Managing your business efficiently and effectively requires the best tools available. Leveraging tools to streamline and magnify marketing and sales efforts can be especially important for small businesses with limited resources, but tools cost money, so they have to be cost-effective as well as increase productivity.
The HubSpot inbound marketing platform is a good example. But does it really make a difference?
How HubSpot Compares To Free Tools
Free is an attractive price. But since there is no free tool that can support all your marketing efforts, you have to acquire and coordinate a variety of independent marketing production and analytical tools – things such as Dreamweaver, Wordpress, Google Analytics, MailChimp, HootSuite, something that helps research keywords, etc. That can be a lot of work, and it can be frustrating.
HubSpot is not free, but it is comprehensive. It incorporates a series of specific tools to handle virtually every aspect of your marketing creation, delivery, reporting and evaluation. And they’re all integrated.
At OverGo Studio, we realized we had the data right in our hands to make some apples-to-apples comparisons between free tools available to marketers and HubSpot. This case study illustrates our actual experience with actual clients over a 12-month period.
We used a sampling of 14 client companies, each of whom published the same quantity of blog posts over the 12-month period measured. Each one also received the same level of inbound marketing services.
About Rick Kranz
Rick has 30+ years of business management experience. He is a bit of a serial entrepreneur having built many varied companies including a display manufacturing firm, a graphics company, a hair salon, an online retailer, and an inbound marketing firm.
Rick’s specialties include creating strategic marketing plans, inbound marketing, and sales management. His interests are unique and vary from golf, golf, and even golf.
Seven companies used HubSpot, seven did not.
Both groups included B2B and B2C companies across a diverse range of industries, all of which fall into the small business classification.
We measured organic traffic at the start of their inbound marketing program, then we measured again exactly twelve months later. We measured lead generation, and compared sub-groups of B2B and B2C companies.