Hubspot Alternatives – Landing Pages, Social, SEO and Hosting

This is part 3 of our deep dive into tools that provide an alternative to Hubspot.

Landing Pages

The folks over at Copyblogger have created a tool called Premise which makes creating landing pages in WordPress dead simple.  Not only does Premise make creating landing pages easy, it also contains a site membership component that allows you to lock content away for customers who purchased or otherwise been granted access to “premium” content.  This is something that Hubspot does not yet have.

Premise has eight different landing page templates including product pricing tables, thank you pages, sales letters, and a page specifically for embedded video.

Since Premise is created by Copyblogger, Premise also provides sample copy for each type of landing page and also helps you create your own landing page content through its Copywriting Assistant.

Cost: $165/One time (We’ll use $13.75 to calculate the month vs. month comparison)

SEO Research, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management, and More

Have you heard of Raven Tools?  Raven Tools is really a conglomeration of a number of tools that have been brought together under one roof.  It can do a lot, and it can do even more if you plug in some more premium partner tools into the base Raven Tools package.  There is way too much to go into here, but the base package of Raven Tools will help you:

• Conduct keyword research to determine which keywords you should target in your content creation efforts.
• SEO Competitor analysis and tracking
• Monitor you social media mentions to increase engagement
• Social media management allows you to sees all your followers across multiple networks in a single interface
• PPC campaign management
• Campaign metrics tracking through Google Analytics integration

This feature list just scratches the surface, see all their tools at RavenTools.com.

On this one, I would say that if you spend the time to configure all the elements that are available to you, that you will exceed the capabilities of the base Hubspot package when comparing functionality.

Price: $99/mo

Hosting

We’ll once again give Copyblogger the benefit of our loyalty and recommend their Synthesis WordPress hosting service.  Depending on your needs, it will scale up for you and they are experts in WordPress hosting.  For a 2,000 user list, their base level hosting should be fine.

Price: $27/mo

The Final Analysis

Over the last couple weeks, we have pieced together an alternative to buying the integrated Hubspot inbound marketing system.  Below are the results:

Total Cost of our Hubspot substitute: $168.75/mo

Total Cost of base Hubspot with 2,000 contacts: $400/mo

Although we have managed to save about $2,800/year, what is the true cost of the savings?  In some cases, we have a tool that may be superior to the Hubspot (The CMS seems to fit the bill at least for now) and in some cases we have had to deal with an inferior product (its tough to get an email tool that is the equivalent of Hubspot’s integrated platform) and in some cases the area is grey, but the alternative tools require a little (or in some cases a lot) more work to configure and integrate.

What’s the parting thought?  Integration seems to make your life easier, even if it leaves you feeling a little boxed in.  That said, many installations for our customer have taken the best of breed solutions (like maybe a wordpress based site) and integrated it with Hubspot to get a more complete package.  Let us know your budget and your needs, and we’ll help you to price out a solution that makes the most sense for you!

 

Jamie Troia is President of Greystack Digital Marketing and author of Stern Rules!