Have you ever contemplated what it would take to independently aggregate the most important elements of an inbound marketing campaign onto a Wordpress site? It’s likely that small to medium businesses do this research and come out with two fairly common objections to the Hubspot software solution:
“I can do all of this on Wordpress for free”
Or
“I’m not moving my site onto the Hubspot CMS”
However, it’s worth taking a closer look at Hubspot Basic. Putting aside the benefits of a fully integrated solution for a moment, just from a pure cost standpoint, Hubspot Basic is a viable alternative. Let’s break down the monthly carrying costs to implement the add-ons needed to execute the most basic inbound marketing components such as SEO, email, social media and landing pages:
Wordpress |
Software |
Monthly Cost |
Hosting |
BlueHost |
$5.00 |
Email (up to 2,500) |
Constant Contact |
$30.00 |
Landing Pages |
Woo Foo |
$20.00 |
SEO |
SEOmoz |
$99.00 |
Analytics |
|
$0.00 |
Social |
HootSuite |
$9.00 |
CRM (light) |
KISSmetrics |
$150.00 |
Total |
|
$313.00 |
Now, let’s take a look at Hubspot Basic service that starts at $200/mo. For this purpose, I’ll assume emails added into the Hubspot platform equals 1,000.
Hubspot |
Software |
Monthly Cost |
Hosting |
Included |
Included |
Email (up to 1,000) |
Included |
$100.00 |
Landing Pages |
Included |
Included |
SEO |
Included |
Included |
Analytics |
Included |
Included |
Social |
Included |
Included |
CRM (light) |
Included |
Included |
Hubspot Basic |
|
$200.00 |
Total |
|
$300.00 |
As you can see, piecing the components needed to successfully execute inbound marketing campaigns into a Wordpress site is not as attractive an alternative. This doesn’t begin to address the world class support provided by Hubspot. With Wordpress, unless you have near full-time help, you’re on your own. Or, at the very least, dealing with many different platform support desks.
Another objection worth addressing is push back regarding hosting a website on Hubspot. This gets into the Hubspot vs. Wordpress CMS discussion. Yet, this can be a moot point. A common misconception is that Hubspot Basic requires you to host your site completely on the Hubspot CMS. This is not the case. In the download Start Up’s Guide to Inbound Marketing, I discuss an elegant workaround that allows your site to stay on its current CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, whatever) and benefit from Hubspot’s array of inbound marketing tools.