Choosing between HubSpot Marketing Hub and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement? You’re probably trawling through comparison blogs such as HubSpot vs Marketing Cloud or even HubSpot vs Pardot vs Marketo. These blogs are ideal for learning the differences in capabilities, pricing, and service. But they don’t always deep dive into specific features.
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An important factor when weighing HubSpot Marketing Hub against Marketing Cloud platforms, such as Account Engagement, are the unique features available. In short, what does HubSpot do that Marketing Cloud doesn’t?
Side note: I’m using the term ‘Marketing Cloud’ to refer to all of the Salesforce marketing platforms, including Account Engagement (Pardot), Engagement, Growth, and Advanced. But a couple of the below features do exist in Engagement.
With 10 years of experience working with Salesforce, I’m sharing key takeaways about the many HubSpot Marketing Hub features you won’t find in Marketing Cloud.
I was surprised to see how easy it is to create a pop-up CTA that leads a prospect to a landing page, and prompts them to book a call or download something there and then.
Even better, CTA pop-ups lean on the HubSpot tracking code, so there’s no additional setup for this. It can literally take 10 minutes to get a beautiful pop-up live on the website.
Needless to say, this is useful for driving more eBook downloads, event registrations, webinar signups, WhatsApp chats, and generally increasing micro conversions via content.
As a Marketing Cloud evangelist, this one is slightly mindblowing. In Salesforce, you need to create dynamic content separately from email content (that can only change based on prospect field information) and then, once saved, embed it into your email and preview.
With Hubspot Marketing Hub, you can create a smart rule within the email itself to automatically pull dynamic content based on a range of factors. It’s convenient, practical, and easy to implement.
For example, you could base this smart rule on the contact lifecycle stage or list membership:
Multi-touch attribution is entirely doable in Marketing Cloud. For instance, in Account Engagement (Pardot), we can use Tableau’s B2B Marketing Analytics to see attribution. However, I’ll call this one out as a unique Marketing Hub feature because attribution reporting is so well baked into HubSpot that it feels easy to set up the reports you need.
There are also a lot more attribution models to choose from, and you can test them out before creating your final reports.
This helps marketers build a deep understanding of their data and empowers them to demonstrate real results when meeting with the C-suite and talking about ROI.
Workflows are the automation home of HubSpot, and one that has impressive breadth and depth. It’s kind of a middle ground between an automation rule and the incredibly powerful Salesforce Flows.
The best thing for new users? There are a myriad of templates to get you started.
With Marketing Hub, a bonus is the HubSpot mobile app, where salespeople and marketers can create Contacts, Deals, Tasks, and more. You can track email engagement, schedule social posts directly from mobile, and check important dashboards. The app even has a built-in business card scanner!
HubSpot emails integrate seamlessly with HubSpot Commerce Hub, which allows you to create payment links and prompt payments via email. Automating payments in this way is a godsend for finance teams but also supports marketing and sales initiatives, especially for B2C brands selling online.
This is a massive USP because it changes the user experience on your website for the better.
With Marketing Hub, you can embed direct calendar bookings on your site and automatically triage these bookings to each of your salespeople, removing the email ping-pong often needed to find a suitable meeting time.
It creates such a friendly experience for the end user and no doubt improves MQL to sales conversion rates.
A while back, I ran a webinar about the integration between Account Engagement, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Cloud Ad Studio to show how you can create unified ad audiences.
In Account Engagement (Pardot), the technical setup looks like this:
In HubSpot, it looks like this:
Less technical support required, a faster setup time, and a single place to manage ads.
When I first got into marketing, I remember HubSpot being mainly a social media listening and posting tool. Since then, it has grown arms and legs! With its roots in social media, you can expect the social media capabilities to be good. And they are.
A disclaimer: buyer intent tracking kind of exists in Account Engagement with visitor tracking, but it isn’t very accurate.
With the HubSpot tracking code on your website, you can identify which companies are visiting, which pages they look at, and how many unique visitors there are.
The brilliance of this tool is that you can create a target market that aligns with your customer profile, and you can filter by the companies that you care about most. This means your sales team can outbound with precision.
Like any forward-thinking martech business, HubSpot uses artificial intelligence (AI), called ‘Breeze’, and it stays with you as you navigate through the HubSpot platform.
This means you can lean on AI for crafting social posts, writing emails, publishing LinkedIn articles, drafting call scripts, and more.
I should add that HubSpot has announced deep research in ChatGPT, which is an excellent evolution of marketing automation meets generative AI, and is useful for marketers and salespeople alike.
HubSpot Marketing Hub includes a full CMS that enables you to host an entire blog or create a microsite if you so choose. Not only this, but AI can help you build landing pages, or you can choose from readymade themes and templates. Once you’ve picked a theme, it’s all drag and drop from there. Simple!
When it comes to ABM HubSpot offers a range of tools to help you get in touch with your dream clients. The ‘Target Accounts’ feature lets you specifically surface key accounts so you can see whether any have open Deals, how many contacts are associated, what the last touch was, and when the last engagement was.
Following this, you can use Smart Content to tailor your email content based on list membership that includes all of the top targets!
Even better, Breeze can help you with your ABM reporting by suggesting the sales and marketing reports you need to generate more revenue from target accounts.
As this blog suggests, there are many HubSpot Marketing Hub features that you won’t find in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement - or if you do, they’re not quite as slick and streamlined. This doesn’t necessarily mean HubSpot is the obvious choice, or that Marketing Cloud doesn’t have standalone features and merits, too.
Ultimately, you need to consider whether these HubSpot features align with your blue-sky marketing strategy, audience, and business processes. If social media is the cornerstone of your marketing, the advanced social features of HubSpot are majorly attractive. But if not, you could end up a shiny feature for the sake of it.
Begin with your strategy, not the martech solution.
Document exactly what you plan to do in the coming months and years to drive greater marketing results. Imagine anything is possible, and be clear about non-negotiable business requirements. Then, use blogs such as this to understand which features will help you to implement and manage your strategy, before choosing the solution that fits.
If you need a hand, MarCloud is your sounding board. As both a Marketing Cloud and HubSpot partner, we’re experienced in both options and can work with you to decide and implement the right choice for your business. Get in touch for an initial chat.
Founder & CEO of MarCloud, Tom has been on both sides of the fence, client-side and agency, working with Salesforce platforms for the best part of a decade. He's a Salesforce Marketing Champion and certified consultant who loves to co-host webinars and pen original guides and articles. A regular contributor to online business and marketing publications, he's passionate about marketing automation and, along with the team, is rapidly making MarCloud the go-to place for Marketing Cloud and Salesforce expertise. He unapologetically uses the terms Pardot, Account Engagement and MCAE interchangeably.
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