When ascertaining which marketing automation platform is best for your business, there is no dearth of platforms. Two of the most popular among businesses are HubSpot and Marketo. It is true that the two software products provide some functionality, options, benefits, and features and each of these platforms has a good fan following, but there are a couple of differences.
According to an article published on Forbes, in this age of digital marketing, it is imperative to provide appropriate content as well as touch points at the accurate time. Therefore, it is no wonder that most worldwide businesses and websites look for content management systems (CMS) in some kind or other.
When it comes to HubSpot and. Marketo, you will require a careful understanding of every firm’s abilities to arrive at the best decision for your business promotion efforts. For instance, the market share of HubSpot is 15.89 percent, while that of Marketo is 2.04 percent.
As far as differences are concerned, it is about pricing and functionality. Therefore, read on to learn more about HubSpot and Marketo.
1) Know about the user experience
One aspect that some people say about HubSpot is its user experience. The user experience was meant for business marketers by marketers. It is true that Marketo also has an outstanding user interface with perceptive dashboards as well as navigation; it is a little challenging to get around Marketo than simple user-friendly interface of HubSpot.
When it comes to HubSpot, though, it offers a detailed stepwise process so that even non-technical users can navigate or get around the platform easily and effortlessly. HubSpot focuses on user experience or UX. It has spent a great amount of time on research to carry on developing the platform for enhanced functionality. This commitment to UX is supported because there is staff at the company working day and night to boost the efficiency of the platform.
As far as Marketo is concerned, the UX focuses more on bigger businesses or companies where specific users within the enterprise depend on particular platform areas. For companies that require deep workflows and analytics, Marketo is the right platform for these businesses.
Opting for the best marketing automation platform comes down to the particular requirements of your company and the preferences of users.
2) HubSpot Training and Support
Before you spend money on a kind of software, you would like to know about the training and support every company provides. Marketo and HubSpot have strong support communities. Then, HubSpot walks the extra mile with its academy as far as training and support are concerned. You will find numerous documents and tutorials available, all prepared for inbound marketers.
The resources do not merely assist users as to how to start campaigns, but they also offer useful insights and information on how to build a winning plan that will work. As far as HubSpot is concerned, it also provides phone support, which is toll-free together with live chat and email support in their portal. In addition, HubSpot provides certifications in inbound marketing and other relevant topics. The challenge between Marketo vs. HubSpot is which platform is better than the other is. Now, that depends whether a business will embrace Marketo or HubSpot more.
3) Marketo Support
Marketo provides support too, but users have not always praised it that well. They often complain about the long waiting time and unable to find the relevant or to-the-point answers to their questions or queries. There is partial support with a usual plan, while paid plans have unrestricted support. It means that you need to pay to receive full technical support if you are using Marketo.
However, Marketo does provide numerous resources on the website too. It includes offering its individual training courses called Marketo University.
4) A comparison of content management platform features
One of the mainly crucial features of marketing automation is how it functions as a content management system or CMS. When it comes to HubSpot, its CMS could be utilized to develop your complete website through drop and drag tool, but you do not need to use it as your CMS if you like any other CMS such as WordPress or WP. You could still utilize the HubSpot to create landing pages as well as blog posts instead of including them these to your business website.
Marketo, though, does not have any CMS. You can use platform to create landing pages, but it does not have the required tools for creating a website or a blog. You will need to develop your website on any other platform and next incorporate it with Marketo.
5) Social media integration
HubSpot lets users build and plan posts for the majority of social networking sites. You can still post updates on LinkedIn for people, not simply business pages. Using HubSpot lets business marketers know the effect of their social media doings, as the benchmarks could be components of the dashboard.
Marketo lags behind a little in this respect because most of the big companies employ Marketo, and they frequently use any other social media marketing tool to plan, publish and connect on social networking sites. It lacks the classy monitoring and reporting, the tools built just for social media sites. Therefore, if social media is a huge focal point for your brand, Marketo is not going to offer you the experience you are looking for to take your business to the next level.
6) Gauging information or data: Analytics and Reporting
All the things you do in marketing requires to be gauged; else, you will not have important data or information to tell you what is fine with your business and what is not. HubSpot as well as Marketo comes with analytics functionality to monitor your efficiency and distinguish helpful data potential buyers and existing customers. Marketo scores are higher than HubSpot in this regard.
HubSpot offers exhaustive analytics related to each method you employ, while Marketo walks the extra mile with predictive analytics as well as modeling from CRM info and demographics.
HubSpot does allow you to build custom reports so you can zero in on the things that matter most to your brand. This can help you see your return on investment when it comes to marketing efforts based on sales data.
Conclusion
When it comes to the battle between HubSpot vs. Marketo, the choice you make actually depends on your business, focus, how big your audience base is, and how technically skilled your audiences are at a point of time.
