HubSpot and digital marketing go together like Batman and Robin, Federer and Nadal, Ant and Dec… but proving its value in a way that impresses the C-suite can be a challenge.
But, if you’re leading a marketing team and you need to make your case for a HubSpot adoption, being able to do so is an absolute necessity.
(We have a separate article covering how to calculate the ROI for a new website.)
Articulate to the rescue! In this blog, we’ll show you how much HubSpot costs, what metrics you need to look at to prove ROI, and the steps you need to take to make it a very harmonious relationship.
Get it? Got it. Good. Let’s go.
Before diving into the ROI of HubSpot, let’s swallow the frog and look at the costs first. Here are the initial and ongoing outlays you’ll be looking at when you start with or migrate over to HubSpot.
HubSpot works on a subscription model and offers a tiered pricing structure, which is designed to scale as your business (and usage) grows. There’s a free tier for businesses just wanting basic abilities or if they’re just starting out, and this can be upgraded to a paid package as your operations grow in complexity.
Depending on the features needed, these plans can range from £16 to thousands per month. Whether you need the Starter, Professional or Enterprise package will depend on your starting point and your goals. HubSpot flexes to match your ambition.
HubSpot offers various Hubs designed to meet different business needs. The Marketing Hub provides tools for managing campaigns, lead generation, email marketing, social media, and analytics, while the Content Hub focuses on creating, managing, and optimising content for blogs, landing pages, and SEO. Sales Hub, as the name suggests, is a customer relationship management (CRM) to help salespeople close more business.
Prices start at, well, free (with significant limitations in terms of functionality) through different tiers with increasing capabilities and prices: Starter, Pro and Enterprise. Check HubSpot’s website for the latest prices. We have clients who spend less than £100 a month on HubSpot Starter and clients who spend more than £5,000 a month on HubSpot Enterprise functionality. In short, your price and your mileage may vary considerably depending on what you need.
While you can get started with HubSpot CRM quickly, adopting additional features like the Marketing and Content Hubs typically requires a structured onboarding and transition phase. This phase should cover key tasks such as:
Partnering with an expert can accelerate this process, increasing time to value and ensuring successful adoption. Conversely, inefficient or delayed implementation can result in higher costs and may prevent you from realising the full benefits of the software.
There are many people and businesses out there that can help you do this but if you want peace of mind, hiring a HubSpot Partner is a good way to go.
HubSpot has a comprehensive but also overwhelming HubSpot Academy, which covers everything from system architecture to better sales processes.
It’s a good place to start if you want to get your team up to speed quickly and inexpensively. However, if you want to ensure that the platform continues to deliver value, technical challenges are solved quickly and that users improve their usage over time, you will want to organise personalised training and support either with a third-party agency or expert. Talk to us about creating a comprehensive onboarding and training plan designed for your team's needs.
Much like a bridge, a car or a marriage, HubSpot requires ongoing maintenance and attention to keep it healthy and working as it should, in line with your business goals and requirements.
The ideal for many businesses is to have a HubSpot Specialist in-house who is familiar with your industry. But, if your budget won’t stretch that far just yet, working out a monthly retainer with your HubSpot agency can keep things working optimally while keeping headcount down.
The ROI for ongoing support comes from:
HubSpot provides excellent technical support to help you use the software. But professional support from an agency partner goes beyond that. It’s the difference between the driver’s manual and dealership warranty you get with a new car and a mountain leader who can help you get to the summit of Everest because they know the best route, the right equipment, the required training and because they will come with you on the journey.
You’ve been transported back to your business studies class. Your teacher is tapping the board, emphasising that something is important. You stop texting under the table for a moment to see what the fuss is about. It’s a formula scribbled in black marker:
ROI= (total investment/net profit)×100
ROI is the ratio of net profit generated by an investment compared to the cost of the investment itself. For HubSpot users, the challenge is quantifying the benefits gained from using its tools against the costs incurred.
Because HubSpot is such a behemoth we’ll just look at the CRM, Marketing and Content Hubs here, as we’re all marketers… and if you’re reading this you probably are too. These are main areas you need to be looking at when crunching your data and calculating your ROI ready for the scrutiny of your C-suite or board.
HubSpot’s CRM has been designed over many years to be the perfect platform for centralising customer data, improving your sales processes, and delivering a personalised buying journey for each prospect.
When estimating the ROI of these efforts, and the role HubSpot played, focus on two key areas: lead management and customer retention.
For lead management, consider how HubSpot CRM can improve your sales process with:
Consumers are willing to spend 17% more for a great experience. HubSpot can help you give it to them.
For customer retention, HubSpot’s automation and personalisation features can make a big difference. Automating follow-ups, segmenting contacts, and using email sequences can help maintain engagement. To measure ROI, track metrics like customer lifetime value (LTV) and churn rates before and after HubSpot implementation—though allow six to twelve months for data to build before assessing the results.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub helps marketing teams to automate campaigns and maximise the effectiveness of marketing strategies, across lead capture, social media and email marketing.
According to HubSpot’s very own ROI report, businesses that implement Marketing Hub have seen a 129% increase in inbound leads.
Measuring the ROI of Marketing Hub will depend on your team's goals, but we recommend focusing on two key areas: lead generation and campaign performance. If your reach, engagement, and qualified leads are improving, HubSpot is delivering value. To monitor lead generation, track metrics such as total leads, conversion rates, cost per lead (CPL), and lead-to-customer ratio.
For campaign performance, utilise features like A/B testing on marketing materials and monitor key metrics including email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), landing page conversions, social media engagement, and return on ad spend (ROAS). Reporting on these stats will provide clear ROI data and a clear path forward for future improvements.
Creating content sounds easy on the surface, but doing it well requires a very tight system of effective research, creation and distribution. HubSpot’s Content Hub helps creators and managers to accelerate and automate content campaigns, ensuring the content hits all of the many platforms, reaches the right people and achieves the intended purpose, whether that be clicks or search rankings.
Like the other Hubs, we recommend focusing your Content Hub ROI reporting on two key areas: engagement and organic traffic. For engagement, track metrics such as time spent on page, bounce rate, pages per session, and social shares. For organic traffic, monitor key indicators like total visitors, search engine rankings, and click-through rates from search results.
Rest assured, if your content is getting more clicks and dwell times are improving, something is working. In the same vein, if more people are finding your website organically, that means your content is valued both by customers and search engines.
As much as the business teachers of our pasts might disagree, calculating a single accurate figure for HubSpot’s worth without years of data to look at is not an easy task. Instead, by looking and reporting on the six areas highlighted above, you’ll have a great start on seeing how much heavy lifting it is doing (and have the bones of a great report for your C-suite).
HubSpot has a handy calculator to help you work all of this out before implementation, so you can state your business case with confidence.
But, without straying too far away from cold, hard numbers, HubSpot success is often more of a journey than a report. It’s a tool for ratcheting up your marketing performance over time and implementing best practices for your marketing. To ensure you get best long-term value, you need to do three things:
1) Ensure it stays aligned with business goals
Things happen, business goals change and strategies can get flipped on their head. In order to get the most from HubSpot, you need to make sure it is set up to deliver exactly what you want - and that means managing and changing its capabilities and reporting every time the goal posts get moved. Until it becomes self-aware and considers us obsolete a la Terminator 2, this will be an ongoing responsibility.
2) Analyse and optimise
We all dream of the set-and-forget campaign that rakes in cash while we jet off to Bali for the winter, but the reality is much grittier. You need to always analyse HubSpot usage and identify areas for improvement. This doesn’t always mean adding new features—it could mean taking some away, too. Keep track of where your budget is going and that it maps to your moving target. Read up on HubSpot best practices and stay up to date.
3) Get expert help
There’s no such thing as a self-made man and there’s absolutely no thing as a successful business made in isolation. As intuitive and powerful as HubSpot is, it never hurts to get a third-party opinion, whether in the guise of a formal audit or regular consulting from a trusted source. Tooting our own horn, we’re pretty good at HubSpot, and marketing in general, so get in touch if you’d like to talk HubSpot or marketing in general.
Ok… deep breath… here’s the pitch! If you’re looking to get started with HubSpot or need help making it roar, get in touch today for an informal chat. We’re good eggs, we promise, and HubSpot is our bread and butter. Let’s get something in the diary today.