I had a new client ask me the other day if I knew anything about HubSpot and what I thought about them. He specifically wanted to know whether he should use HubSpot or WordPress, not fully understanding the difference. I told him I’d do an analysis of their products and give him my opinion. Here’s what I came up with. I’ve broken down each section of HubSpot and compared it to the closest WordPress feature I could relate it to.
Create Section
If you create your content with HubSpot and decide to leave HubSpot I could not determine who owns the content. Are you at risk of losing all the time and effort it took to develop the content that you’ve created? How about SEO rankings that the content has helped you achieve if they take it offline? SEO takes months to start seeing benefits from, but they last a lifetime. Does this mean you are tied to HubSpot for a lifetime as well?
I have learned that your content is yours, and you can take it where ever you go if you decide to cancel with HubSpot, but why wouldn’t you just create this content on your own website that you control and own to begin with? When your content starts to produce results and becomes vital to your business and invaluable to you, wouldn’t you like to have the piece of mind of knowing you have full control over it? What if HubSpot goes out of business (although I heard they have significant funding) and disappears? And even if you did retain rights to that content, moving it to a new server, even if the domain is the same, can sometimes lead to a drop in rankings because of IP address issues and server speed. Both of which you can control if you host your own content.
Optimize Section
Google’s search engine has such a huge market share that no other search engines really matter to us SEO’s. I don’t care how my customers rank in Bing or Yahoo or even Ask because they produce no business for my clients. HubSpot has several tools including a keyword research tool and page grader. My experience is that Google Webmasters Tools has the best page grader available because it is exclusive to Google’s own search results, the only results that really matter, and its free. They also have the best keyword research tool available, because its also exclusive. I only care what these tools say are good keywords because if my main focus is to rank on Google, all I want to know is what Google thinks about their own keywords. There is nothing better than going directly to the source in my opinion.
Promote Section
In terms of social media and email marketing, HubSpot has some nice products. However social media integration can be added and fully automated with WordPress with little effort and there are so many options out there it’s rediculous. I use a plugin for my email marketing company, MailChimp, that as soon as someone signs up for my newsletter, my autoresponder keeps their email box fed for six months. And I can add that same functionality on Facebook, YouTube, and anywhere else I want to. I only use their start service which is free. Then in my WordPress dashboard I can look at all the statistics such as how many emails were opened, how many were clicked on, how many unsubscribed, etc. Hard to beat for free.
For social media I use a plugin called Ping.fm that publishes links to my new content out to about 30 social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others. So where it looks like HubSpot works with just Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, WordPress will work with thousands of social networks, services, etc. I think much better can be achieved in terms of promotion. I didn’t even cover Pinging or RSS either, two additional ways to promote your website can be set up to build hundreds of backlinks with the push of a button if you know what you’re doing (or know a WordPress expert that knows what he is doing) You just have to know how to set it up.
Convert Section
I have two words to say here, Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the most used conversion tracking software in the world, they are practically on every major website. They provide the most detailed data on tracking and conversions that most companies need. And again, it’s coming straight from the source. It’s easy to set up (add the plugin and enter your account info) and reports can be automatically emailed to you each day, week, or month to show you exactly how things are going with all your Internet marketing efforts. I have over 100 sites in my Dashboard I watch daily. I would use nothing else. In terms of lead and prospect management, WordPress has a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) plugin or I would use a Free Personal Account with http://www.salesforce.com which also has a WordPress plugin. And just about any online CRM service you find that’s not a CMS will integrate with WordPress anyways that would be 100% adequate and do that same job HubSpot can do, except with much more flexibility.
Analyze Section
I go back to Google Keyword Tool, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster tools here. The only part of this that you might need to visit something different is Competition, and for that we have tools such as SpyFu and Compete.com, two of the most comprehensive competition focused applications available.
Conclusion – Updated
I feel like HubSpot is probably worth the money if you have limited knowledge of all the methods I mentioned above and would like everything manageable under one roof. However, for the more technically adept, there are better tools that can do a better job and you won’t be tied or limited to any one source. This is an industry that changes daily, literally. Google changes their algorithms and one thing that works for search or social media today can change overnight. I’ve seen BMW’s site erased from Google’s index because of a couple of mistakes their Internet consulting firm made. I’ve seen a friend lose over 500 clients’ website rankings because he used a system similar to HubSpot’s (won’t mention the name) and because of a mistake they made Google penalized any site associated with them. Not to say that would happen to HubSpot, but again you don’t have the control. You want to have total control over your entire web marketing system. You need to be able to use the best services out there, especially for the fact that they can all be integrated together just like HubSpot does for you. I feel strongly that limiting yourself to one company and one set of tools will hinder your ability to be as successful as you could.
