Using customisation services ensures that they are transparent and easily scalable. The experts also offer managed services that provide support.
4. Hubspot Marketing Integrations
Integrations allow you to integrate various platforms to deliver a unified message across different channels. It standardises communication and data flow, including advertising, PR, social media channels, websites, etc., to create various promotional campaigns on a single platform, enabling strong brand awareness and fostering customer loyalty. You can track the progress of your campaigns and get insights to make informed decisions.
5. Hubspot Automation Service
The automation services help you eliminate manual processes to provide customer support on live chat, email, facebook and other platforms. Marketing automation services help you seamlessly switch between channels that give complete context to every customer interaction. The customer service team can create a personalised experience and provide unprecedented visibility across your internal platforms.
6. HubSpot Migration Services
The migration services for HubSpot help you migrate your data and assets from another platform to HubSpot. These include website migration, CRM data migration and other content migration. The website gets migrated from a new theme in HubSpot CMS, content migration from HubSpot Marketplace, a re-platforming or a default theme. CRM migration involves migration from different CRMs to HubSpot. You can move your website content, like pages, blogs, and reports, to HubSpot.
Is Hubspot a free tool?
HubSpot offers a free CRM that is fully functional and customisable and helps businesses manage their contacts, sales, pipeline, digital marketing and lead nurturing. This free version includes marketing, sales, customer service, content management, and operations. The features for your marketing team include forms, email marketing, ad management, and landing pages. You can use contact management, deal pipeline, quotes, and meeting scheduling to improve deal closure rates for your sales team. Furthermore, you can streamline your customer service process with free features like ticketing, email scheduling, live chat/ basic bot and a shared inbox. The platform also helps you optimise your website and blogs with basic SEO recommendations and edit websites with a drag-and-drop editor. You can also sync your data, choose default field mapping and integrate the app marketplace for operations.
Inbound marketing with HubSpot
Inbound marketing is a strategy to attract loyal customers to your business by aligning it with audience requirements. It focuses on creating a personalised and tailored experience through valuable content to drive customer engagement and growth. Inbound marketing aims to foster long-term relationships with prospects and customers.
There are three ways of using inbound marketing:
- Attract – Seeking attention with the right and personalised content and conversations. The interactions must establish you as an expert in the niche. Creating SEO-optimised blog articles, content offers, and social media posts improves brand visibility and awareness.
- Engage – Provide solutions to prospects that match their pain points and requirements to compel your customers to buy your product or service. Communicate with your customers with inbound strategies to build long-term relationships with them.
- Delight – Offer your customers support to attain success with the product. Integrate well-timed chat-bots and surveys to help, support and request feedback to delight your customers. You can also use social media listening to ask for feedback, ask questions and share your experience with your products or services.
Read More: Salesforce CRM ā The Ultimate Guide 2024
Getting Started with HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful tool that offers a wide range of tools and features for your sales, marketing and service departments. It is a vast platform and might need expertise to handle and maintain it. You can either hire your developer to handle HubSpot operations or consult third-party HubSpot consulting services that can help you with HubSpot implementation, onboarding, customisations, integrations, automation, and migration.
Once you have created your account on HubSpot, you can start with email, website and contact integrations to generate leads. HubSpot has provided a detailed guide on setting up your HubSpot platform. Letās have a look at the steps included in setting up your HubSpot platform in brief:
- Email integration – With email integrations, you can monitor and manage your entire email activity, which requires a single automated source of email data.
- Create filters – Filters can help you create groups to see similar activities done by people, like a recently opened email or a reply to an email.
- Import contacts – Moving your old contacts into a new system enriches the platform with more accurate customer data.
- Deal stage defining – Predefining stage types is a way of keeping track of multiple deals in the pipeline. You can move the deals within the predefined stages using the drag-and-drop option.
- Lead ads – You can create ads within the platform and generate leads from a targeted audience. All the new leads get auto-populated within the CRM.
- Integrate website – You can collect data from your customer visitors and improve the quality of customer data inside the CRM by integrating JavaScript tracking code.
- Get your team to work – You can invite your team from all the departments, ensuring centralised data access for the team members.
Scale your business with HubSpot and āMaster Software Solutionsā
āMaster Software Solutionsā is an IT service-based company that offers HubSpot consulting services, helping you analyse and configure your business requirements and strategise accordingly. We are a team of 90+ experts with more than nine years of experience in IT services. Gain access to an extensive array of services, from HubSpot customisation to implementation, to enhance business outcomes. Let us use our expertise to support HubSpot’s long-term expansion. Join us on a transformative HubSpot journey.
