What Is HubSpot And Why Do We Use It? - Inbound After Hours Podcast - Ep 9

When we started the Inbound After Hours podcast we didn't intend to talk specifically about HubSpot that much. As it turns out as a HubSpot agency that's pretty tough to do! So we thought we would jump right in and do a full episode on HubSpot, so when we are waffling about it in the future you have some context!

In this episode we will discuss:

• What is HubSpot?
• Why have we chosen HubSpot as our chosen platform?
• Hubspot is MASSIVE - any tips for learning how to use it?
• Advantages for using HubSpot
• HubSpot compared to other things we’ve each used?
• Pro’s and Cons (can’t all be perfect?)
• What do we personally like about using HubSpot?

Watch...

Listen...

Resources in this episode:

• How much would it cost to do inbound marketing without HubSpot: https://www.digital22.com/insights/how-much-would-it-cost-to-do-inbound-marketing-without-hubspot

• Social sharing: https://www.digital22.com/insights/inbound-marketing-social-media-planning

• HubSpot Academy: https://academy.hubspot.com/

• Why go HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/why-go-hubspot

• Free CRM: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

• HubSpot Demo link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o3f2pUNhL0

• Comparison guide: https://www.digital22.com/insights/hubspot-cos-vs-wordpress-which-is-the-easiest-to-use

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Be sure to subscribe to Inbound After Hours if
you haven't already!

Have some feedback you’d like to share, do it in the comments below!

Full transcript:

- Hello everyone, welcome to Inbound After Hours, Episode Eight. Today, we'll be talking about the platform HubSpot.

- How you doing guys, you alright?

- Good, thanks.

- Good, yeah.

- Not too bad.

- Yeah, I'm not too bad.

- We've got Paul, we've got Andrew. We're down a man today, Rikki's not with us, apparently he's in Ibiza, is that right?

- So I've heard. No-one's heard from him.

- No-one's heard from him cos he's gone Ibiza where his family are.

- Conveniently turned Slack and email off.

- Yeah, he's vanished. Which, he deserves it cos he works hard but I just can't imagine Rikki in Ibiza cos he's the most relaxed, quietest and sensible person we know, so...

- He's DJ-ing, he's got a set out there.

- He'll be DJ-ing, but anyway, let's move on.

- We'll edit this bit out Rikki so you can't hear it.

- Okay, so HubSpot is massive.

- It is, it is.

- We use it, it's our chosen platform. For the guys listening, what is HubSpot? Anyone wanna kick us off?

- It's everything, isn't it? That we use.

- Yeah, I mean, you probably know it's something to do with marketing if you're watching this video but, um, it's an all in one tool, heavily focused towards marketing although they've built it out for sales now. Originally, it was a content marketing platform, that's sort of, runaway with itself, it's been so successful. Has had millions of investment, it's a huge company now, and they coined the term inbound marketing to start with. They've really, sort of, held the torch and pushed inbound forward, inbound sort of follows the HubSpot tool as much as HubSpot follows what inbound is. It's the-- sort of, at the same point so HubSpot as a company release a new aspect of HubSpot and that therefore becomes a new part of the methodology because they are the ones that invented it. It's quite a, an interesting symbiotic relationship but, yeah, to us it's the tool we use every day. You do your blogging on it, your landing pages, your emails, you manage your contacts in there, it records everything your visitors do.

- Social sharing.

- Social sharing and reporting.

- Web building.

- You can build websites on it.

- It's the engine isn't it? It's the engine of everything we do, I mean,

- Yeah.

- You think back to the early days when we were an SEO slash design slash PPC company, how many different platforms did we use?

- Yeah, I mean, we still use a lot of tools but back in the day, you'd use, you'd have a different tool for everything.

- Hootsuite, you'd have MailChimp, and these different-- there were no closed loop reporting stuff.

- No, everyone hacked together either their own little reporting systems or API'd into dashboards and all that sort of stuff. Which people still do but HubSpot really hit the ground running with this all in one dashboard view, pulling together the things that it saw as being fundamental to generating traffic and leads and customers.

- And it's good they keep adding the bits that are missing as well, aren't they? That you alluded to a bit then. They say, I don't know... before we were involved on HubSpot there was probably no social tool but then everybody was pulling out the blog content and putting it into something like Buffer or HootSuite so HubSpot have built a really good social tool--

- I know what they actually-- when I started working at Digital 22, I can remember, I spoke to somebody at HubSpot about the tools and I know, they've always been very strong with the blog tool and the content publishing because that's were they, sort of, began. And I think since day one, they had all the tools, but they were quite upfront with saying it was pretty basic like the social one, for example. Their strong suit was that it was connected to the blog tool that was strong, so that, you could see who's gone between your social message to the blog in your contact record. And they were quite-- again, I go back to them being quite open about everything being simple. Like, with the ads add on, which is one of the newest big release that, sort of, concrete now but they started off just being able to analyse stuff. So, they're very, very good at just getting something out there that looks great, is very stable but simple and then they continuously upgrade and iterate and improve that.

- How many times have you heard someone say that as well? If you don't like to do something, you show somebody, or they show you, and guaranteed the person being shown something will go, "Oh, it's actually really simple that."

- And again--

- So, that's what got us as well in that respect.

- Their argument for, things like the ads tool is, it kind of plays in their favour but it should be simple and there's a lot of complicated tools out there, a lot of big, old tools that make things very complicated and they can do absolutely everything but they're thinking, what do you actually need? Let's boil this down, for us and you, we wanna get a tool out there. They make everything look lovely and it's dead simple and you think, I can see why you're getting away with that cos it's brand new to you but actually I can't really argue cos it does it's job.

- Yeah.

- They've just been valued recently at 2.5 billion, so that's not bad.

- Us?... - No, HubSpot. - So, within 10 years, that's not bad and they've just had another 300 million in investment on their development team. I mean, that-- how can anyone keep up with that? It's just great and that's why we've gone all in one HubSpot, as we have.

- Yeah.

- That tells you where the future is, doesn't it?

- Yeah, course it does. And the-- we'll get on to this later on, all the new stuff what's coming out, the stuff me and Rikki picked up at in Dublin as well. There's a couple of non-disclosures

- Always going on about Dublin.

- Always going on about Dublin, yeah. He needs to get away in business.

- Yeah, yeah, it's the don. - We'll definitely send you on the next one, alright? Definitely, I'll stay at home, I'm not fussed.

- I've been to Rotherham.

- It worked.

- So, it's a CMS, it's a CRM, it's a social tool, it's got sales enablement, sales teams, it's... It just goes on and on.

- I think a that a lot of people don't realise that about the sales side as well, cos we find that with a lot of clients, don't we?

- It's either one or the other, like, most of ours, like you say, don't understand the sales bit and that's a whole other podcast about the importance of the sales and marketing alignment but then, we've had the odd one, what they've come in on--

- For the sales bit?

- Yeah, cos the sales CRM is actually free, which I think they've done because they wanted to build it up but some people come to us actually asking for help with the sales side and you're like, but what about the marketing? and they're, oh right, okay I can do that can I? and it's interesting and it just sh-- and I mean, again, another podcast but that shows you how apart sales and marketing can be from that angle.

- I know it sounds like we're bigging HubSpot, well we are really cos I think they're brilliant, I really do.

- Yeah.

- We wouldn't be where we're at without them, I don't think. We'd still be--

- Is there one like it? In the interest of impartiality, is there one that's, what's their competitor?

- Yeah, there's a few. So, there's, the few, the two bigger ones or the biggest I'd say would Marketo. Which was, has recently been bought out. That's-- I think that is a cheaper option to HubSpot. It's not as fully fledged and I don't think it's quite as slick.

- That's one thing I've heard off other people who aren't quite sold on HubSpot is the price.

- Yeah.

- It's quite pricey.

- Yeah, it's an objection, we've got a couple of blogs on it, I know HubSpot do a good one as well about building HubSpot, they call it FrankenSpot. So, basically, if you wanted to do HubSpot on a WordPress site with plugins, how much to-- they work their way through all their plugins, pick something that's in the same area, it doesn't have to better or just as good, it can even be a simpler version but they would get a similar result, and they add up the costs and over a year and the price is astronomical to actually do it on WordPress yourself. And the time, the fact that it's not actually connected properly and the fact it will probably break down at some point.

- Yeah, when one of em's not updated.

- Because it's an all in one, your costs are all in one, and it looks like a big ticket for one thing but if you actually split that out with all the tools and gave them their own individual price, that's £20 a month, that's a fiver a month, it'd all look very cheap because you're getting so much. I think it's just a visual thing, people are-- It's a bit of a... Scary thing to jump in to when you've not a lot of people having not done this before.

- It is, yeah, it is for small businesses, one, two man, 10 man bands. But I think for our persona, which are businesses from eight million up to 100 million, these guys can afford, they can afford it.

- Definitely.

- Yeah, we speak to some people as well, don't we? and it's not their only marketing tool.

- No.

- So, that's the ball park maybe they're aiming at, especially if they got, what did you say, 300 million last round of investment?

- 300 million dollars

- Of investment, next round of investment come through just for development, yeah.

- You've got to remember that there's a free version. You can go and get a free version, it's reduced, you can't do all the stuff but you can chuck your contacts in there, start using the dashboard and getting a feel for how it's going to be which is a great one for getting people on board.

- And we'll put a link to it there. I've always wanted to do that.

- Did we do that the other week? I did something like this.

- I haven't seen that one yet, so we will do. - Make it happen.

- So, we'll put that in. Let's talk about HubSpot personally then, how we all use it in different levels. So, start with you Paul, what do you like about HubSpot and what part of it do you use the most?

- I use the blogging and the social the most and now I'm doing more and more on the reporting side.

- Yeah.

- Today, just-- well I'll just look at today, I've been helping clients get in to-- we've had, I've seen a form submission do this, where can I find that person and more information? And just making videos for them, showing them how to go from the form they've submitted. That's the only information he had. Then we've gone, set the date parameter it's all on and you've found who submitted it and then you can go in and you can see that persons journey around your website. What blogs they've read, where they came in from and all because they filled in that form and I think that's what-- I think you'll be similar, won't you? That's what we spend a lot of time looking at the stats of what the users are doing, all over your website, love the blog, the social profile, what emails they've read, everything.

- Lets strip it back to the basics then, you're gonna create a blog. How-- I know how easy it is, I'm asking you so you can explain to the viewers. How easy is it to put the content in a blog and optimise it? Give the viewers an idea.

- What we do is we write in a google doc, just for our internal process but they've got, HubSpot's got their own blog writing tool. It's distraction free, it's similar to WordPress' blogging tool. So, we upload the copy straight in but you could've just typed that and then you'll input your blog title, you'll set a feature image which goes on to the blog homepage. You'll set your URL and your meta title and meta description. It's even got an optimization tool where you'll input your keywords for the blog post and then it'll tell you how many times you've used each of them, whether it's in your title or in your meta, and give you orange crosses of anything you've missed and green tick everything that you've got and then you know you can hit schedule or publish then and it's-- I mean you could just give someone the link and we have done, cos we've recently switched to having everybody in the company do a blog. People who have never done a blog before on HubSpot, you show 'em, there's your blog post, have a go, ask me if you need anything and the first time you get asked a question is right, I've done everything, can you just check it's done and it usually is.

- It's just a traffic light system ennit, it's red if it needs doing, if you're missing a keyword it'll tell ya, if you've not got a back link to an internal page it'll tell ya.

- It even tells you images are missing an alt text which, I've used a few blogging tools in the past and not all of 'em do that. It's just the little things like that that just-- that you do forget when you're doing three blogs a day or whatever.

- I think fromanyone listening who's in-house, obviously we're an agency who manage HubSpot accounts for people, for businesses and obviously for ourselves. It's nice to know, we're seeing it from our side, but if you're an in-house person whether you've got an agency or not, HubSpot has actually been built for you and not us. It's easy to us, we're more that way inclined and we use it every day but it's made for in-house people to be able to-- yeah, you might have a developer that builds your blog and your site and get you set up, or an agency, but you are as prepared and able to jump in there, write your own blogs, optimise your own webpages, create your own landing pages and it's... That's the whole point, the whole point is this continuous analysis for everyone in the business, sales, marketing teams, it's as easy for everyone and HubSpot's done a great job of reducing those barriers of entry to marketing, analysis, analytics, the whole, you know. Previously it was often a google analytics account and they've pulled a lot of those features in and we'll go onto that later with the new features that they're actually releasing and I think what they're doing a great job of is yes, they've got the all in one tool, but of those tools and the things that used to sit out in other departments, like data, for example, and analytics and bounce rates and things that marketers may need to email the tech guys to do and that can be tricky or people run out of time so things get held up, it's all going in to literally this front dashboard now. It really is-- it already does, but they're really, I think their goal is just to empower marketers to do better marketing and do better inbound and just have all the tools without having to, you know, carve their own path, so to speak.

- I think the content tools are usable to anybody who's used Blogger, WordPress, Squarespace, any of the--

- And Gmail.

- Yeah.

- If you can send an email on Gmail you can, pretty much, jump in and send an email on HubSpot.

- Yeah.

- That's a good point what you said about the dashboard and the stats being there, it doesn't... Every other tool I've used in the past is, it's for content production and if you wanna look at the marketing analytics head over here in the tool but what HubSpot does is just fuses it together. When you're producing the content, it's content mode. Once it's live, it's marketing mode, and it pulls it-- it's in the same place, it then adds on all that data underneath and it's there and it's handy.

- It's there. I tell you what they're good at, predicting. I always thought. About a month, a month or two ago, I was saying bloody hell, we're spending all this money on Adobe Stock Library, paying X amount a month for our blogs and then next minute we get a release saying--

- I remember you saying that.

- They partnered up with Shutterstock now so we can just jump in Shutterstock and plane the image off, free of charge, and just throw it straight in your blog. Things like that, they're always...

- They're marketers, they're in their community, they...

- They will have seen the blogs, won't they? Because everyone submits their blogs or your top viewed blogs get through to HubSpot and they'll have been seeing that everybody's using, I can't remember what the site's called.

- Flickr

- Crap stuff off like, yeah--

- They'll be getting the same images, won't they?

- And they'll know that, we all know, that you spend however long writing a blog and then it probably takes as long to find a good stock image.

- Elaine said it today, didn't she? She said, sorry it took so long, I've just been trying to find an image I can use.

- And I think they, yeah, they're very well aware of that. They're quite involved in the community. Another one of the points I got off with today about you know, why I like HubSpot. It's not just the software but they actually seem to be bothered about the community. And they are actual marketers, they're quite geeky and in to it all. They're not just a product and a corporate entity, they're part owned or invested in inbound.org which is a great website. Some of you may have been on it or not, we'll put it in the show notes, but that's like a forum for inbound marketing. Tonnes of questions on there from agencies, in-house, people who have ever even done it before, copywriters, all these different things and it's a bit of a melting pot and they're on there. They're invested in that, so they've got a direct line in to what people are struggling with and they just-- it's perfect inbound marketing for their own product. They just look at the pain points, answer 'em through development and they release that out.

- Did you-- I interviewed Sam. I can't say his last name cos it's really long. I interviewed Sam, he's the guy who project led inbound.org. I interviewed him last week on Inbound Influences, what we'll put in the link. Have you guys watched that?

- Yeah, yeah.

- So, he's a really clever guy. We're gonna set up another call with him and that's another great site you should be on if you're a marketeer, jump on there.

- Yeah,

- Can we nip back to you, Paul? So, you've created your blog and then you're gonna social share. How easy is it?

- Literally, takes you to next screen for after you hit publish that has this marketing stats underneath and then there's, edit, I think there's unblog, if not there is on everything else. Edit, share and you hit share and it comes up with, it starts with Twitter, iMessage, pulls in the feature image, the link works, it's a preview link. You can now change it into an imagecard, so you can choose. That was one of the pitfalls before, when we talked about it being simple and they'd give you a simple view on everything, when you were on about ads, and you might wanna do something else that's one of the slight pitfalls of it. But, what they do, is when they find that pitfall is they improve it and how they've improved the social sharing is you can now shape your message a bit better, schedule your next run of tweets, click on to the next tab and there's your Facebook post. It's aware of... character limit, image type and so on and then you do LinkedIn and Google+ and I believe instagram is coming soon, automated instagram. So, they'd be the first... Or anyone else who's got the same deal but they'll be the first company to have automated instagram posting and it'll be there in your tool which is just--

- A little tip for anyone who does use HubSpot, you may not know, if you do do your scheduling and make a mistake and something goes live you can delete from within HubSpot. You can just go into your published messages for Twitter and Facebook.

- That's one thing that does--

- Should be on the next round of improvements, all your social posts that are scheduled go in to one big queue so when you've got a campaign, so if your halfway through a campaign, you've got two months of posts to wade through to find the one related to that blog that's got a typo in the title but I'm sure they'll fix that.

- Yeah.

- I know we've mentioned it on podcast three and five about how we social share our content. We'll put that, again, in the show notes, that's really useful. Like LinkedIn, Facebook and how we do that.

- Yeah, the format.

- Frequency.

- Yeah, frequency, that's been probably 12 to 18 months of trial and testing to get that actual formula so we'll give you that and that's in the show notes. Thank you, Paul.

- Andrew, I know you're in this thing eight, 10 hours a day. What's your favourite bits?

- Where to start really? I think, I mean, I'm a bit of-- my favourite bit of the whole of inbound, I love landing pages. I like building 'em, I don't, I'm not meant to in my job you'll probably catch me like-- - What happens when you build one?

- Yeah.

- Don't forget, delegate, delegate.

- I'm not allowed to do it anymore but I find myself drawn towards tweaking landing pages cos I really enjoy it and that's probably come from me not being a developer but wanting to-- Not like James over here, not being able to build a web page from scratch or anything like that and then feeling a bit, slightly more powerful with this landing page tool that I can create a nice looking page. I can create the form and I can, you know, play around with it. And then, obviously, that is the funnel for where you get your results which is obviously great but... With HubSpot, it was quite-- I was quite surprised when I first started using it, I felt like I'd used it before. I'm sure that's what their goal is of great design but nothing without a place, I didn't have to go root-- you never have to go rooting for anything, you know, it's a few clicks away sort of thing but yeah, big fan of landing page tool, big fan of the email tool. The overall, just the UI and design of it, is great and they've just refreshed that and they seem to refresh it quite a lot which is good. It's nice, it's lovely and there's a nice colour palette which is a bit sad but I like that, it's nice to look at when you're--

- I've not been on it for a bit, but what's the thing called where you can, you put suggestions on, what's it called? HubSpot, like a suggestion box, it's like a forum and stuff gets upvoted.

- Yeah, I don't know what it's called. Is it the developer forum?

- Yeah, it's the develop forum.

- Develop forum, yeah.

- Yeah. And you can put on like, I had a-- I think it's like the ideas and you could say, this'd be good and people upvote it and if it gets the most votes, they will have a go, sort of thing.

- In the next sprint.

- It goes to the meeting, yeah, which is really good and a lot of good features have come out of that. I don't know whether we wanna talk about some of the brand new stuff that's just coming out? But, one of the interesting features, they've introduced and unbounce feature, so, when you're emailing a database you'll get a mixture of successes, soft bounces, which it retries, you'll get some unsubscribes and you'll get some hard bounces. A hard bounce being, a dead email, an email that doesn't exist or something else.

- If someone's left the business or--

- Some sort of error, yeah. That happens and that's valid a lot of the time but there is sometimes where there was just some error and when something hard bounces in HubSpot you can't send another email to that account, so they've just-- you used to have to, sort of, grovel to the development team and ask them to unbounce them. It can often be a big chunk of contacts if there's been some sort of error with a firewall or something on the clients side or the people yore trying to market to so they, they've just released a feature where you can actually manually do that yourself. Which I think is really good and adds to that empowerment thing I was on about for marketers. And the analytics dashboard, I think I touched on how they're trying to bring things in. I'm a big fan of the main marketing dashboard which shows you your visits, your leads, your customers. At the top, where it says marketing dashboard, there's a dropdown, click on that. There'll be, I think if you've got the sales CRM, you can flick it to the sales one but below that it'll say web analytics dashboard and that, effectively, is a boiled down google analytics. It'll tell you time on site, pages viewed, bounce rate, exit pages, that sort of thing. In the same way that HubSpot looks so it's very easy for you to understand and then you've, because that data's in there, you've got the same options for exporting it as a PDF for your boss or you can set it up on the weekly emails.

- That'll be good, won't it? When it gets there cos I know when we're doing reports, you're still into other tools, aren't ya, for reporting. Behaviour conversions and so on.

- Yeah, yeah. I think it's like a first stage, it's quite new, but I still use google analytics, I won't lie. I do still go over there and use that for reports and stuff but, it's just nice. I'm just a big fan of how they're always pushing the envelope, it seems. Obviously they've got the investment and the desire to grow but... I've used other tools like FusionSoft and Drupal and other, sort of, CMS' and HubSpot just seems to be the most active in terms of updates and general new things that they're bringing to the table which I think is really exciting.

- We've talked about pro's, let's talk about cons. What's bad about HubSpot apart from price?

- Yeah, um-- - Is they anything?

- Some stuff is still too simple. Like we said before, they improve that, don't they? I think what their tactic must be is get it on, get it connected to whatever that it's gonna be for and then we'll improve it. A bit like the G-E-D stuff we spoke about before, I guess. So, like, they're always improving the social tool. The workflow tool, when it first came, when I first started using it was quite static, you'd have to to work to peoples behaviour how they might act to an email workflow, you'd have to make a new workflow. And so you'd go through one step and then depending how they behaved, if they did this, add them to this workflow, and then that'd be another one, and how they behaved, add them to this workflow. So, what they've done since then is now add if branches within a workflow that are more developed. So, you can have a workflow in the same tool, in the same page that spreads however much you want it to. Whereas, before, you used to have to have a chain of workflows.

- And visually, it's much better.

- Visually, it's much easier, it's quicker, yeah they tend to do that for most things, I think.

- Yeah, I've found, I mean the one we talked about before is the ads tool, which is a new tool for them. I think that, it's not a negative at all, but it was one of the things that a lot of agencies and some of the more people in-house that in the ads world may have come across is the adwords tool very simplistic. And the LinkedIn tool, when it launched, I know they've introduced Facebook now and they were pretty basic. It's not a negative really, the thing about HubSpot is any bad things-- I think they've got rid of a lot of that, they've never had a bad tool in my eyes, since I've started working with them. It was usually a design principle or a simplicity thing, the feature was always there it might have just been a bit of an extra few steps which they've cut down over time.

- What's nice is, they say that, don't they?

- Yeah.

- They say, it's beta or it's first version. Next one's coming in six months or whatever. The other thing that we do get bugged about, that does bug us rather, is how Americanized it is.

- Yeah.

- You do something on it and it's like, good job.

- You're amazing, we're not amazing.

- I like all that.

- Yeah, you love it, don't ya? We're just cynical British.

- I know what you mean though.

- It's be nice if like, again, I... I was gonna just go off on one about, like the report side and the reporting in general, which is great, but we know there's a lot more out there and they've got that much data that I'm sure they've got some super dashboard at HubSpot HQ with like crazy insights which--

- What we do know, what they do show us, I don't get why they can't show us everything analytics does.

- Yeah, they've obviously got all that information somewhere. It's not a negative and at the end of the day-- - Not listening.

- Sorry, but the, I think, where they're at it always gets boosted by the fact that it's all connected.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And you only need this much across every single tool you've done to make some amazing decision as opposed to all this much in one specific area which you can't really do much with outside of that tool. So, I think they have approached-- they're trying to grow the, sort of, places where people interact and have a foot in all of those pools rather than A to Z in one, they're just going a short space across everything and bringing them all together. - So, I'm listening to this. I'm an in-house marketeer, I don't want to spend any money right now and I wanna test this, what do I do?

- I would get yourself signed up to the free CRM.

- Yep. Get that, get access to that and get sales CRM if you want that as well. Id sign up to the newsletters, HubSpot, go through their academy. Figure out how to use the thing, just sit and have a play around, get a test database imported into it, link up your social and just sit and honestly go through the training videos. I know it's boring but you'll miss something unless you do that and just figure out what you're trying to achieve and just have a go at doing that. The free CRM is mainly for, managing a contacts database, tracking behaviour, as opposed to sending out emails and having sub-domains set up on your site and converting people, that's-- you do have to start to pay for that but, the free CRM will give you a very good indication of what it's capable of and how easy it is to use. So, have a go with that and then give us a call. and we will take it from there.

- One thing you mentioned there, and I do think this is fantastic because it saves us a fortune in-house training people. We just send them to the academy so they invest so much money doing these academy video training courses. Step by step, at the end there's an online sort of, certification and it's bloody hard to pass and there's so many different things. And as soon as somebody starts in our business that's the first month there, doing that. They gotta get certified in everything. I just think there's no other training facilities out there as good as them, I don't think.

- No.

- What I've seen.

- No, it's all video based. You can now, for a lot of the course, download the study guide as well if you're not a visual learner. It's really good, great content. They've got, I don't know how many courses now, they've got over 10 I know. Some big NH courses are good, 10, 15 hours worth of videos.

- They're meaningful aren't they, as well. - Yeah, they're all very relevant, they're all very specific. There's specific ones for email content specifically, customer relations, design, the tool. A lot of them are two parter where you've got to learn, then do it and submit what you've done.

- That's what I had to do when I started at Digital 22.

- You've gotta actually prove, you know?

- You've gotta submit, like, a lot of portfolio stuff that you've done and it says right, you've done the exam and I was like, right, I'll do part two and it's like, yeah, it'll take you like six months to get enough evidence

- You can't just--

- And that's a free certificate so it's serious, it's good.

- I don't know anyone who's passed it first time, unless you guys do, and you always, you watch 'em all, 20 odd hours worth and you fail it. You have to get 70%, I got like 66, I'm like bastard. so, you've got to watch 'em all again and do it so, but it's gotta be cos you have to learn it.

- Yeah, no it is, I think it's testament to, sort of, their investment in the inbound movement as opposed to just their tool. I know we always harp on about inbound in Boston but, when you go there, they do actually say we're not here to sell you--

- You're going Boston, aren't ya? Yay! = Roadtrip for ya. But they made a point of like, okay, they don't really talk about other softwares but they're not there to sell HubSpot outwardly. Each talk doesn't end with, have a go on HubSpot, they just talk about, the specific HubSpot talks but there's a lot it's just inbound as this new marketing movement and content and all the other stuff so.

- It is hard, ent it? We were apprehensive to do this podcast talking about HubSpot cos we, I know we name drop but we try not to talk about it. We talk about inbound and tactics and...

- Yeah.

- They're bloody God and we wouldn't be here without them, I don't think, or we would be but it'd be a lot more challenging. - It would, it would take us a lot, yeah, it'd be tougher and I think, you're right to say, you know, we're not-- we don't just talk about HubSpot because... HubSpot is just a tool, at the end of the day. You can't just buy HubSpot, turn it on and it brings you leads.

- That's a good point.

- We've had people, we've had clients, like facing that, aren't they? When they joined.

- Yeah, I mean, the price is-- some people wish it would cos they're paying a high price but HubSpot's nothing without imbound, inbound could probably be done without HubSpot and I'm sure before HubSpot came along, they find out that the people that were winning online were these people who wrote blogs 20 years ago and were ranking number one because they helped people and that's how inbound came around cos they probably thought, what's going on there? And that was sort of like, it snowballed from there but yeah Spot's fantastic but not much without inbound and that sort of methodology behind it.

- Yeah, great. Any useful links we can put? I've wrote a few down, we've got, a demo link, so if you wanna actually demo, watch a demo of the video, we'll put that in the show notes. And there's a site, on the HubSpot, there's a page called Why HubSpot? We'll put that in there for you as well. Anything else we can give the viewers, any more tips?

- Yeah, just--

- It's these blue moons.

- Our latest download, which is just going live this week, is a comparison between a lot of the most popular platforms so it compares HubSpot, WordPress, Drupal, I think that might be it. What we do is, we put them side by side, it's a huge feature checklist download, massive value if you are wondering what platform's right for you. I know we've spent over half an hour saying HubSpot, we've tried to be as objective as possible in this guide. So, we'll put a link to that down below and you can have a look at that.

- Brilliant, just before we finish then, anything new coming out that you know of that's not been launched or?

- The instagram one for me is gonna be big, especially with a couple of our clients at the minute.

- Yep, video stuff. Again, been over in Dublin, there's a lot of add ons with the Facebook video now so we can start doing a lot of video content live--

- A lot of native stuff, yeah.

- That's coming out. There's something awesome coming out but we've got a non-disclosure on it at the minute, it's like a fourth part to HubSpot but I'll get my ass kicked if I mention it so...

- Okay, we'll leave it there then.

- We'll leave it there, it's amazing. So, yeah, all good.

- Perfect.

- Anything else to add guys or?

- No, I think that's it.

- Not me.

- Okay, Rikki, hope you're having a good time.

- Hope it's cold.

- And we'll see you next week guys, thank you very much.

- Cheers.

- Thank you.

- Take care, bye bye.