Hubspot Marketing Hub vs Marketo in 2024

• January 6, 2024

Reading Time: 8 minutes

As we step into 2024, the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve with cutting-edge tools and platforms. Two giants in this field, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo remain at the forefront of the discussion. In this article, we’ll delve into a detailed comparison of these platforms to help marketers make an informed decision.

What is Hubspot Marketing Hub?

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a dynamic and integrated platform designed to aid businesses in their digital marketing efforts. It’s a part of HubSpot’s larger suite of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, but it specifically focuses on the marketing aspect, offering a range of features tailored to enhance and streamline marketing strategies.

At its core, HubSpot Marketing Hub is about unifying various marketing channels and activities. It allows businesses to manage their content, social media, email campaigns, SEO, and analytics all in one place. This centralization is crucial for creating a cohesive and effective marketing strategy. By integrating these different aspects, businesses can ensure that their messaging is consistent across all platforms and can easily track the effectiveness of their efforts.

Key Features of Hubspot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub in 2024 continues to be a comprehensive and versatile platform, offering a range of key features that cater to various aspects of digital marketing:

Automated CRM Database: Central to HubSpot’s functionality, the CRM database automatically updates customer profiles, tracking their engagement and journey. This feature aligns sales and marketing efforts, enabling a more collaborative approach.

List Segmentation: HubSpot allows for effective list segmentation in the CRM, grouping contacts with similar qualities for more tailored marketing efforts.

Content Creation: Users can create SEO-optimized web pages, blogs, and landing pages. HubSpot aids in building trust with the audience by providing valuable information and encouraging engagement.

Automated Workflows: The platform enables the creation of automated email and marketing campaigns, with real-time response and engagement performance analytics.

Email Analytics: HubSpot offers detailed analytics for email campaigns, including engagement rates, open rates, and click-through rates, helping to refine email marketing strategies.

A/B Testing: This feature allows for testing different aspects of marketing emails to understand what resonates best with the audience.

Social Media Integration and Management: The platform integrates with various social media platforms, streamlining the process of drafting, scheduling, publishing, and tracking posts.

Paid Ad Tracking: HubSpot’s ad integration tool helps in measuring the performance of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads, linking interactions back to the CRM.

Dashboards: Providing comprehensive analytics reports, the dashboards in HubSpot enable a holistic view of marketing campaign performance.

Enhanced Deal Prioritization with Coloured Tags: This feature in sales pipelines allows for creating colored deal tags for easy identification and prioritization of important deals.

Mobile App Email Enhancements: The HubSpot mobile app now offers enhanced capabilities for managing emails, further improving communication and productivity for sales teams on the move.

Multiple Knowledge Bases with Service Hub: Service Hub now supports hosting multiple knowledge bases within a single account, catering to different brands or customer segments.

These features demonstrate HubSpot’s continued commitment to providing a unified, all-in-one solution for managing and optimizing various facets of digital marketing strategies​​​​​​.

What is Marketo?

Marketo, an Adobe platform, excels in marketing automation with advanced lead management and seamless integration with Adobe Experience Cloud. It offers robust analytics, customizable features, and scalability, ideal for medium to large enterprises. Marketo’s integration provides cutting-edge analytics and content management, facilitating a comprehensive marketing approach. Its automated tools streamline complex processes, enhancing productivity. The platform’s adaptability and detailed insights into campaign performance and customer behavior support data-driven strategies.

Additionally, Marketo’s vibrant community and Adobe’s support system offer valuable resources, making it a comprehensive ecosystem for modern marketing operations and strategic decision-making.

Key Features of Marketo

Marketo offers a range of features designed to streamline and enhance various marketing activities for businesses. Key features and advancements in Marketo that have been noted for their efficiency and operational excellence include:

Advanced Lead Nurturing and Segmentation: Marketo offers sophisticated capabilities for lead nurturing, using behavioral triggers to deliver personalized content. Efficient segmentation allows for dynamic content delivery tailored to different audience segments.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM): The platform facilitates the kick-starting and deployment of ABM across channels. It enables businesses to define ‘Account Lists’ for key accounts and build scalable programs, with AI-based predictive scoring to rank leads and identify potential conversions.

Predictive Content: Marketo’s predictive content feature personalizes email messaging, landing page content, and campaign delivery times, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

CRM Integration: The platform seamlessly integrates with CRM systems, allowing for the creation of custom campaigns, enhanced engagement, real-time insights, and effective data management.

Additional Screens in the Next-Generation Experience: Marketo has introduced additional screens with a new design and usability enhancements in its next-generation experience, including landing page asset details in Design Studio and Marketing Activities.

Self-Service Flow Steps: This feature expands connectivity between Marketo and other technology stacks, allowing for the creation of customized flow steps in Smart Campaigns. It contrasts with webhooks by enabling the use of external web services in both batch and executable campaigns.

Dynamic Chat: This feature enhances website opportunities by targeting leads and accounts with personalized conversations, improving user engagement and lead generation effectiveness.

These features position Marketo as a comprehensive solution for modern marketing needs, offering tools and functionalities that cater to a wide range of marketing strategies and goals​​​​.

Hubspot Marketing Hub Vs Marketo: Core Features Compared

When comparing HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo in terms of their core features, it’s clear that each platform has its own strengths tailored to different business needs. Here’s a breakdown of some key areas:

Target Audience and Focus:

• HubSpot: Primarily designed for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) organizations, focusing on boosting customer interaction with omnichannel strategies.
  
• Marketo: Geared towards Business-to-Business (B2B) companies, excelling in campaign creation and offering a range of customization tools.

Campaign Creation and Customization:

• Marketo: Offers a rich design suite with templates and drag-and-drop tools, enabling the creation of personalized campaigns. It excels in filtering discrepancies in data and assigning multiple assets for different product channels.
  
• HubSpot: Known for its lead intelligence capabilities, gathering relevant information across customer channels, though it does not match Marketo in terms of campaign customization and data filtering.

CRM Integration:

• HubSpot: Offers built-in CRM integration, providing a seamless experience with a user-friendly interface. It supports over 100+ native integrations with applications like Gmail, WordPress, and MailChimp.
  
• Marketo: Integrates with various CRMs including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP. Its CRM integrations are more advanced with in-depth coverage but are not as user-friendly as HubSpot’s.

Analytics:

• Marketo: Provides fully customizable reports with the ability to monitor customer’s browsing and search history. It features visual elements like charts and graphs.
  
• HubSpot: Offers a more accessible analytics tool with a simple dashboard. The reports are less customizable but user-friendly.

Community & Support:

• HubSpot: Known for its strong community-driven approach. Offers phone and email support for all Professional and Enterprise plans.
  
• Marketo: Provides basic support to all users, but full support comes at an additional cost. Its customer community is active but not as extensive as HubSpot’s.

Automated Program:

• Both HubSpot and Marketo offer strong automated program capabilities, with HubSpot providing a fantastic workflow for understanding leads and Marketo featuring a customer engagement engine for highly relevant dialogues.

Customer Retention:

• Marketo: Builds personalized campaigns effectively for long-lasting engagement.
  
• HubSpot: Creates lead nurturing campaigns that trigger automatically based on lead behavior, facilitating long-term customer retention.

Assigning Multiple Assets:

• HubSpot: Allows organizing, scheduling, and publishing content across various channels with an intuitive calendar feature.
  
• Marketo: Offers strong asset assignment capabilities, including personalizing website segments without HTML interaction.

Customizable Qualifiers:

• HubSpot: Provides lead scoring and breaks down leads based on value and professional information.
  
• Marketo: Utilizes a proprietary metric for content performance grading.

Sales-Lead Conversion:

• HubSpot: Offers a suite of content tools for attracting visitors and guiding leads towards conversion, with strong CRM integration.
  
• Marketo: Converts customers by triggering timely sales calls or offers, helping the sales team capitalize on opportunities.

Visitor Reports:

Both platforms offer robust visitor reporting features essential for targeting traffic segments and optimizing marketing strategies.

HubSpot is more user-friendly and better suited for B2C organizations with a focus on customer interaction, while Marketo offers more advanced features and customization, making it ideal for B2B companies and larger enterprises​​​​​

Hubspot Marketing Hub vs Marketo: Pricing Compared

Analysis of Hubspot Marketing Hub Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a range of pricing options designed to cater to different needs and stages of business growth. Here’s a breakdown of the pricing structure for the HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• Free Tier: This tier is ideal for solopreneurs and beginner marketers, offering basic website lead capture and tracking at no cost. It’s a great starting point for those new to digital marketing.
  
• Marketing Hub Starter: Priced at around $45 per month, this tier includes more advanced features compared to the Free tier, such as customizable forms and deeper insights. It’s designed for businesses that are beginning to scale their marketing efforts.
  
• Marketing Hub Professional: Starting at approximately $800 per month (billed annually), this plan is aimed at more experienced marketers and growth marketing teams. It includes scalable, automated inbound marketing campaigns and a broader range of tools and functionalities.
  
• Marketing Hub Enterprise: For advanced marketing teams that require sophisticated analytics and revenue reporting, the Enterprise tier starts at about $3,200 per month (billed annually). It offers the most comprehensive set of features for large-scale marketing operations.

Analysis of Marketo Pricing

Marketo Engage offers four pricing packages to cater to different business needs:

Growth: This package includes core marketing email, segmentation, automation, and measurement. It allows up to 10 users and 20k API calls per day.

Select: This package includes essential marketing automation and measurement. It allows up to 25 users and 50k API calls per day.

Prime: This package is designed for lead- and account-based marketing with journey analytics and AI personalization. It allows up to 25 users and 50k API calls per day1.

Ultimate: This is the most powerful marketing automation package with premium attribution. It allows up to 25 users and 50k API calls per day.

Each package includes different features and capabilities. For instance, all packages offer audience segmentation & targeting, campaign & journey automation, email marketing, and more. However, advanced features like predictive content, dynamic chat, target account management, and advanced journey analytics are only available in the Prime and Ultimate packages.

Please note that the exact pricing is not publicly listed on the website. You would need to contact Adobe’s sales team for a custom quote. Some sources suggest that Marketo offers three standard pricing tiers at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 per month, but this information might be outdated or inaccurate. You can contact the Marketo sales team for details regarding its pricing.

Salespanel as an Alternative

Our product, Salespanel presents itself as an efficient and cost-effective alternative to HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo, catering to businesses seeking a streamlined approach to digital marketing, particularly in lead tracking and segmentation.

Key Features of Salespanel:

• Lead Identification and Tracking: Specializes in real-time lead identification, tracking, and scoring, offering insights into visitor behavior on websites and categorizing leads based on engagement and fit.
  
• Account Revelation: It excels in revealing accounts visiting the website, transforming anonymous traffic into identifiable business opportunities.
  
• Segmentation and Personalization: Facilitates detailed segmentation of leads, enabling personalized marketing campaigns targeted toward the most promising prospects.
  
• ABM Capabilities: Salespanel supports ABM strategies by providing tools for targeting and nurturing high-value accounts.
  
• Email Marketing Integration: Though lacking an in-built email system, it integrates seamlessly with popular email marketing tools, aligning email campaigns with lead data.
  
• Real-Time Alerts and Reporting: Offers real-time alerts and comprehensive reporting, aiding sales teams in timely and informed decision-making.

Final Thoughts

In 2024, the marketing landscape continues to be dominated by prominent tools like HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo, each offering unique capabilities tailored to different marketing needs. HubSpot Marketing Hub, known for its user-friendly approach and integration with various digital marketing channels, serves as a holistic solution, especially for B2C organizations. It excels in unifying content, social media, email campaigns, SEO, and analytics into a cohesive strategy. With key features like an automated CRM database, list segmentation, content creation, and analytics, HubSpot is designed to streamline and enhance digital marketing efforts.

Marketo, on the other hand, stands out in marketing automation, particularly appealing to B2B companies due to its advanced lead management and seamless integration with Adobe Experience Cloud. It offers robust analytics, customizable features, and scalability. Marketo’s strengths lie in predictive content, CRM integration, and personalized customer engagement, making it a comprehensive tool for modern marketing operations.

Both platforms have their distinct advantages: HubSpot’s ease of use and comprehensive integration capabilities make it a preferred choice for businesses focused on customer interaction, while Marketo’s advanced features and customization options cater to larger enterprises and B2B marketing needs.
Ultimately, the choice between HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketo will depend on the specific requirements and goals of a business. You can also try out Salespanel!