As the demand for scalable, data-driven marketing grows, so does the need for tools that simplify complex workflows, provide actionable insights, and empower teams to execute campaigns at scale. The martech landscape grew to over 15000 tools, there are tons of platforms that help you do all kinds of marketing jobs. Of course, not all of these martech tools are created equal.
HubSpot stands out as an all-in-one platform that centralizes marketing activities (among others) while enhancing efficiency and ROI.
Below are the top HubSpot features that make marketing not just easier, but smarter.
Lists seem like an obvious feature for any CRM. And you know, it should be. But at the same time, smart lists are vastly underused. Lists exist to help you segment your audience based on behavior and data. They can be used as the audience for your emails or as triggers for workflows. But you can go further. We personally use them to get better insights into our data and for troubleshooting all kinds of things happening in our CRM. The thing that makes these lists ‘smart’ is that they automatically update when data in your CRM changes.
Example: Create smart lists of contacts who viewed a specific page and clicked on a CTA in your emails. Or create a smart list of everyone that ever attended your webinars, or within a certain time frame.
ROI: If done correctly, your team will save tons of time creating an audience for the emails you plan to send for example. We see time savings of about 10%.
Workflows can automate many things, like email nurturing, lead scoring, internal notifications, updating contact or company records, and more. The tasks you previously needed to do manually can now all be part of a workflow that does all the work for you.
Example: Trigger a welcome email sequence when a user downloads a lead magnet. If they engage, escalate them to a lead scoring workflow and notify your sales team when a threshold is reached.
ROI: Companies that automate lead nurturing with HubSpot see up to a 451% increase in qualified leads (source: HubSpot). That’s huge!
HubSpot provides intuitive tools to create, send, and track professional email campaigns. You can use the data in your CRM as personalization tokens, and HubSpot by default contains a large number of contact properties. It also allows for advanced personalization, dynamically changing content based on lifecycle stage or the smart lists you created.
Example: You can segment your email list based on past purchases, website behavior, or demographic data. Then, send an email to customers who viewed a specific product category but didn’t purchase, with an incentive.
ROI: Personalized emails have much higher open and click-through rates. These lead to increased engagement and conversions. HubSpot’s email marketing can lead to a 25% visitor-to-contact rate from email, contributing to overall lead generation and revenue growth.
You can schedule and publish content across various social media platforms directly from your own HubSpot portal. And you can monitor conversations and analyze the performance of your social campaigns, all in 1 place. Every social post can be linked to specific campaigns in HubSpot. This way you can see in every campaign how your social media activities contributed.
Example: Schedule a series of posts promoting your latest blog article across LinkedIn, Facebook, and X (Twitter) for the upcoming weeks. Track which posts generate the most engagement.
ROI: Efficient social media management saves time and ensures consistent brand messaging. While social media ROI can be harder to quantify directly, increased brand awareness, engagement, and website traffic from social channels can indirectly lead to more leads and sales.
Connect your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads accounts to HubSpot to track ad performance, manage audiences. You can report on ads ROI directly within the platform. From your HubSpot account, you can create audiences for your ads based on contact or company lists.
Example: Create an audience in HubSpot based on contacts who have abandoned their shopping carts, and then target them with a retargeting ad campaign on Facebook.
ROI: Integrated ad management provides clear visibility into your ad spend and revenue attribution, allowing you to optimize campaigns for better ROI. HubSpot’s ad integration helps marketers measure and analyze performance. It enables data-driven decisions that reduce wasted ad spend and increase conversions.
HubSpot enables you to automatically assign scores to your leads based on their engagement with your content, demographic information, and other predefined criteria. This helps sales prioritize the hottest leads. It helps marketing nurture the ones that need some more information before making a purchase decision. By the way, we also have a blog about choosing the right lead scoring model for your business.
Example: A lead who visits your pricing page multiple times, downloads a case study, and opens several of your emails would receive a higher lead score than someone who only visited your homepage once.
ROI: Lead scoring ensures sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising leads, improving sales efficiency and increasing conversion rates. This can significantly reduce the sales cycle and boost win rates.
Easily design and publish high-converting lead capture forms without needing a developer. These forms are directly linked to your CRM, ensuring all captured data is automatically stored in the right places. You can use smart forms, which means you can replace fields in your form you already know the answer to by other fields. It’s called progressive profiling and it enables you to gradually gather relevant information from a contact person without asking them to fill in enormous forms.
Example: Create a dedicated landing page for a new product launch, featuring a form for visitors to sign up for early access or download a detailed spec sheet.
ROI: Optimized forms improve conversion rates, turning more website visitors into leads. HubSpot users often see a 150% increase in landing page views per year, directly contributing to lead generation and a healthier sales pipeline.
HubSpot’s blogging platform helps you create, optimize, and publish blog content. It’s built-in SEO recommendations guide you on keyword usage, meta descriptions, and other best practices to improve your search engine rankings. You can actually set up your content pillar strategy and map all your content around your content pillars. It makes your SEO and content strategy very visual.
Example: As you write a blog post about “The Future of AI in recruitment,” HubSpot helps you add relevant tags that users can search for. It helps you add every article as a piece of supporting content for a specific content pillar.
ROI: High-ranking blog content drives organic traffic to your website, attracting more qualified leads at a lower cost than paid advertising. HubSpot customers report an average of 80% increase in blog views per year, leading to a significant boost in content marketing leads and overall revenue.
The Campaigns Dashboard in HubSpot gives you a centralized view of all your marketing campaigns. It allows you to see their combined performance across different channels and assets. You can link emails, landing pages, social posts, ads, and more to a specific campaign.
Example: For your new product launch, you can create a “Product X Launch Campaign.” The dashboard will then show you the total number of leads generated, website visits, email open rates, ad spend, and overall revenue attributed to that specific campaign. It gives you a holistic view of its effectiveness.
ROI: The Campaigns Dashboard eliminates the need to jump between multiple tools to assess campaign performance. It provides a clear, consolidated view of ROI for specific initiatives, helping marketers identify what’s working best and optimize future campaign strategies. This leads to more effective resource allocation and a higher overall return on marketing investment.
HubSpot offers comprehensive dashboards and reports that provide insights into all your marketing activities. You can find data about website traffic and lead conversions, campaign performance and revenue attribution. It also pulls in data from other platforms you use, like ads, webinar tools or your social media accounts. Furthermore, you can set up dashboard automation so other stakeholders get reports in their inbox automatically.
Example: Generate a report showing which marketing channels contributed most to your closed-won deals over the last quarter, helping you allocate your budget more effectively.
ROI: Data-driven decision-making is crucial for marketing success. HubSpot’s reporting allows you to prove marketing’s value, optimize strategies, and make informed budgeting decisions. Businesses using HubSpot’s reporting and analytics often see improved lead quality and conversion rates.
These are just 10 of the many features in the platform. HubSpot’s integrated platform and powerful features empower marketing teams to work smarter, not just harder. By leveraging these tools, businesses can streamline operations, gain valuable insights, and ultimately drive sustainable growth and a strong return on their marketing investment.
