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Mailchimp vs HubSpot

Posted on June 17, 2021April 2, 2025 by Phil

As business owners, we’re all busy! So you and your marketing team (if you have one) are likely to have a full plate. This therefore makes choosing a marketing platform that increases efficiency everything. For example, this article compares two popular marketing platforms — Mailchimp v Hubspot — to help make your evaluation process simpler.

Overview

Marketers today have no shortage of tasks to complete. Each task, whether an email send, an ad retargeting campaign, or managing social media accounts, is one of many customer interactions that together create a holistic customer experience. Just as marketers have no shortage of jobs to be done, likewise, there’s no shortage of tools you can use to execute on your marketing strategy. This page will help you determine what’s best for you and your team when evaluating marketing tools.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s platform combines marketing automation, email, and a suite of other flexible marketing tools. In addition, it includes the power of a CRM to give you insight into how your marketing efforts are influencing your customer’s experience across their entire buyer’s journey. Moreover, HubSpot is ranked #1 in Marketing Automation by G2, and #1 by Gartner Peer Insights.

Mailchimp

On the other hand, Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing service. Their customers leverage Mailchimp’s email marketing tools to connect with their audience as well as, expand the tool’s functionality through a number of integrations.

Email Marketing

An email service provider is certainly the first tool marketers may add to their tool kit — and for good reason. Email marketing is a quick way to engage with your leads, and as a result, nurture them into loyal customers. It’s also extremely cost effective, with some studies showing an ROI of up to 4400%. When choosing an email service provider, you’ll want to ensure that it has the features you need, and is flexible enough to stay with you as you grow your company.

Mailchimp’s email marketing tool features a drag and drop email editor, as well as custom coded email templates. Once you upgrade to a paid tier, as a result, you’ll gain access to features like A/B testing, and dynamic send times. You’ll also unlock comparative reports so you can begin analyzing data across campaigns and share insights with your team.

Hubspot Email tool

HubSpot email tool on the other hand has everything Mailchimp offers, and more. Furthermore HubSpot’s drag and drop email editor is easy to use and they offer a slew of templates that you can personalise to meet your brand’s specific needs. Consequently as you grow, you’ll unlock features like smart send times, A/B testing, and more.

The real power of HubSpot’s marketing email tool comes when it’s combined with the CRM, and our marketing automation platform. With HubSpot, you can create detailed email campaigns that as a result, give each contact a tailored experience based on the information you’ve gathered within the CRM. You can also create if/then logic in your automated email campaigns, so each contact receives a contextual email based on the experience they’ve had with your brand.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Drag and drop email editor
Ecommerce emails
Email personalization
A/B testing
Time zone sends
Optimized for any device
Post-send email analytics
Comparative reports
Transactional email

Contact Management

As you grow, so will your database of contacts. In short, being able to track how these contacts have interacted with your brand, and take action off of those interactions is essential to your success. Using a marketing automation platform that gives you full insight into your customers’ journey, and the ability to manage contacts across a growing team will help you personalize your marketing, while helping you scale your business.

Mailchimp’s Marketing CRM on the other hand has an audience system that leverages segments and tags that can be used to manage your customer outreach. Segments will automatically create groups of contacts based on a single variable, while tagging your contacts let’s you create manual groupings — just like you would tag a group of blog posts as “How to” articles. Mailchimp lets free users use up to five conditions to create a segment, while premium users can use advanced segmentation features that let you combine unlimited conditions to filter your audience.

Hubspot Marketing Tools

HubSpot’s marketing tools are built directly on top of the CRM of choice for growing companies — therefore giving you insight into a contact’s entire experience with your company. In short, you get extremely granular control over your contacts and how you manage them. The HubSpot CRM includes more than just information on your marketing activities. For example, in addition to seeing if a contact opened your most recent marketing email, you’ll be able to track how contacts are interacting with your website, how their most recent sales call went, and whether or not they have an open ticket with your support team.

Create as many custom properties as you’d like within the HubSpot CRM and use these properties’ values to create lists that can be used across all your marketing campaigns. You’re also able to combine an unlimited amount properties to further segment your list of contacts from our free marketing tools, all the way up into our Enterprise offering.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
List management
Create custom contact properties
Combine unlimited filtering options to further segment your lists		Premium feature
Update contacts in bulk		Only through import
Timeline of all interactions with your company		Limited

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is essential for any scaling company. As you grow, actions that you used to do manually, such as sending nurturing emails at a regular cadence, are no longer feasible. You have too many contacts to manage, and too many other tasks taking up your time. Marketing automation lets you continue to give your customers a personalized experience, while you focus on more mission critical tasks.

Mailchimp’s marketing automation tool lets you trigger marketing emails based on a number of different actions your contacts take. Everything from sending abandoned cart nurturing emails to birthday emails is supported. But Mailchimp only allows you to use marketing automation to send email. You can not automate your contact management, or internal notifications through their automation tool — leaving growing businesses to look elsewhere to automate these tasks.

HubSpot’s automation platform goes beyond just email. Triggering an email based on actions your contacts take is just the tip of the iceberg. While Mailchimp stops with automated kickback emails and drip campaigns, HubSpot’s workflows tool lets you manage your contact database, rotate leads amongst your sales team, even create support tickets automatically. You can also go a step further and add delays and conditional logic to your automation, allowing you to customize your workflows to meet the exact needs of your team. HubSpot’s automation platform is meant to assist your entire business — not just your email marketing.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Single automated kickback emails
Multi-step Drip campaigns
Conditional if/then automation logic
Automate internal notifications and tasks
Automate lead management & segmentation
Automate the process of updating contact or company properties
Custom automations through API

Social and Ads

Having an active social presence is essential for engaging with your audience. Ads on the other hand, allow you to get extremely targeted with your messaging across both search and social. You can use ads to generate new leads fast, hone your messaging and targeting, or re-target contacts in order to nurture them.

Mailchimp Social

Mailchimp’s social tool allows you to publish organically to Facebook and Instagram. Their ads tool let’s you manage your Facebook ads, as well as Google display ads. They also include a number of reports that tie your ad spend back to revenue. For Facebook, you need to have connected an ecommerce platform to your account, such as Shopify or WooCommerce. Targeting is limited on Mailchimp. For example, you cannot use contact lists for your Google ads to refine or exclude your audience, and you’re only able to target ads at all website visitors. There is no opportunity to specify a specific page, or group of pages.

Hubspot Social

If you’re looking for one tool to align your entire team around both your organic social and paid strategies, HubSpot is the tool for you. Start by connecting all your social accounts to HubSpot across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Schedule out posts across each network, and quickly report on your success on each channel. HubSpot will give you insight into your performance no matter where you publish, ensuring that posts published within HubSpot or directly within the network are tracked. You can also connect your YouTube account to HubSpot to see how your audience is engaging with your video content. With the social monitoring tool, you’re also able to keep tabs on specific trends and keyword phrases that are important to you and your brand, and also reply directly to comments on your social posts within HubSpot.

Hubspot Ads

HubSpot’s ads tool lets you easily manage your Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn ad campaigns from one central location. After connecting your account to HubSpot, adding tracking pixels to your site is a two click process — in short, no developer required. Any leads that are generated through a Facebook lead ad or LinkedIn lead gen form are automatically synced over into HubSpot. You can also get granular with your targeting — using any CRM data point or an extremely specific grouping of pages to reach exactly who you intend to with your ads. And because HubSpot ads are closely tied to the CRM, you can report on exactly how much revenue can be attributed to your ads at various stages in the buyer’s journey.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Social publishing	Facebook, Instragram, LinkedIn, Twitter	Facebook & Instagram
Social monitoring
Social reporting	Report on your success no matter where you published	Only report on social posts that were made through Mailchimp
Facebook/Instagram Ads
Google search ads
Google display ads
LinkedIn ads
Advanced website audiences
Contact list audiences		Facebook only
Facebook lookalike audiences
Ads ROI Reporting		E-commerce integration required
Ads reporting across a number of attribution types

Landing Pages and Forms

Creating simple yet effective landing pages that match your brand and drive conversions is essential for growing businesses. An effective landing page should make it easy for your site visitors to quickly fill out a form and learn more about your offer. Moreover, your forms should be customisable to meet your business’s and customers’ needs — allowing you to gather all the information you need to effectively nurture your leads.

Mailchimp Landing pages and Forms

Mailchimp offers a simple drag and drop landing page editing experience, as well as a forms solution. Their forms solution is automatically tied back to a list — which makes following up with form submitters quick and easy.

Hubspot Landing pages and Forms

HubSpot also has a robust landing pages and forms solution. What separates HubSpot from Mailchimp is the tool’s flexibility. By adding the HubSpot tracking code to your site, as a result, you can automatically bring data into HubSpot from any forms tool you use. HubSpot also understands that the goal of a form submission isn’t always to convert a new lead for the first time. Progressive profiling let’s you change what a visitor to your site sees if they’re already a contact in your database — ensuring that every form fill yields valuable information for your business.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Forms
Pop-up forms
Embedded forms
Collect data from any form solution you use		Through integrations
Custom form fields
Hidden form fields
Progressive profiling
Dependent fields
Drag and drop page building
Template/custom coded landing page development
Use custom domain
Scheduled publishing
On page SEO optimizations

Integrated tools

HubSpot is so much more than just email and marketing automation. With live chat, a managed CMS, SEO tools, and more, HubSpot therefore has everything you need to get your marketing strategy started, with advanced features that you can grow into. Furthermore, you can add your sales and service teams to HubSpot too, and see how having all teams working out of one system reduces friction in your customer’s entire experience with your company.

	HubSpot	Mailchimp
Live chat tools
Programmable bots
Unified email & chat inbox
Blog
SEO tools
Video hosting and management
Hierarchical teams
Meeting booking tool
Lead scoring
Automated sales sequences
Ticket & deal automation
Sales Playbooks
Knowledge base tools
Customer feedback tools
Help desk tools

Support

Whether you’re a seasoned vet, or you’re just getting started on a marketing automation platform, HubSpot has the resources you need to find success. From extensive online resources to our 24/7 support team, as a Hubspot Solutions Partner, we’re ready to assist you and your growing business.

Why is my website not converting?

Posted on April 12, 2021July 4, 2024 by Phil

So you’ve got a website – great! A website is meant to drive visitors, give you new leads, and increase sales. But what if it isn’t converting? You’ll surely want to know why it isn’t! The most common reasons come down to design, content, and usability. In this article, we’ll break down a few key areas that can contribute to why your website isn’t converting as you hoped.

What are your goals?

It’s easy to get a website these days as there are tons of options from do-it-yourself to custom-built like the websites we do here at Back9. But there’s a lot more to it than just getting online. You’ve got to have goals. What do you want to achieve with your website? Do you want sales leads, to sell more products, or to educate? Whatever your goal is, it needs to be S.M.A.R.T; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. By planning your goals out ahead of time, you’ll know if your website is doing what it’s supposed to–or if it needs some work. If you want some help creating these types of goals, take a look at our SMART Goals Template–it can help you get started!

Get a FREE S.M.A.R.T. Goal template

Just pop your email in and hit submit and voila! We’ll redirect you to the template

Review and update your goals over time

An important part of goal setting is to review your goals regularly to see how they’re going. Did you achieve them? If not, how come? Were they too ambitious? Or is there something wrong with your website? If you can’t see any reason why you didn’t quite meet your goals, it might be time to review your website for a few key things.

Great design is key

We’ve written about this topic many times but we can’t stress it enough. If you have a well-designed website that is user-friendly and visually appealing, your website is more likely to convert.

A lot goes into the design of your website. It’s more than just looking pretty. It has to be intuitive and easy to use too. One thing strongly believe in at Back9 is growth-driven design. In this way of thinking, your website is constantly growing and improving. Digital technology is one of the fastest-changing industries there is. But with growth-driven design, when something changes, you’ll be ready to adapt quickly!

Too many options

Something that we often see is a “more is more” approach but unfortunately, this could be another reason why your website isn’t converting. If your potential customers have too many options, it can be overwhelming. For example: the main navigation (home, about, services, etc), and then underneath that you’ve got sub-categories for your services and then you’ve got a product banner with a few buttons that users can click – am I painting a clear picture for you?! It’s too much!

It might seem counterintuitive, but in good design, less is more. Fewer options is often better because, let’s not forget, the average user is very savvy. We don’t need to over-complicate their experience or underestimate their abilities to navigate a website. Finding the right balance is essential. The design should help guide users to other parts of the website, but not overwhelm them with decision paralysis.

Review your website content

Are you producing content that helps your customers or answers those burning questions about your business or service? More than likely you’ve answered no to that question and that’s fine, we know how hard it can be to take the time to produce internal content that is interesting and informative for your potential customers. If you can invest in Inbound Marketing your business will reap the benefits and you will attract the right sort of customers. Educating your customers before you’ve ever interacted with them helps you build trust and it is also a huge time saver for your organization. Find out more about why this is important in our article, 9 reasons why you should educate your buyer.

There’s no clear conversion path

If you have a good design and educational content and your website still isn’t converting, what gives? You might be giving users a lot of information, but what do they do with it? What’s the next step? You need to tell visitors what they need to do next. On almost every page you’ll want a call-to-action (CTA). This will tell someone what you want them to do next and then an easy way for them to do it.

For example: you write an article and at the end of that article, you have a message to book a meeting, or to buy now, or get a free quote. Then you have a link or a button that goes to a calendar, or your shop page, or the contact form. If you don’t have a CTA on a page you might lose some leads on that page instead of moving forward. You might even direct them to the next article in a series and have your contact CTA at the final one. Whatever your goal, make it as easy as you can to achieve it!

My website’s broken, now what?

If failure to plan is planning to fail, overlooking testing is sure to get you overlooked. Yup, you need to test and test and test your website. Remember that people are using different web browsers, different mobile devices and your website can have glitches across these different platforms. We also use/interact with websites differently, that’s the beauty of being human but it also means that just because you as the business owner do it one way and it works, doesn’t mean that it works another way for your customer. Often we see websites being launched without proper testing and wouldn’t you rather find out that your ‘Learn More’ button doesn’t work than your customer? It can have a massive impact on the trust level a customer has for you if there are issues and bugs with your website.

Follow best practices to get your website converting

As you can see, there are a lot of things to do with your website. If your website isn’t converting, it could be one or several of these things that need fixed. But how can you tell? Reviewing data like Google Analytics can be helpful, but it takes some practice to understand what to look for. Something else that can help is to regularly audit your website.

This can be done internally but we recommend an external provider as a fresh set of eyes will provide the most insight and constructive feedback. It can also be quite hard to look at your own business subjectively and truly put yourself in your customers’ shoes. A website audit will review your website design, user experience, content, ranking on Google, data in Google Analytics, and more. Once you’ve had an audit, you have real data that can help to improve your website and start converting.

There are several places where you can get a website audit, but we can do one for you for free here at Back9. This will include an analysis of your site and where you can make improvements. Or you might find the site is doing well already! Interested? Click the button below and fill out the quick form to get your free website audit.

What is Inbound Marketing? [VIDEO]

Posted on April 9, 2021April 12, 2024 by Phil

Inbound Marketing is a different way of thinking, a better way! Everyone in business wants to increase brand awareness, that’s a no-brainer. Traditionally what we have seen and heard in our local market over the years is the age-old quote, “I want to get my name out there!” But… “Where is there?”

‘There” has usually meant a mass market. That place that is saturated in marketing messages and ruled by the world’s biggest brands. It is known as outbound marketing. It is interruptive and expensive. Big Brands can afford to spend millions of dollars in advertising to reinforce their name. For most, (if not all) smaller local businesses though, this ‘scattergun’ approach of telling everyone “I’m here and this is what I do!”, it simply isn’t financially viable. Not only does mass marketing seldom bear fruit for smaller businesses it’s near on impossible to measure!

So what is the answer? How do you get your name out there…? And where should “there” be?

First, you need to understand and more importantly accept that marketing has changed! This is a result of potential customers (or leads) having so much information at their fingertips–and NO, I’m not talking about the Yellow Pages where you used to let your fingers do the walking–With a phone in our pockets and access to an abundance of information, the consumer is in total control.

And the smartest, most successful companies around the world understand this.

Inbound Marketing Simplified

Simply put, Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.

To win at marketing these days, successful businesses are adopting this Inbound Marketing methodology.

What is the Inbound Methodology?

The inbound strategy – or methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.

Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.

The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:

Attract. Drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
Engage. Presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you.
Delight. Providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchase.

When customers find success and share that success with others, it attracts new prospects to your organization, creating a self-sustaining loop. This is how your business builds momentum, and this is why the inbound methodology serves as a strong foundation for your flywheel.

What Is the Flywheel?

The flywheel is a business model adopted by HubSpot to illustrate the momentum your business can gain by prioritising and delivering exceptional customer experience.

You can spin and build momentum in your flywheel by investing in strategies that acquire and retain customers — these work as forces for your flywheel. They keep it moving.

The opposite of this is friction. Anything that slows your flywheel is friction. Often the biggest sources of friction for your customers come in the handoffs between teams. This means alignment and communication between teams are key to keeping your flywheel spinning.

When your flywheel is based on the inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and service functions can add force and eliminate friction throughout the attract, engage, and delight phases. All organizational functions are also responsible for removing friction from your flywheel.

For example, in the attract phase, marketing will likely play the biggest role by doing things like blogging, event marketing, and running paid ads. Meanwhile, your sales team can also add force by engaging in social selling. And your customer service team can add force by making it easier for current customers to make referrals.

Once you attain enough customers and engage and delight them, they can keep your flywheel spinning by promoting your organization and bringing new customers to you. Over time, your flywheel allows you to grow without continually investing in customer acquisition. Often, your customers will help by sending people your way by word of mouth!

Examples of Inbound Marketing

Now that we’ve talked about the philosophy of Inbound Marketing, it’s time to see some real-world examples. One of the most important aspects of inbound is making sure that you send the right message to the right person at the right time. A good way to do this is by segmenting your audience. First, you need to know who you audience actually is compared to who you think it is. Sometimes those two match up, but other times you might discover there’s a different group that’s attracted to your business. A target market workshop can help you nail down the right people for your specific company.

To reach the kind of people who are a good fit for your company, create messages tailored for them. Then send the message out to them. Digital platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Advertising have these features built-in. Digital platforms like these have fantastic measurement too. You can easily see how many people saw and engaged with your message. Those combined with a great website that informs and educates your buyer can attract, engage, and delight the right people for your business.

Adopting an Inbound Marketing approach

Adopting an Inbound Marketing approach is a long game. it involves really investing in delivering what your potential customers are wanting or needing. Then marketing to them based on which stage of the buyer’s journey they are on. Since Inbound Marketing is a philosophy, it can involve making some big changes. But these changes are worth it! Companies that adopt the inbound approach get better leads and repeat customers.

Many businesses find working with a marketing agency helps make the transition easier. But how do you choose the right one for you? Take a look at our article about how to choose the right Marketing Agency for your business to find out more.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Agency

9 reasons why you should educate your buyer

Posted on April 1, 2021July 8, 2024 by Phil

Updated 8th July 2024

Shoppers these days have more choice than ever before when it comes to buying a product. But with so much choice also comes with some confusion on what product they should buy. Buyers now rely on self-education before they step foot into your store and speak to a salesperson. In fact, some experts say as much as 70% of the decision is made before getting in touch with a business. By the time they get to the store, most buyers have an idea of what they want; if not the exact product they need. So how do they find out this information ahead of time? The way that they educate themselves is with content that they find online. This means it’s important to educate your buyer so they can get the information they want.

3 Women with linked arms walking outdoors carrying handbags and shopping bags.

If the information is available online, the buyer will find it. But does it matter where they find it? In this article, we’re going to cover some of the most important reasons why you should be the one to educate your buyer, and how it can help them – and you.

1. It’ll save you time

A lot of businesses will say that they are too busy to create content. The reality is often that they are so busy because of all the phone calls or in-store visits from customers or potential customers who just want to know more information about a product. By creating content that will answer your most frequently asked questions and making it easily available, you’re saving time and money and likely answering those questions to a much larger audience than ever before.

2. Buyers want to learn for themselves

According to market leader Hubspot, only 29% of people want to talk to a salesperson to learn about a product, while 62% will consult a search engine. This outlines that while it’s still very important to have well-trained salespeople, you can not dismiss the fact that creating content online holds so much weight in the sales process. You might get lucky from a customer being educated by a competitor, and your company still getting the sale. But you don’t want to base your sales on luck, do you?

3. They can see the product or service in action

Very few customers will respond positively to an email they receive from you telling them how amazing your products are. But instead, if you were to send them an email that included a how-to/product demonstration images or video, they then can decide for themselves how amazing that product is. Seeing the product or service in action is a lot more visual than having them guess what the benefits are for them. After all, there is an entire industry based on infomercials.

4. Become an authority in your industry

The more information you have about your products or services, the more reputable you are. Creating content for your products gives you authority and trust regarding the very challenge that your buyer is looking to solve. You start to become a thought leader instead of just a salesperson. Even if someone isn’t ready to buy right now, they’ll start to see you as the expert when they do need what you offer.

5. Build customer trust

Customers are far more likely to trust a brand or company that makes an effort to share their knowledge about the product or service. They’ll trust you much more if you don’t make it out to be perfect too. Not every product is right for every person. If you address that, but still focus on the positives of what you offer, you can educate your buyer and help them make an informed purchasing decision. Even if that pushes them elsewhere, they might refer a friend to you later when your offering is the right fit.

6. Reduce complaints

When your customer has been more educated about the product, they are more likely to be aware of how to use the product or what to expect. This works to eliminate most of the basic issues that they would complain about. They can see the features and limitations ahead of time so know what to expect. Often, it’s better that a customer doesn’t buy a product from you that’s a bad fit than complain and give you low reviews.

7. Get better website stats

Without going too deep into how a website works, Google loves websites that have engaged visitors who stay as long as possible (bounce rate). By having an educational piece on your product page (rather than just an image price and feature list) the viewer is more likely to stay on that page for a longer period of time. Video is a great way to keep your viewer engaged for longer. This will tell Google that your page is worth looking at, and this will result in Google showing your website to more people.

8. Attract customers who are a better fit

You can attract more customers that suit your business if you educate your buyer. Anyone can create content about how to toast bread. But, if your company is in the business of selling waffle makers then bread toasting content isn’t going to help you attract new customers that want a waffle maker, or even connect with your existing customers that have been making waffles. It’s just going to confuse them about what you actually offer as a service. While you are most certainly creating educational content about making toast, you’re not educating your customers about what they really care about. In reality, you are just educating someone else’s customer. You aren’t the expert in the toaster business, so why would you try to be?

When you’re creating your content with your desired audience in mind, you are cutting out this misdirected approach. If you want to attract more customers like your existing ones then you have to create relevant content that appeals to them. Instead of making content aimed at everyone – including people who will never be customers, why not target people who are a good fit?

9. Simplify the sales process

When you’re selling to a customer who’s already educated on your product, it will save a lot of time explaining the basics, as you’ve already done that with your content. They have made an educated decision to come in to make their purchase, so a good chunk of that sales process is already complete (that’s not to say you can slack off and not give the best service!). The bonus is that if it was the salesperson that has created that educational content, then rapport building has already started before the customer has walked into the store. This simplifies the sales process – they might come in, tell you what they want, and be on their way.

Be the one to give your customers what they want

Remember, we live in a knowledge-based economy. Customers care about value & trust. The key to effective sales content is to educate the customer, not bombard them with things that they don’t care about and don’t want to hear. If you think you might have trouble creating content to educate your buyer, the team at Back9 can help. We have professional content creators who do expert-level content including copywriting, graphic design, and much more. Get in touch today to find out more about how can help you through content creation.

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How Much Should I Spend on Marketing?

Posted on March 31, 2021January 4, 2024 by Phil

How much should I spend on marketing is a pretty common question we get asked. And it’s a fair question. But like anything in the marketing world, it’s like asking: How much does a good logo cost? Or How much does a website cost?

The short answer is… It depends… Not very definitive is it? It depends on what your goals and budget are and whether you see marketing as an investment or a cost. Fortunately, there are some guidelines that can help you decide.

What do the experts say?

While there is no hard and fast answer about how much to spend on marketing, there are some guidelines and general rules of thumb that can help you make the decision about what’s best for you.

Well how about this. According to figures from a recent CMO survey published in February 2021, across all industries the spend averaged 8.9% of revenue on marketing. In theory, this money spent should generate more revenue. When it’s done right, it’s money well-spent.

Finding the sweet spot for spending can be a challenge though. Ultimately it comes down to what you believe the purpose of marketing to be. And if you see it as an expense or an Investment.

Marketing is an Investment

The important thing is to see any marketing spend as an Investment. Not an expense or cost.

Sometimes investments return a lot, sometimes they return a little. Sometimes investments return nothing and sometimes they end up losing you money. However, if you look at any long-term investment, whilst there are always peaks and troughs. In the long run, if you understand what you are trying to achieve, monitor and measure results, and adapt when necessary, most of the time you will see a good ROI.

Marketing is no different. If you define really good SMART objectives, it is much easier to put measures into place to get to the destination.

If you’re throwing money at various activities with no real plan or direction, and not measuring the results, then you are just throwing money away. Marketing without a plan is like driving with your eyes closed. You’re probably going to crash.

Download a FREE SMART Goals Template

Should I cut my Marketing Costs?

Posted on February 19, 2021February 19, 2021 by Phil

Marketing is easy to view as an expense, which in turn makes it easy to justify cutting it as a cost. But what is the potential cost of cutting your marketing spend? When times are tough or looking bleak or there’s uncertainty in the air, all too often over the years I have seen people cut costs on marketing. It’s just a number on the PNL (Profit n Loss) sheet, right? Or is it something else entirely?

Is Marketing just another expense, or is Marketing an investment?

Marketing clearly comes with a cost. There’s no doubt about that. But is it also an investment? Will it bring more money in than is spent on it? Yes–but only if done properly. It needs to be seen as an investment, and it’s crucial to know that success may take time.

The marketing marathon

In the industry, a common phrase is that “marketing is a sprint, not a marathon”. And it’s true. Like in a marathon, the newer and less experienced you are, the longer you have to train and prepare. A brand new start-up with a handful of clients will take longer to see a return with marketing than a business with 30 years in the industry and a loyal client base.

Whether that return is a better business, better team morale, a more engaging place to work etc, the return will have a financial impact on the business itself. And like any investment, it is a long term game.

Cutting marketing during hard times can have the opposite effect, especially if you’re still in the “training” phase. But if you aren’t seeing results, the problem may not be with marketing itself, but may be the type of marketing you’re doing. One of the biggest advantages of Digital Marketing is that it’s easy to measure. You can see how many people visit your website, click on your ads, or fill out a contact form, or buy from your online store. Then, based on those results, you can emphasise what’s working and cut/change what’s not. Over time, as you build followers and gain more trust, you’ll find that you can get better results for your advertising dollar.

The Overnight Success lie

Anyone who has studied, worked hard, sacrificed, and started a business from scratch knows the cliche that is dubbed an overnight success. It is simply a fallacy. Besides the extremely rare case, it just doesn’t happen. Anything that will pay dividends in the long term is something that needs some serious dedication and commitment.

For our children to grow up successful, happy and fulfilled, we need to spend time with them when they are young. We need to build a stable foundation for them to become confident human beings. We need to help them understand and grow. Our staff, our team are the same. We have to encourage and invest in them. Even with the knowledge that yes, they may leave one day, it is still a fundamental pillar in which we must TRUST. It is an investment in them as much as it is your business.

And my friend, your marketing is in the same boat!

If you invest in the long-term, you will be rewarded if you keep at it. Just like your staff, who you (hopefully) want to nurture and see them grow, it takes an investment of time, resources, and effort to improve. Ultimately, they’ll get better at their job and become a valuable asset. If you get your team excited about what they do and they perform – because they want to – then this is ultimately going to produce an ROI. If you invest time in marketing (which is not advertising) and focus on the right activities, you will potentially see tremendous returns on the investment in the long run.

How do I invest in the right Marketing?

Well, firstly you need to find out what the “right marketing” is for your business. It may be different from others–even ones in the same industry. Ultimately, the right marketing and the right activities are the ones that lead you towards the end goal. So knowing what you want to achieve from your Marketing Strategy is very important too.

In this day and age, marketing is about telling a story, about engaging and attracting the people who believe what you believe. It is about educating them about your industry – especially if they don’t understand it well. The right marketing is about understanding who your customers are and how you can attract them and doing it where they actually hang out. You may instinctively know this or you may need the help of an agency like us, but that is up to you to decide and figure out.

If I was to define what I believe to be the “right marketing’ I would say it is producing helpful, unbiased, relevant content that will educate and inspire your buyers and potential staff alike. It’s about being customer-centric and getting to know and understand the philosophy of Inbound Marketing.

If you aren’t sure what content is, or what type is effective in 2021, take a look at our e-book The Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing: What is Content and why do I need it? You can download it by clicking the image below.

What is Inbound Marketing?

This is an article in its own right, but essentially, Inbound Marketing is a philosophy that attracts customers to you. Instead of going out to get customers through extensive advertising, you create content that brings them to you. Inbound helps to educate potential customers about your business and your industry and makes it easier for them to decide they like and more importantly, trust you. And as I mentioned earlier, the ROI for the right activities can be tremendous. I believe the one true currency that really matters when embracing and investing in Inbound is TRUST!

TRUST- the one true return on your Inbound investment

We’ve all heard the saying that it can take years to build trust and seconds to destroy it! Of course, your marketing and sales activity needs to be genuine and authentic. You can’t just say what you think people want to hear – that’s still an old school manipulative marketing tactic. Especially when it’s not true!

So if it is an investment to build trust, it makes sense to agree that once you’re trusted and respected, that if you remain genuine, then that status is easier to maintain right? So why after investing so much and gaining all of that momentum would you want to cut it?

Yes, marketing costs money, but Inbound marketing – if you genuinely want to educate and believe in being transparent, can return far more than money.

So should you cut costs on your marketing?

It’s easy for me to sit at my computer and type all of this, and for some people, they can’t decide if the chicken or the egg came first so they can’t make the leap of faith. And that’s ok. Although I believe marketing is an investment, it ultimately comes down to what you believe (although if you’re still reading at this point, there’s a fair chance you might agree with me on this one!) But still, it’s every business owner’s right to choose. So whether you should or shouldn’t cut marketing costs, that’s your decision.

However, keep in mind that although marketing has costs associated with it, marketing itself is not actually an expense when done right. In fact, if you’re willing to adopt an Inbound marketing mindset then using the right tools and software, such as Hubspot, the trade-off is that the cost may even provide you with an ROI of the one thing we possibly all value as much as trust… TIME!

It’s true. Inbound Marketing can not only help you gain a financial return if you’re willing to invest but an ROI of Trust and TIME too. Just remember that with Inbound especially, marketing is a marathon that takes time, investment, and resources, but can ultimately be extremely rewarding if you see it through.

If you’ve been considering working with a marketing company, take a look at our article about how to choose the right marketing company for you by clicking the button below.