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Look, I'm sorry if this blog post offends some people, but I know it will be super helpful to way more than it offends. Hubspot is NOT a lead generation platform. It will NOT help you grow your business.

My friends, Hubspot is a CRM. That's it.

It's a really great CRM, don't get me wrong.

Because Hubspot started earlier this decade as a content marketing / inbound platform (one of the first to over the "opt-in to download" landing pages - you know, the ones where you have to put in your email address in order to get a resource you want, then you get served a series of emails trying to sell you the value proposition of buying a product or service from the company that you downloaded the resource from?).

In the marketing business this tactic is now referred to as "drip" / "nurture" / or my personal LEAST favorite "trip wires."

I mean, kudos to Hubspot for being an amazing CRM, seriously. They are strong at logging data, attributing it to a referral source, and especially strong at email marketing.

But, my friends, we have to ask ourselves a simple question - HOW MUCH ARE WE PAYING FOR HUBSPOT?

A ridiculous amount, for sure. So ridiculous, that you could buy so much awareness and quality web traffic from Facebook Ads, while using Mailchimp (free up to 2k email addresses - and about 3% of the cost of Hubspot) + Google Analytics (FREE) + WordPress (FREE + one time web developer - hopefully us cost) to do what Hubspot does while actually increasing your quality leads and sales because the bulk of your dollars would go into new customer acquisition (the Facebook Ads) NOT the hard cost of your CRM platform.

Case in point, Hubspot just launched Facebook Ads integration. They're doing this, obviously, because they see the value in marketers BUYING Facebook Ads. What this new Hubspot feature doesn't do - not surprisingly - is help drive traffic to your website. What it does do, is integrate with the Facebook API to show your Facebook Ads data within Hubspot. But, no surprise, they want an extra $100/month from you.

That's B.S. You have the data FOR FREE, within Facebook Ads Manager.

To call Hubspot a rip-off would be unfair, and untrue, but to say that it's more than just a really good CRM is also extremely false.

It's NOT a digital marketing platform. It's NOT a way to generate new leads for your business. It's just a good way to keep track of your relationships with prospective and current customers.

Consider spending your real money on Facebook Ads, Instagram Influencer Campaigns, or creating the actual really good content that tells your story.

I hope this was helpful.

KEEP MARKETING!

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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