When shopping for a marketing platform for your company’s inbound marketing and sales efforts, there are a slew of options for you to choose from. While many tend to start with Hubspot, after a short time a number of users are left feeling unsatisfied. The Hubspot software is not for everyone. An excellent all-in-one alternative is Kentico EMS. Kentico EMS is an integrated customer experience management solution that provides the tools needed to quickly and efficiently create campaigns, forms, and newsletters while including all the content management power of Kentico CMS.
There are four major factors where Hubspot falls to Kentico EMS.
Features
There is no denying that both Hubspot and Kentico EMS are user friendly marketing and sales platforms.
Hubspot lacks in extensive flexibility and control over marketing assets compared to Kentico, which can hold everything in one location for various staff members to update. Using Hubspot to form marketing tools such as landing pages and blog posts, you are required to follow the pre-determined Hubspot conditions. Building off the lack of flexibility within the software, a lack of design tools or software customization capabilities may leave you feeling locked into Hubspot’s system. Kentico provides personalization and customization features so that each viewer gets a unique experience.
Should your company operate globally—or plan to expand outside of the United States—Hubspot is not the platform for you. Currently, Hubspot is only operating in English. Kentico believes having a website translated into multiple languages is the first step to growing your business to new markets.
Price
One of Hubspot’s largest flaws is the cost. You will pay 50% more for Hubspot, while missing out on 50% of the features that Kentico EMS currently has. As previously discussed, giving your users a personalized experience is the best way to make them loyal customers for life. By using Kentico EMS you are able to do just that.
Integration Considerations
Integrating Hubspot with your current domain can be a tedious and time consuming process. When integrating Hubspot with an existing website, you are required to establish a subdomain such as info.yourmaindomain.com along with several DNS entries to get up and running. As you begin to use Hubspot, you quickly realize that you have decentralized key content and are spending additional time matching up analytics between two domains.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is another area to consider when implementing Hubspot with your current website. A common rule of SEO best practice is that your website reside on a TLD or top level domain. Let’s assume you’ve spent time optimizing your main website for organic rankings and you have just implemented the Hubspot platform on a new subdomain.
The new subdomain will begin to outrank your primary domain for many of the phrases you may have already optimized for on your primary domain. Now, along with decentralized content and multi-domain analytics tracking, you have a bifurcated URL structure which is not optimal for SEO.
If you are planning to use or currently use Hubspot as your inbound marketing software, it is important to understand that moving off of the platform is more difficult than the implementation. Content migration, URL re-centralization, and re-gaining SEO rankings are among the few challenges you will face.
We hope you find this blog helpful as you research various marketing platform alternatives.