HubSpot is a powerful software solution that helps to streamline sales, marketing, and customer service departments. However, its cost can be a big investment for businesses, so understanding its potential ROI is crucial before making a decision.
This blog provides everything you need to know about HubSpot pricing and its financial impact to help you make a better decision that fits your budget and business goals. We'll discuss the following points:
- The financial impact of MarTech on your business
- HubSpot pricing explained
- Choosing the right plan for your business
- 3 tips to maximise your HubSpot investment
The Financial Impact of Marketing Technology on Businesses
Positive Impacts
Enhanced Customer Insights
Investing in your marketing technology enables you to gain a better understanding of the demographics and behaviour of your customers and prospects. This means you can be more informed and efficient with your marketing spend, as you can choose to invest in marketing channels and tactics that align with the behaviour and interests of your customers and prospects.
- Discover insights into how CMOs spent their marketing budget in 2023
- In the video below, MarTech Expert, Chris Watson-James, discusses how business owners can utilise their tech stack for generating revenue at a better cost :
Improved Efficiency & Cost Savings
Investing in marketing technology helps to reduce time and money wastage across your entire Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service teams. For instance, the pipeline feature available in Sales Hub means that sales reps can quickly have an overview of the entire sales pipeline rather than adding friction to the sales process by navigating convoluted spreadsheets. Likewise, smart automation capabilities are available in Marketing Hub Pro (note: a very simplified version is available in Marketing Hub Starter), making it easy for the marketing team to set up email nurture sequences when a contact has completed a desired action (e.g. signed up to receive email marketing).
Potential Challenges
Initial Investment
The upfront cost of implementing marketing technology can be high, which might strain budgets for smaller businesses. However, it’s important to remember that investing in the right technology can yield substantial rewards. For example, platforms like HubSpot offer solutions to streamline marketing, sales and customer service processes, leading to increased efficiency and productivity which will have major impacts on your bottom line.
You also have to factor in your wider market. Some of the features HubSpot provides such as personalisation and automation are now seen as basics in the marketing world and not using them will leave you well behind the competition.
Complexity
Without the correct training, teams may find it challenging to understand how to use HubSpot effectively, resulting in underutilisation & wasted resources. As a HubSpot Platinum Certified Agency Partner, we’re certified and accredited to help train businesses to use HubSpot, through our bespoke onboarding and/or implementation services. If you’re looking for external support to help you navigate the complexity of HubSpot, it’s key that whoever you partner with is accredited and certified by HubSpot.
Streamlining Your Tech Stack - Case Studies
Menzies, a leading UK accountancy firm, had developed a complex tech stack where systems didn't properly integrate with each other, creating a lot of headaches for the team. They came to us to help streamline their tech stack and improve efficiency and resource management.
As a result of developing a bespoke HubSpot migration solution, we were able to help reduce wastage within their existing tech stack, improve efficiency, reduce cost and more. Read the full case study on our HubSpot migration and integration.
We have extensive experience of supporting clients with their HubSpot needs:
Find out how we can help you
How Can the HubSpot Platform Grow with Your Business?
HubSpot is a valuable asset for businesses looking to expand and evolve, as its plans and hub packages can grow as your requirements change. To ensure that your business makes the most of it, it's essential to select the appropriate HubSpot plan and hubs that align with your goals and objectives.
HubSpot Pricing
There are 4 different variables to consider when building a package with HubSpot:
- Hubs - Which tools do you need access to?
- Tiers - How advanced do you need these tools to be?
- Seats - How many users will need edit access to the tools?
- Marketing Contacts - How big is your database?
Tiers and Hubs
HubSpot offer their platform at 4 different tiers, starting from Free going up to Enterprise. This means that you can tailor the package you buy to match your business needs right now. Then, you can add additional hubs or upgrade your existing hubs to match your changing business needs. In other words, HubSpot has been designed to scale with your business.
HubSpot offer a range of hubs with different features. We've summarised below what each hub can help you with so you can make a more informed decision about which hubs to purchase/upgrade to.
Marketing Hub
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This is an all-in-one marketing automation solution that enables you to manage your marketing channels and activities from HubSpot including Email, Biddable Media, Landing Pages, Social Media, and more. |
Sales Hub
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This solution helps empower sales teams to create deal pipelines and close deals faster with a range of sales engagement tools, call tracking, sales automation & emails, lead management & prospecting, predictive lead scoring, and more. |
Service Hub
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Service Hub is focused on increasing customer retention with its help desk & ticketing, knowledge base, omni-channel messaging, and SLA management solutions. |
Content Hub
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This is one of HubSpot's latest hubs and is an all-in-one AI-powered content marketing solution, that can generate multiple outputs of content (imagery/blogs/social posts/emails) in just a few minutes, as well as other exciting features. |
Operations Hub |
The data quality automation and data sync feature available within Operations Hub enable businesses to keep data clean and accurate. |
Commerce Hub |
Designed for B2B, Commerce Hub enables businesses to run quoting, payments, and reporting in one place to help you get paid faster and increase revenue. |
HubSpot Package Examples
Just Getting Started?
As an entry-level example to HubSpot’s paid tools, you can take their entire suite of hubs (Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, Content and Commerce) all bundled around their Smart CRM starting from just £14* a month. This is based on one paid seat and 1,000 marketing contacts within your CRM (more on both of these later) .
With this suite of tools you can build and host a website, run basic automated email campaigns and monitor your sales pipelines all in one platform.
Need more powerful automation?
If you were instead looking at taking HubSpot’s latest product bundle (and in our opinion a great option for most marketing teams), Marketing + Professional now starts at £783* a month (based on 3 paid seats and 2,000 marketing contacts).
This bundle gets you access to advanced marketing automation and a suite of AI-powered content tools to help you maximise value from your content and take advantage of an omni-channel strategy without ever leaving the HubSpot platform.
HubSpot Seats Pricing Model
In 2024, HubSpot added seat pricing to ensure that their customers could pay for exactly what they need. This is great news if you’re just getting started with HubSpot, as now it’s cheaper to get started with tools like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.
There’s another benefit of the updated pricing model, not only can you now get access to HubSpot’s tools at a lower starting price, but if you work with one of HubSpot’s partner agencies (like Innovation Visual), we can access your portal as Partner users, which means you don’t have to pay for the additional users and we can maximise your ROI from your software investment.
Marketing Contacts
You will also need to consider how big your database is, and how many marketable contacts you will need to store in HubSpot. We can work with you to cleanse and audit your data to ensure that you’re only paying for the contacts you really need to.
*Prices correct as of June 1st 2024. HubSpot’s prices can change over time, so it’s worth checking their pricing page for the most up to date prices.
Choose the Right Plan
The combination of different hubs, tiers, seats and contact limits can make HubSpot’s pricing model seem quite confusing on the face of it, however, we can help you cut through the noise and pick the right package for your needs. Most HubSpot setups will be based around Marketing Hub, or Sales Hub, as these offer a lot of the core functionality that HubSpot users love. Using this as a starting point, we can help guide you on whether you’re going to need Content Hub, Operations Hub and / or Service Hub - this will depend entirely on your existing tech stack and business needs.
It's worth noting that you don't have to have the same tier across each hub you purchase - e.g. you could have Marketing Hub Starter and Sales Hub Professional. HubSpot's packages are very easy to upgrade when your business needs it. So, if you purchase Marketing Hub Professional but later decide that HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise is more appropriate, you can easily update your package.
Top 3 Cost-Effective Tips for Maximising Your Investment in HubSpot
1. Utilise HubSpot Academy
HubSpot offers an extensive range of free training resources and certifications such as AI for Marketers, Data Management, Email Marketing, and more. These resources can help your team quickly get up to speed and develop their knowledge of the platform, ensuring your business makes the most of its investment. Alternatively, we offer HubSpot expert onboarding services to help businesses get the most out of HubSpot from the beginning.
2. Leverage Automation
Automate repetitive tasks such as email follow-ups and lead scoring (note: this is dependent on which HubSpot hubs you've purchased) to save time and reduce operational costs. Likewise, you can use automation to help streamline key nurture workflows such as abandoned cart, post purchase, event follow-up, and more.
3. Create Dashboards and Reports
Use HubSpot’s range of customisable and out-of-the-box dashboard and reporting features to track performance metrics and make data-driven decisions. This will help identify areas where you can optimise your spending and help you visualise the impact of your investment in HubSpot.
However, we appreciate that reporting can be overwhelming! That’s why partnering with a HubSpot Partner agency like ours is a smart choice. We can help you uncover valuable insights within your data and create fully bespoke solutions and reports tailored to your needs.
Ready to Maximise your HubSpot Investment?
Investing in marketing technology is crucial for business growth, and HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite of tools to facilitate this. Despite some businesses having reservations around HubSpot pricing, if you utilise HubSpot effectively, the investment will be worthwhile.
As a HubSpot partner, we provide the expertise to create bespoke strategies and ensure businesses utilise HubSpot to its fullest. We've worked with a range of B2B and B2C HubSpot clients and have successfully completed many implementation, integration, and migration HubSpot projects.
Whether you're looking for an agency to completely outsource HubSpot implementation or need us to work alongside your sales and marketing teams, we can help. Get in touch with us today!
