2018 in Marketing at RotaCloud: Moving on from HubSpot
At RotaCloud, most of our marketing budget is dedicated to inbound. We recognise the importance of maintaining a good blog, building a list of email subscribers, and gaining a captive audience on social media.
In 2019, we’re looking to focus more on outbound marketing. But in 2017 and 2018, inbound was our marketing bread and butter.
In mid-2017, we turned to HubSpot—a product synonymous with inbound marketing. Like so many businesses, we were impressed by the product, particularly its ability to follow customers right the way through the marketing and sales processes, and keep all our marketing functions in a single place.
With this in mind, we ended up signing up to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and CRM.
The onboarding process was mostly positive — the HubSpot team essentially replicated our blog on their platform, and the switchover just worked — although our contact at the company often seemed to overestimate the time we had to implement HubSpot, create content, and promote it.
We forged onwards, and began using HubSpot for our blog, social media posts, marketing strategy, reports, landing pages, forms, CTAs, keyword planning, email marketing and much more. Even with our limited resources, I feel we made good use of HubSpot’s many features.
But as our contract (and our negotiated discounted price) came to an end in mid-2018, we decided to move on from HubSpot’s marketing package.
This was a huge decision for us as a company, but here’s why we made it.
- Cost/performance. We felt that HubSpot wasn’t generating enough value to justify the significant monthly cost. It seemed the pricing structure was designed for businesses with fewer, more valuable contacts.
- Features & tools. Individual features had small but significant limitations — particularly the blog editor, landing pages, automation tools and social media functions.
- UI. HubSpot’s user interface was inconsistent and confusing — not at all what you’d expect from such an expensive, market-leading product.
- Inflexibility. We quickly found that we had limited control over some technical elements, like customising AMP styling.
- Support. The speed and quality of customer support was poor post-onboarding—we often had to wait more than 24 hours for a response.
- Unfinished features. Some features felt rough or unfinished, yet new ones (which could be charged for) were often rolled out.
We could have stuck around for another year and waited for HubSpot to address some or all of these problems. And in the time since we’ve parted ways, we know they’ve been working to tackle some of the issues we’ve listed, most notably through the HubSpot Canvas design system.
But as a small business, when you’re paying a five-figure sum for software, it’s a huge risk to stick with it if you’re not absolutely enamoured with it, so we decided to say goodbye.
We knew that leaving HubSpot was going to be a significant technical challenge. After all, while HubSpot will help you every step of the way when you’re joining them, if you decide to leave, it’s down to you to relocate your content and processes in order to keep your business running smoothly.
We’d have to replace HubSpot with multiple other tools, and set up processes to transfer data between them. Yet if we’d have waited a second year to end our contract, it would have been even more difficult to extricate ourselves.
If we were going to break up with HubSpot, it needed to be sooner, rather than later…
What came next
RotaCloud continued to use the HubSpot CRM, but all marketing functions needed a new home. We did our homework and settled on a set of new platforms — some paid, others free—that would fill the gaps:
We now use Autopilot for marketing automation and email marketing. Autopilot reads forms on our website, and contacts enter ‘journeys’.
Zapier helps us update information in Autopilot based on actions elsewhere — for example, adding a contact to our blog subscribers list when they enter their details on our blog.
Zapier also reaches out from Autopilot — such as assigning HubSpot owners to contracts when they’re added to a list in Autopilot.
We’ve also started using a lesser-known tool called Sleeknote to replace landing pages and their forms. This nifty tool creates on-page lead capture forms that can be triggered by various events, such as clicking on a link or scrolling partway down a page. Contacts then either enter an Autopilot journey (and are then added to a list and/or sent an email) or are transferred to a relevant page.
We also use Sleeknote to send customers PDF versions of our resources upon request and direct them to long-form content from blog posts.
For our company blog, we decided to go with Ghost: an open-source, Kickstarted non-profit publishing platform that until fairly recently had a Markdown-based editor.
As RotaCloud’s blog editor, the biggest change was not just relocating all of our existing blog content, but rebuilding the blog itself on this new platform…
Why Ghost is great 😍
Moving the blog to Ghost required some work from our developers, but nothing too time-consuming. Our blog used the default theme, Casper, which works perfectly fine for a business blog — it certainly looked a lot more professional than blog layout we’d been using ever since our blog was born back in 2014.
As a writer, meanwhile, Ghost was and is a breeze to use. The editor initially required Markdown, but a visual editor was introduced in August 2018 which is very similar to Medium’s editor.
Ghost’s UI wasn’t the most intuitive to learn initially, with most options for each story (meta description, featured image, post URL etc.) tucked away under a tiny, faint ‘settings’ icon. Of course, this makes the editing window clean and tidy, which helps when writing, but it didn’t seem like the most obvious location at first.
There are a couple of features from HubSpot and WordPress that we miss — most notably some form of image gallery where you can browse images you’ve previously used within posts.
Complete customisation
While the default theme is OK, the real power of Ghost comes from customising your theme — or even creating your own from scratch.
This is where Ghost particularly impressed me.
During 2018 I started learning HTML and CSS seriously. Before the Ghost move, I’d been tinkering with a few pages on the main RotaCloud website to help out when our web developer had his hands full, but the switch to Ghost gave me another opportunity to start testing my skills — and the open source nature of Ghost (and Casper) gave me full control over the design of the blog.
As a very inexperienced web developer, this was incredibly daunting, but the detailed documentation and wealth of comments within the code gave me the best platform I could have hoped for.
I certainly haven’t made any huge changes to Casper, but I’ve made dozens of smaller changes (GitHub tells me it’s 47 commits, but that’s probably an underestimate). These design tweaks have helped me build my confidence with CSS, whilst giving us a company blog that fits our brand.
The customisation doesn’t end there. You can also use code injections to apply styles to individual posts, without having to dig around in the theme’s code itself.
I’d better stop talking about code now, but put it this way—if I can learn how to customise Ghost default’s theme, anyone can.
Should you switch to Ghost?
Everyone at RotaCloud who’s used Ghost agrees that it’s a fantastic blogging platform — but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you might find in HubSpot or WordPress.
And, in truth, that’s OK. Ghost is just a great publishing platform. It does what we need it to do, and it does it well.
If that’s what you’re looking for, then I’d highly recommend Ghost for business blogging.
All-in-one vs. Best-of-Breed Marketing Tools
In the past couple of years, we’ve experienced both of these marketing set-ups at RotaCloud. From what I’ve said in this post, you’ll probably guess that I prefer to use an array of SaaS best-of-breed tools instead of one overarching system.
For small businesses like ours, here’s why I’d recommend this approach:
- You have more control over features and functionality. Previously, we had to put up with HubSpot’s product decisions and removals, or start paying for another tool on top of HubSpot if we didn’t like them. Now, if one of our marketing software providers makes a decision we don’t like, we can switch very quickly— we aren’t locked into a contract and the switch wouldn’t cause much disruption. And the nature of SaaS pricing structures means that these brands are more willing to act on customer feedback quickly.
- Build a bespoke marketing tech stack that meets your needs and your budget. While integrated systems do allow some customisation in terms of pricing plans, you have far more flexibility with a combination of individual best-of-breed solutions.
- Never feel under pressure to get your money’s worth. We pushed all our marketing resources into HubSpot in the early months of our contract, as its benefits tend to depend upon using as many of its features as possible (i.e. understanding how customers interact with your brand and content). We felt that we needed to go ‘all-in’ in the early stages of the contract, doing everything HubSpot’s way, if we were to ever get our money’s worth from the product. By using a range of different tools instead, you can ramp up usage more slowly, in a way that suits your business.
- You can leave. We’re only half-joking here. Detaching from all-in-one software is difficult. And not just because you need to find several tools to replace it; you also need to export data (from blog posts and images to contact information) and rework your entire marketing methodology once more. If the platform you’re parting ways with is used for only a single element of your business, however, then the process is a lot easier.
A final note on HubSpot
HubSpot is by no means a bad product—it just wasn’t right for us. If you’re thinking about using HubSpot at your small business, we advise you to draw up an exit plan too—no matter how impressed you might be with the software right now—detailing exactly which elements of your site and marketing mix you’ll need to reclaim if and when you decide to end your contract.
As noted above, we still use HubSpot’s CRM, and I’m still a reader and subscriber of the HubSpot blog. Their new design system looks promising, and I’m interested to see how to see how their product evolves in the future — but for now, we’re not going back.
2019 for RotaCloud’s marketing team
Although 2018 was a year of change in terms of platforms, many other elements of RotaCloud’s marketing strategy remained static. In 2019, we’re looking to branch out and try different approaches to marketing, and test new channels, formats, and strategies.
As ever, keep an eye on our social channels to see what we’re up to.
