Ever since my Hubspot review was posted a few months back, I have received 100’s of emails requesting me to follow-up that post with a Hubspot alternative guide.
After months of research, finally I managed to come up with an alternative guide which should come close (if not the same) to providing the same features for your business.
The best part- you are in complete control of your website and you’ll end up saving thousands of dollars every year.
Focus on building your business while I take care of the tech stuff for you.
Before diving into this guide, I’d want you to understand one thing. Hubspot is a great tool. I have no objection against small businesses using the software. For businesses with thousands of dollars to spend on the platform every year, it’s a great tool. But most small businesses cannot afford that level of pricing- hence this guide.
For business owners looking for a hands-off service to implement the solution below, I have set up a service for you; more on it at the end of this post.
Understanding Hubspot…
The first step in building an alternative to Hubspot is to understand the real benefits the platform offers. It’s a great platform that integrates a lot of useful solutions for small businesses and provides it as a single package.
As with any other tool or platform, Hubspot or the alternative I am suggesting here is not a magic tool that will automatically increase your sales and revenue. There is still a lot of hard work to be done to achieve business success.
Enough of disclaimers and business coaching; let’s move on with our guide.
Hubspot Alternatives Guide: The 5 Components You Need
Component #1: Content Management System (blog)
At the core of Hubspot, it’s a blogging platform (or a content management system). Although it’s much more than a blog, the basic idea of inbound/content marketing is generate high quality content, build trust, attract leads, get them into your sales funnel, and convert them into customers.
With that thought in mind, the first thing you should have is a blog platform; and what better software other than WordPress to use for your blog?
Read my detailed guide on how to create your business website using WordPress for under 100$. I have included details on purchasing the right hosting, choosing domain name and also suggested plugins for your business website.
With Hubspot, you can create landing pages on the fly (although limited to what you can with the system). With theme frameworks, you can achieve the same effect. However, for advanced functionality, you might require coding help.
This is where plugins like Gravity forms come into use. The easily integrate it most service providers you might require. Even if there is some feature you want but cannot find using the default set up or the plugins I recommend, I bet there is a free plugin in the WordPress plugin repository.
Component #2: Lead Capture and Lead Nurturing
Capturing leads (emails of your prospective customers) is an important aspect of building your business.
In order to capture leads, you need an email marketing solution. If you are a small business selling your own product or service, I recommend using MailChimp as your email service provider.
If you are into internet marketing and act as affiliate for other people’s product, then choose Aweber since Mailchimp does not allow use of their software for affiliate marketing purposes. However, if you are the seller and you have other affiliates working for you, MailChimp shouldn’t have any problems.
I have worked with Bluehornet, Aweber, MailChimp, Madmimi, Sendy, GetResponse, and a couple of other low key email marketing solutions on a large scale. I can hands down say Mailchimp is the best among the lot. Best thing is Mailchimp has a forever free plan which lets you have upto 2000 subscribers for zero cost.
I’d suggest that you try Mailchimp for a month and if you feel comfortable, upgrade to their paid plan (Their paid plans have some cool features like Auto responders, time wrap which lets you deliver emails based on the users local time zone as well as batch delivery which lets you send emails in batches so that all emails don’t go out at the same time causing in a flood of traffic that might crash your site).
Lead nurturing is a fancy word for saying building up trust among your prospective customers so that they can turn from leads into paying customers. I have written about the importance of lead nurturing in the past.
If you can set up auto responders using your email service provider, or send custom e-mailers once in a week with useful content, you should be able to nurture your leads effectively.
Oh, and don’t worry about people who unsubscribe from your list. You want your list to be as clean as possible. Don’t worry about people who do not find value in what you are providing them with.
If you see people leaving a lot, you might want to re-think your value preposition and see if what you are giving them is genuinely of value or simply sales pitches disguised as valuable info.
Integration Guide:
Component #3: SEO & Social Tracking
Husbpot allows you to keep track of your rankings and how well your pages perform. Instead of Husbpot, I suggest you use SEOmoz.
SEOmoz is a SEO tool that lets you do much more than just track keywords and analyze on page SEO. It also let you do competition analysis, analyze your competitor backlinks, do in-depth twitter analysis using their newly acquire tool followerwonk, social media analysis, and do much more.
You can read my detailed SEOmoz review here.
Component #4: Analytics
This is one area where Hubspot shines basically due to the fact that they have a closed system where each of the components works really well with each other. Even though you cannot achieve the same level of awesomeness with free tools, you can come close enough.
The tool I use and recommend for analytics is Google analytics. It’s a free and a very powerful tool from Google. If you can do advanced customizations, then there is virtually nothing this tool cannot do. However, some of these maybe a bit advanced for beginners.
If you want things to be simpler, you can use KissMetrics which is another great tool. It’s not free though. If much of your sales happens offline, you’d be better off using Google Analytics (Even for completely online business, I still suggest Google Analytics. However, for advanced functionality you get in Hubspot, there is a learning curve for Google Analytics).
Integration guide
- Integrate Google Analytics with WordPress- use this plugin
- Integrate KissMetrics with WordPress
Component #5: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software
Not all businesses require CRM to manage their customer database.
However, it’s good to have a structured data about your existing customers and prospects to get better idea about your sales and marketing effort. It also helps you create campaigns tailored to your prospects present status (Have they just contacted you, are they almost ready to buy, and so on).
Hubspot does a nice job of integrating CRM and email marketing solution into a single platform. If you’d like to replicate the same with your custom website, you can go for any of the CRM providers out there, sign up with them, integrate them with your email service provider like MailChimp and set up email campaigns.
The catch here is that, it’s not as smooth as you’d come across in Hubspot. If you are new to CRM’s, I’d recommend Salesforce.com for people who already have a very profitable small business and is familiar with the sales cycle. If you want advanced contact management solution and not a full-fledged CRM, you can go for HighRise.
If you want things to be as smooth as Hubspot, you can opt for higher plans of CRM’s which lets you send mass emails to your prospects based on the data in your CRM. For beginners, I’d definitely not recommend it. Once you are familiar with the CRM and you are sure using a CRM justifies the cost, then you can move ahead and upgrade to a higher plan.
Integration Guide:
- Integrate Mailchimp with Salesforce- use this paid addon
- Integrate Mailchimp with HighRise
The Fine Print
Although I have provided a Hubspot alternative guide here, implementing this will not give you the same experience as using the platform with everything smoothly integrated. Well, that’s what you pay for when you are talking about thousands of dollars a month and a 1 year commitment.
The solution given above should be a very good solution for any business out there (and provides almost all the features of Hubspot minus the convenience of getting it everything in one place). As your business grows, you can upgrade to Hubspot if you feel it’s the right move.
Focus on building your business while I take care of the tech stuff for you.
For entrepreneurs who still think this is very technical and time consuming, I have set up a Hubspot alternative set up service. You can hire me to take away all the technical stuff from you while still saving thousands of dollars and your precious time.
What You Are Gaining With This Set Up
But using the above alternatives for Hubspot platform, you are gaining several advantages
- Save thousands of dollars each month. Put the money into improving your product/service or use it for hiring experts who can help you get more customers
- Complete control over your website. You decide how it looks, where it’s hosted, what features it has
- No long term contracts. With Hubspot, you have a one year contract. If you decide to change your course in between, having your own set up is easier
Over to You:
What do you think of the alternatives here? Have you tried the above set up and found the results to be better than your existing system? Let me know via the comments.
WordPress is the best and most affordable alternative to Hubspot for small businesses. Once the initial setup is complete, you don’t have to pay huge monthly premium that doubles when you get more clients and leads into the pipeline. My clients absolutely love it after moving from Hubspot, and I love it too and will continue recommending it.
Very useful content thank you. I’m a sole proprietor and while I love HubSpot content I simply can’t justify the spend. I use Salesforce.com already so the other tools were really useful I’m likely to use SEOmoz based on your recommendation. Sincere thanks.
Racquel
Glad I could be of help Racquel.
Adarsh, very interesting review you have here. I think the one thing you are leaving out here is the education you get with HubSpot. It is one thing to piece together a CMS, Blog, Landing Page, Email, Analytics, CRM tool (daunting task in itself). For the sake of the conversation lets say you get this all set up. Now what? Do you have your target personas well defined so the content you create will resonate with people? Do you understand how to leverage something like Google Analytics to better your search results, or are you just seeing information about how people find you? What about if you drive people to your site, what is your conversion strategy? After you have converted some leads, are you able to easily segment your database and tailor your content so that you aren’t just spamming your database? There is a lot that goes into Inbound Marketing that HubSpot teaches it’s customers with the onboarding process that actually makes the software valuable, rather than just having tools to get it done that needs to be taken into account: http://www.hubspot.com/services (Yes this is a biased review from a HubSpot User, but needed to be said)
Hi Jeff,
I am glad you are happy with the software.
When you talk about the onboarding process, I agree that Hubspot has a lot of handholding process. However, is that something that cannot be achieved outside of Hubspot? No!
Unless you spend time learning Hubspot system, you cannot use it. Similar is the case with any other tool. Just because you use Google Analytics, it does not mean you’ll get all valuable data out of it. You have to learn the system to be able to achieve the maximum results. The way I see it, learning other systems vs Hubspot is not that different. In fact, it’s much better if you learn other systems (if you need to move out of the Hubspot eco system).
I now have a client who tried using Hubspot spend thousands of dollars on the platform and did not gain anything from the site. If it produced a high ROI for you, then it’s good. But I know a lot of people who wasted thousands of dollars on the platform thinking it was some magic tool that will bring in an avalanche of sales. It’s not going to happen!
Segmenting database can be done by any good email providers out there. So that’s not a big deal. It all depends on how users use the system. I recently signed up for a Hubspot users email list and all his emails land in spam for me. Does this mean it’s Hubspot’s fault? Maybe, maybe not! At the end of the day, a platform is only as effective as someone who uses it.
I agree Hubspot is a valuable tool for the “right” business. But it’s simply not the right tool for the majority of the businesses out there.
That being said, I’ll follow up this post with another post that lays out a step by step plan that will help small business owners crack inbound marketing. This should make it easier for the non-Hubspot users to embrace content marketing (My free e-book is usually a good start).
Thanks for the comment.
You’re spot on here, and the key thing to consider when doing ANYTHING involved with Inbound Marketing is that there is no magic bullet. Small businesses owners need to understand that if they go with HubSpot or the Frankenstein monster of tools you package together, there needs to be time dedicated to creating content and refining your process using solid analytics and data to make decisions.
HubSpot is brilliant at pulling all the pieces together so you go to one place for everything, and HubSpot 3 has improved on most of the stuff that was weak in the past (email, marketing automation, more flexible COS). The most valuable part about it is that all of the tools talk to each other. Rather than pulling info from mail chimp, SEOMoz and Google Analytics into a spreadsheet to see what is driving customers to my businesses, HubSpot calculates all of this automatically.
THIS TAKES TIME WITH EITHER SYSTEM, but at HubSpot I was able to work with a consultant to teach me the best way forward, and the tools are IMMENSELY easier to use than the 5 different systems you mentioned.
Lastly, I need to address this idea of HubSpot holding you hostage. Yes, there is a one year contract that I knew about from the very beginning, but I do not host my website on HubSpot, just my blog and landing pages. If I want to cancel I can do so anytime, and they have an app to migrate my blog to WordPress in about 5 minutes.
Hey, thanks for this suggestion on a Hubspot alternative, I have been thinking along the same lines. I am familiar with most of the specific tool components you mention. One thing I still don’t quite see a good alternative for with your suggestion, is the “single database” view of your visitors/leads:
- How will you connect the visitors actions over time to i.e. a lead/contact?
- And then tie each lead into a simple yet automated workflow?
- How do you suggest to compare acquisition cost or ROI across the different channels?
Best,
Anders
Hi Andres,
About connecting visitors actions over time- you can use solutions like Kissmetrics to do just that.
For an automated work flow, use Mailchimp auto responders. However, it’s not as easy because you’ll need different sign up forms on different pages if you want to target different customers. There is an easier way to do this via mandrill API (from mailchimp). However, it requires programming knowledge of API’s.
To compare acquisition cost you can use Google analytics or Kissmetrics.
Thanks for the tips – I’ve been working on something similar myself for a couple of years – once you are pretty solid with WordPress, it is hard to leave it for something more limited in the blogging department.
Personally I’m using WORKetc as my “single reference point”
They will be introducing social lead generation and nurturing soon and have great inbuilt collaboration at the moment, and I’m using Gravity forms to capture leads from my website and enter it into the CRM database.
It isn’t cheap, and is overkill for a solopreneur but for a 5+ person business it is pretty amazing.
Thank you for your articles; I love WordPress and would like to continue with it, but find it hard to piece things together. The separate costs are nearing Hubspot’s “one-stop” solution:
$99 SEOmoz PRO
$30 Mailchimp
$8 Gravity Forms
$8 Malware Removal
$3 Web-site hosting
$2 Web-site backup
$30 Web developer help
——-
$180/mo costs