HubSpot for Startups

If you are a startup and want to kick-start your business with expert guidance and highly effective marketing and sales tools, HubSpot is for you.

Marketing automation can not only save your time but can also take care of boring, repetitive tasks that a startup doesn’t want to get stuck with.

Hubspot is easy to use, impressively effective, and offers a great package for startups to get going in the competitive business landscape.

The company provides extensive training courses in addition to 1-on-1 consultations that make growth easier for a startup.

While it can be tempting to run outbound marketing campaigns to get your business in front of relevant people quickly, I recommend using the power of inbound marketing.

Let’s be honest. People don’t like ads. Ad blockers are so popular for that reason.

Plus, with inbound marketing, you can get maximum results with minimum expenses.

HubSpot is the best tool that can leverage the power of inbound marketing for your business. After reading this “HubSpot for startups” review, you’ll know why it’s the best choice for your startup.

Let’s dive in.

 

What is HubSpot for startups Program?

Previously known as HubSpot’s Jumpstart Grant Program, the HubSpot for startups program focuses on helping new businesses scale fast.

A long time ago, HubSpot was a startup too. It understands the hiccups an entrant faces in this competitive world.

The company offers impactful sales and marketing tools and guidance to promising startups to kickstart their businesses.

 

Benefits of HubSpot for startups

Discounts

A major benefit that may also come as a surprise to you is a huge 90% discount on the sales and marketing software. Although, of course, you’ll have to qualify for the HubSpot for startups program to get that, which is fairly easy.

 

Mentorship

HubSpot for startups program offers world-class courses taught by HubSpot experts in different industries.

Not only that, but there is a whole community that you can be a part of. Being a part of such a cohesive community allows you to learn and network with other startups.

 

HubSpot for Startups Onboarding

HubSpot onboarding is an exclusive service that qualified startups. You can talk to a startup specialist and get their help in developing an effective inbound marketing strategy.

It also provides you with technical assistance and access to the support team round the clock.

 

Additional Training

Not only do startups get comprehensive sales and marketing courses in the HubSpot Academy, but they also get exclusive training sessions.

The training session focuses on how you as a startup can use inbound marketing to generate leads, convert, and retain them as long-term customers.

 

Why should I use HubSpot as a startup?

1.   Effective Employee Training

A major investment you have to put in as a startup is employee training. Without trained employees, it’s practically impossible to get ahead in this competitive business space.

Thankfully, HubSpot is not like any other sales and marketing tool and provides in-depth learning resources in the form of HubSpot Academy.

You get detailed guidance on how you can take your startup to the next level by implementing advanced and effective marketing and sales tactics.

A business relies on its employees to perform. HubSpot’s helpful resources will help them get better at making your startup more visible and attractive to prospects.

 

2.   Pay as You Grow Plans

As a startup, it’s unlikely that you would have deep pockets to invest in premium plans that you don’t need.

Believe me; some tools take your money for the services you don’t even require. They just come with your plan. Why should you pay for something that isn’t adding value to your business?

Well, HubSpot for startups program is different, and in a good way. Your startup doesn’t have to pay for what you don’t require.

HubSpot has different program tiers that suit different business stages. For instance, if you are just starting, you won’t be needing more than 1000 contacts. HubSpot only provides that, and at a reasonable price point.

And, as your startup grows, you can upgrade your plan and use more features that can help you grow further.

 

3.   An All-in-One Marketing and Sales Platform

HubSpot is a one-stop-shop for all the marketing and sales-related needs for your startup. You won’t have to juggle multiple tools to streamline your online efforts.

The platform is ideal for startups that don’t want to waste their time understanding different software. If you want to avoid investing your time into keeping your marketing plan cohesive, HubSpot is for you.

It helps you attract your prospects, convert them into your customers, and retain them long-term. Customer retention allows you to spend less of your marketing budget on new leads as selling to existing customers is cheaper.

 

4.   Identify Website Visitors

When a prospect visits your website, HubSpot records their IP address and monitors their activities on the site. This allows you to pinpoint your potential customers and retarget them more effectively as a startup.

 

5.   Plan and Implement with HubSpot’s Calendar

 

Digital marketing is all about planning. Without a proper strategy, your efforts can easily go in vain, as you won’t have a tracking system in place.

Thankfully, HubSpot’s calendar allows startups to schedule and plan posts, blogs, emails, and landing pages.

By using HubSpot’s calendar, you can make sure your marketing goals are achieved in time. It also lets you track your progress, allowing you to get better along the way.

 

6.   Get Ahead with Effective SEO

Search engines aren’t going anywhere. People will continue to search for the stuff they want, and businesses will keep on putting solutions in front of them.

But, how can you be in the right place at the right time? With HubSpot’s powerful SEO assistance.

You don’t want to miss out on optimizing your website in the beginning days of your startup. SEO takes time, but once your website gets ranked, you can attract potential customers on auto-pilot.

HubSpot not only helps you in creating an effective SEO strategy but also aids you in producing search-engine-friendly content.

Another thing you’d be struggling with, in the starting days of your startup is establishing your authority in search engines like Google. HubSpot helps you build your authority with the search engines.

 

Why is CRM important for startups?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is important for startups for several reasons.

 

A CRM Allows Startups to Manage Leads Effectively

As a startup, you’d want to attract as many prospects as possible. For that, you’d be targeting multiple strategies. These will probably include:

• • Email marketing
  • Websites
  • Social media
  • Advertisements
  • Cold calls

But, it would be impractical to focus on all the channels. You’d have to find out the most suitable ones for your startup.

This is where a CRM comes in. A CRM like HubSpot tells you the source of your leads, allowing you to identify what’s working.

Email marketing provides the best ROI possible. Using the right CRM, you can automate your email sequences.

For instance, when someone subscribes to your email list, the CRM sends them a warming welcome email.

It also tells you when your prospect performs a specific action:

• • When someone opens your email
  • The number of times your email was opened
  • Did that person download your attachment?
  • Did they click on the link you placed inside the email?

Such information helps you identify whether your email strategy is working or not. For instance, if the open rate is low, you can make a tweak in your email’s preview text, the part that the user sees before opening an email.

 

A CRM Keeps all the Customer Information Centralized

Before CRMs, startups had to collect relevant data about customers from different places. With the help of a CRM now, your prospects’ data remains in one place.

This allows you to better understand your customers without exhausting many resources and take an impactful decision for your startup with teamwork.

 

A CRM Helps with Up-selling and Cross-selling

It’s easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers. A CRM helps you with customer segmentation, which helps in targeting existing customers effectively.

As a startup, you can either up-sell your customers (selling something more) or you can cross-sell them (selling something different) by using CRM data.

 

A CRM Automates Customer Engagement

With a CRM in place, you can instantly send notifications and alerts to your customers, which can improve the customer satisfaction rate of your startup.

 

Keeps Your Team Connected

Your team may not be present in one location all the time. A CRM provides a platform where you can access all the information related to your startup in one place.

So, no matter what the location of your employees, with a CRM, they can access and share data with each other.

 

Is HubSpot worth the money?

Absolutely!

HubSpot provides a complete set of software that can not only help you attract prospects but also in converting them into long-term customers.

With HubSpot’s marketing and sales software, you won’t have to invest in any other tool. The best thing is you pay as you grow. This means you can get the starter plan at an impressively low price point. And, when your startup grows, you can invest further.

And, as a startup that qualifies for the HubSpot for startups program, you get a whopping 90% discount on all software. And, a free CRM!

So, considering what HubSpot has to offer, it’s a steal for the price.

But, keep in mind that the 90% off deal is only valid for the first year. The second-year is 50% off. For subsequent years, your startup can continue to use HubSpot at 25% off.

Even at the full price, HubSpot’s impactful industry-leading software can easily make your startup a huge success.

 

What does HubSpot integrate with?

 

While HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales platform, it offers a complete marketplace of apps that you can integrate with it.

So, if you are using software already, and want to continue using it, you can integrate with HubSpot with ease.

For instance, it’s pretty straightforward to connect WooCommerce and HubSpot.

 

Is HubSpot better than Salesforce?

While both aim to provide an effective CRM for businesses of all sizes, Salesforce is a bit tilted towards large enterprises.

HubSpot is more user-friendly, so your team can get started without facing any hiccups. Salesforce is a little challenging to learn and has a confusing interface.

And, while you can get started for free with HubSpot, Salesforce doesn’t offer that advantage. HubSpot’s free plan helps you get your feet wet before purchasing a plan, even for the most basic features.

HubSpot is cost-effective, easy-to-use, has a free plan, offers great learning resources, and is ideal for startups.

This makes it a clear winner for a startup that needs a robust marketing platform.

 

What is HubSpot onboarding?

HubSpot onboarding is a 30-day setup period where a team of specialists helps you in utilizing the HubSpot platform for your startup.

It allows startups to get value from the marketing and sales software as soon as possible and get the success needle moving.

HubSpot has designed effective projects based on the most successful startups that used HubSpot before they were successful.

In the HubSpot for startups onboarding service, the company also teaches you how you can create sustainable growth strategies for your startup.

So, in HubSpot onboarding, HubSpot will create a complete plan based on your goals and guide you to achieve them.

 

How do you use HubSpot effectively as a startup?

HubSpot restructures your marketing workflows and helps you create an effective inbound marketing strategy.

You spend 61% less on inbound leads as compared to outbound leads.

Inbound marketing involves delivering valuable, user-centric, and high-quality content to relevant people, adding value to their lives.

Once they are attracted to what you want to help them with, you can convert them into leads and eventually into customers.

To understand better, let’s discuss the methodology of inbound marketing.

There are 4 main steps in the inbound marketing methodology: Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.

And, HubSpot’s helpful tools will assist you in every stage of this amazing method.

 

Attract

The first step is to attract the right audience. Ask yourself, who do you want to attract to your startup? The best way to identify the ideal customer is by creating a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your prospect. While creating a buyer persona, try to find their pain points, challenges, desires, demographics, and psychographics.

But, thankfully, you don’t have to create it manually. HubSpot’s amazing “Create my Persona” tool lets you create your buyer persona for free. On top of that, you can download the information in a Word file.

When you have a buyer persona, you can focus all your efforts on attaining and retaining that audience. This way, you get maximum results with minimum resources spent.

After you have your buyer persona, you create a list of keywords that people are putting in search engines.

Proper keyword research is a key to an impactful inbound marketing campaign. It’s necessary if you want your blog to appear in front of the right people.

Numerous tools can fetch you a list of keywords. A couple of highly effective tools are HubSpot and SEMrush.

Once you have a list of keywords around your main keyword, you have the license to create content around them.

For content ideas, you can use answerthepublic.com or HubSpot’s tool: The Blog Ideas Generator.

Or, you can use the good old Google search.

 

You don’t want your website to load slowly either. HubSpot provides you another amazing tool to check whether your site is performing well.

 

Let’s jump to the next part of inbound marketing methodology.

 

Convert

Once you get them to land on your website, you would want to convert them into leads and then to customers.

How do you do that?

By including a call-to-action in every blog post, article, video, or podcast.

Keep it simple and actionable. When they click on the call-to-action, your chances of making a sale maximize.

Let’s see how you can close them.

Close

This part is a little tricky. Your marketing and sales teams must be aligned with each other to finally convert the leads that you attracted. And HubSpot provides you marketing as well as sales tools to not only bring the leads but also to convert and retain them.

 

Delight

Once you close some customers, you’d want to continue selling (upselling/cross-selling) your existing customers. It’s a lot cheaper than acquiring new customers.

If you treat them right, not only will they continue to buy from you, but they will act as your brand ambassadors. And, word-of-mouth marketing is an effective strategy that can bring you a lot of conversions without you even having to spend a dime.

Now that you know how you can grow with HubSpot as a startup, let’s see how you can create an impactful inbound marketing strategy for your startup.

 

Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy for Your Startup

HubSpot’s effective software helps you implement an impactful inbound marketing strategy for your startup.

The marketing hub of HubSpot allows you to automate your marketing tasks and attract prospects on a scale. You can create converting landing pages, create personalized emails, and generate high-quality leads for the sales team to convert.

And, you can track your progress in the analytics section to identify any loopholes and tweak your strategy for the better.

Not only that, but the marketing hub of the platform tells you which ad platforms are bringing good results. This allows you to double down on the effective ones and keep a check on your ad spend.

 

Convert Leads Using the Sales Hub

Once you have prospects landing on your website, use HubSpot’s sales hub to create email sequences personalized to those leads.

The sales hub allows you to schedule meetings, manage contacts, chat with prospects, track their activity, and eventually close deals.

 

Offer Top-Notch Customer Service with HubSpot Service Hub

Using HubSpot’s service hub, your team can effectively communicate with any prospect right from the dashboard.

Moreover, you can chat live, manage tickets, create a knowledgebase and frequently asked questions, and collect surveys from your prospects in the service hub.

In short, HubSpot provides startups with a powerful service hub to effectively cater to customers’ needs and maximize their satisfaction.

 

Is HubSpot Safe to Use?

An online business can be a tricky thing. Even a small data breach can lead to a disaster for a business.

Thankfully, HubSpot users don’t have to worry about their security and safety online. The company uses rigorous security procedures to make sure your business is safe online.

Moreover, even if security issues arise somehow, HubSpot is quick to respond and address them. It can detect and prevent any security attacks using effective firewalling, behavior analytics, and routing.

In addition, HubSpot runs security scans and assessments all the time. The company brings in other firms to test their infrastructure for vulnerabilities.

All in all, HubSpot focuses on safeguarding user data from potential threats quite effectively.

 

HubSpot Pricing

HubSpot for startups program approves startups that have under $2 million funding. They get a massive 90% off the first year. In the second year, you’ll be getting 50% off. The third and so forth is 25% off.

Whereas startups that have raised over $2 million can qualify for 50% off for the first year and 25% off after that.

 

Conclusion

HubSpot for startups is an amazing opportunity for businesses trying to get momentum in this competitive space.

It provides you with tools and resources that you can not only use to get visible to prospects but also helps you close deals.

With HubSpot for startups onboarding, you can even get a ready-made plan from the industry experts and get ahead of your competition.

It’s an all-in-one platform; from helping you produce SEO-friendly, user-centric content to retaining them as long-term customers, HubSpot offers all.

The best thing, the HubSpot for startups program offers a massive 90% off in the first year, 50% off in the second, and 25% off onwards. Plus, you get a few basic features for free.

If you are a startup, HubSpot is probably the most impactful platform you can use to not only survive but thrive in this competitive landscape.