Is HubSpot B2B or B2C?

There is no doubt that the capabilities of HubSpot’s customer relationship platform are massive. However, the harder question to answer is ‘Is HubSpot B2B or B2C?’ and understanding how it can work as part of your inbound marketing efforts throughout the sales cycle.

B2B vs B2C Marketing

In marketing, you target people based on personal attributes, business demographics, job functions, or titles.

B2B

B2B stands for business to business, meaning that your business sells directly to other businesses.

Marketing Agencies – They sell their services to support other businesses’ marketing functions.

Logistics Businesses – Their business ships goods for other businesses

Workwear retailers – Sell specific workwear to businesses directly, often including branding or personalisation.

B2C

B2C is an abbreviation for ‘business to customer’. This is the classic business you find on the high street that sells its products or services straight to consumers. Some examples of this may include:

Hairdressers – They sell their services straight to the individual from their shops

Gaming stores – They sell their products straight to the individuals who play the games via websites, apps, and storefronts.

ASOS – The e-commerce department store brand sells directly to consumers from their website and app.

Is there any crossover?

Like everything, it’s not always black and white; some businesses work both B2B and B2C.

One prime example of this would be wholesalers like Costco. Initially, they were B2B, selling wholesale/bulk items for businesses at discounts. Now, as families are bulk buying, Costco could easily be categorised as B2C as well.

What HubSpot Offers

HubSpot’s Software offers assistance in a range of business areas, aiming to delight customers and improve sales strategies for businesses. One common question is, ‘How does HubSpot work, and what can it do?’ which we’ve covered in a previous blog.

To summarise, HubSpot can assist in your inbound marketing efforts, sales, lead management, automation, reports, and customer service, showing results from the get-go. Having one platform to support all these business functions means that everything is in one place. It can be easy for your team to find anything they need across the board.

HubSpot functions on a tier-based system, meaning the more you pay, the more you get. You must check what is included in your subscription before selecting a tier.

Let’s uncover HubSpot’s wide range of features for B2B and B2C businesses.

B2B

For B2B marketing strategies, following your prospects through the sale process and further communicating without massive amounts of manual work can be valuable for customer relationships and efficiency.

Lead Management

With the sales funnel from awareness to purchase undoubtedly longer for B2B companies, HubSpot marketing tools can help you manage this more effectively.

Save details of your contacts, their company and their current position into your sales pipeline. From here, you’ll be able to track communications with that given person from anyone within your team.

You can filter contacts into lists based on set criteria. This is to make bulk contacting clients for specific services or products easier if needed.

Deals

With deals, you can track potential revenue through your sales team and process and associate deals with that contact or company.

You can set a default deal amount if your business has a set price. You can also assign the price as a manual entry, monthly or annual recurring and/or the total contract value. Alternatively, you can choose which value option and enter the amount separately for each deal you create.

Chatbots

Chatbots make it easy for you and your team to communicate with current and potential clients from the offset. With a HubSpot chatbot, you can assign conversations to your team members. Potential customers can look for solutions or ask questions, and your team can pick up messages from website users immediately.

Sequences

HubSpot sequences allow you to create a series of unique touchpoints that help you connect with and communicate with customers or prospects at scale with marketing automation.

You can create your own sequences from scratch or use one of HubSpot’s templates. This can help you streamline repetitive tasks to drive business growth and reach your business goals for each personalised campaign.

B2C

For B2C, customer contact is very frequent, with email marketing continuing to grow. 64% of small businesses use email marketing; making the process easier for businesses is the key to continued efficiency and growth.

Personalisation

HubSpot’s wide range of personalisation features allow you to segment and personalise content and communications for specific customers. Personalisation is key for B2C companies, as 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalised messaging.

One way we see this benefitting businesses all of the time is through personalised emails. For example, you can personalise emails by filling out customer contact details. When writing an email to send out to a list, using the format “Hello, (first_name)” will automatically fill in each user name when it arrives in their inbox.

Automation

With marketing automation, you can set up workflows to trigger a range of activities, from adding contacts to lists of updated contact information to sending emails and assigning related tasks for your team.

Integrating Data

HubSpot has many integrations that allow you to see data from a range of channels. As well as which of your marketing channels performs the best and which channel each customer came from.

Drawbacks

As mentioned above, with HubSpot, everything comes in a tier system. If your business already uses a different software that supports most of the marketing functions, you don’t need to pay the extra to access the whole of the marketing hub unless you plan to get rid of your other software.

You don’t want to end up paying double for features you’re only using on one platform.

Hidden extras come in all shapes and sizes. For e-commerce businesses, you’ll need to factor in the additional cost of transactional emails, including receipts and shipping details.

Is HubSpot B2B or B2C?

Now that we’ve covered features for both B2B and B2C, it’s time to clear up the question ‘Is HubSpot B2B or B2C?’ and the answer is – it’s for both!

The highlighted features can be easily switched between sectors, benefiting each other.

First, consider what you need from HubSpot and how much you need it. Ask yourself some key questions like:

• How many contacts do we have?
• What other systems and software are we currently using?
• Can HubSpot replace any software?
• Do we need the full HubSpot marketing hub, or is that centralised elsewhere?

Ask yourself and your team these questions to determine what you need from HubSpot and which powerful features are less important.

HubSpot can be complicated, especially at the beginning. As a HubSpot partner, we provide HubSpot Management to assist with setting up and optimising your inbound marketing strategies and enhancing performance.

Key Takeaways

• Understand if your business is primarily B2B or B2C.
• Check out the different tiers HubSpot has.
• Understand the range of HubSpot marketing tools.
• Understand your target market audience and their buying habits.
• Use your team to understand exactly what you want from HubSpot.
• HubSpot can be both B2B and B2C when used to its fullest potential.

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