Mastering HubSpot Marketing Hub

Marketing today is more than just campaigns and ads—it's about building lasting customer relationships across every touchpoint. A truly successful strategy requires a unified, end-to-end platform that connects the buyer’s journey across marketing, sales, and service seamlessly. That's where HubSpot comes in—a powerful solution designed to empower businesses to attract, engage, and convert customers efficiently, ensuring a cohesive and data-driven growth strategy. 

With Marketing Hub, users gain access to a powerful suite of tools designed to streamline campaigns, automate workflows, and deliver personalized customer experiences that drive real business results. Whether you’re a growing startup or an established enterprise, understanding how to unlock the full value of Marketing Hub is key to maximizing your investment in HubSpot.

This guide is your deep dive into HubSpot Marketing Hub—what it is, why it drives value, and more importantly, how you can harness its full potential. Gain the knowledge and tools needed to leverage Marketing Hub effectively, ensuring that your marketing strategy is aligned with the software that powers it.

Key Benefits for Marketers 

In today's digital landscape, businesses require a marketing platform that not only streamlines operations but also enhances customer engagement and drives revenue growth.  

HubSpot Marketing Hub meets these needs by offering a unified system for marketing automation, lead management, and performance tracking. It eliminates the friction of disconnected tools, enabling teams to execute campaigns with precision, gain actionable insights, and continuously refine their strategies based on real-time data. 

• Unified Data: Marketing Hub centralizes all your marketing data from email, social, ads, web analytics, and more, giving you a complete view of performance and optimization across all channels. Plus, with built-in attribution for contact, deal, and revenue creation, you can see exactly what efforts are driving results.

• Unified Tech Stack: Run your entire marketing strategy in one place. Marketing Hub consolidates email, social, web hosting, forms, landing pages, ads and more via integrations into a single, connected platform.

• Unified Process: Automate key marketing workflows, track lifecycle stages, and align with sales to drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities with a frictionless customer journey.

Who benefits from Marketing Hub? 

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams use HubSpot to streamline their campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, and track performance in real-time. With tools for email marketing, social media management, and analytics, they can optimize strategies and improve engagement.   

Sales Teams 

Sales teams benefit from Marketing Hub’s lead intelligence, which helps them prioritize outreach and engage with prospects effectively. By integrating marketing data with sales workflows, teams can nurture leads and close deals more efficiently. 

Small Businesses & Startups 

Small businesses and startups use Marketing Hub to launch and scale their marketing efforts with minimal complexity. The platform’s automation and reporting tools help them make the most of their resources while driving growth. 

Enterprise & Mid-Market Organizations 

For larger organizations, Marketing Hub offers robust analytics and automation to manage complex, multi-channel campaigns. It ensures consistency across global initiatives and provides insights to refine large-scale marketing strategies. 

Understanding HubSpot’s Core Objects 

HubSpot’s CRM is made up of three main objects.  

• Contacts: The people who make up your database
• Companies: The companies where your Contacts work or your target accounts
• Deals: The stages sales use to track deal progress, from initial engagement to close, including those generated by marketing

Within those core objects, there are two primary funnels. Contacts and companies have lifecycle stages and deals have deal stages.

Lifecycle Stages: Lifecycle stages categorize contacts and companies to track their progress through the go-to-market funnel. The stages are intended to align with the buyer's journey, from the first interaction with a company to becoming a customer. 

Deal Stages: Deal stages are the steps in your pipeline that signal to your sales team that a deal is moving toward the point of closing. 

Standard Account Configuration and Set Up 

When setting up a new HubSpot portal, several key settings must be configured to ensure a smooth and effective marketing experience. Proper setup helps improve data accuracy, campaign performance, and overall platform efficiency.  

Below are some areas to focus on to ensure your HubSpot account is set up for success. 

Domains 

Settings > Website > Domain & URLS 

Connecting your domain(s) to HubSpot allows the platform to publish web pages, landing pages, and send emails that appear to come from your company.  

There are two key HubSpot domain types available to connect, 

• Primary Domains: The main domain where your website is hosted. This serves as the default domain for your website pages, landing pages, and emails.
• Secondary Domains: Additional domains connected to HubSpot that allow you to host content and multiple brand properties. 

If your website is hosted on HubSpot’s Content Hub, use your primary domain for your main website and set up a secondary subdomain for HubSpot-hosted landing pages and email sending. 

This setup ensures that HubSpot can publish landing pages using your brand’s web address and send emails that appear to come from your company, improving deliverability and brand consistency. 

Pro Tip: Partner with your organization's IT team to properly connect your domains to HubSpot to counteract any roadblocks or challenges that arise.

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Connect your domain to HubSpot
• Connect additional brand domains
• Change the primary domain for your HubSpot content 

HubSpot Tracking Code 

Settings > Tracking & Analytics > Tracking Code 

The HubSpot tracking code allows you to identify visitors, track events, and monitor page views without requiring a page reload. If you want to track custom events, you can use the Tracking Code API to create and track specific user interactions dynamically within HubSpot. 

To enable tracking using the HubSpot tracking code, copy the tracking code and insert it into your website’s global header. 

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Install the HubSpot tracking code
• Setup site tracking 
• Create tracking URLs
• Track website visitors 

Brand Kit 

Settings > Account Defaults > Branding 

Your brand kit allows you to upload your logo and set your brand colors to maintain consistency across emails and landing pages in HubSpot. This ensures that all marketing materials reflect your brand identity, creating a professional and cohesive experience for your audience.

Pro Tip: We suggest making use of HubSpot’s AI by uploading on-brand copy to start generating your brand voice. 

Marketing Contacts 

Profile > Account & Billing > Usage & Limits 

Marketing contacts are those you intend to target with marketing emails and/or advertisements. Only these contacts can receive marketing emails from HubSpot, and they are the only contacts that count towards your contact tier limit. 

Your contact tier limit is the maximum number of marketing contacts allowed before moving to a higher pricing tier. HubSpot bills based on the highest number of marketing contacts set during a billing period. 

Pro Tip: To stay within your contact tier limit, regularly review and update your marketing contacts. Use workflows to automatically update contact statuses and prevent exceeding your tier. 

Marketing contact status can be assigned through any of the methods listed below: 

• List imports
• Forms
• Workflows
• Integrations
• Manual contact assignment

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Understanding marketing contacts
  
  

Campaigns

Marketing > Campaigns  

A campaign in HubSpot is a structured marketing effort designed to achieve a specific goal by combining multiple marketing assets. The Campaigns tool allows businesses to manage emails, ads, social media posts, and landing pages under one initiative to track performance and measure impact. 

How to Create a Campaign 

Marketing > Campaigns > Create Campaign 

When creating a campaign, HubSpot provides various templates that serve as starting points for different marketing objectives. Choosing the right template can help streamline your setup. 

• Email Drip Campaign: Best for gradually engaging leads over time with a sequence of automated emails. Use when following up with leads after an initial contact or inquiry.
• Lead Generation Campaign: Best for capturing new leads through gated content, events, or sign-up forms. Use when driving sign-ups or generating high-quality leads. 
• Nurture Campaigns: Designed to guide leads through the buyer’s journey with personalized and educational content. Use when engaging prospects who have shown interest but aren’t ready to buy or educating leads over time with email sequences. 
• Re-engagement Campaigns: Aimed at re-engaging inactive leads, past customers, or dormant subscribers. Use when leads have stopped engaging with emails or to win back churned customers with exclusive offers or personalized outreach. 
• Onboarding & Welcome Campaigns: Designed to introduce new customers or users to your product, service, or brand experience. Use when welcoming new customers, new subscribers or providing a step-by-stop onboarding sequence for new users.

Pro Tip: Additional campaign types include In-person Events, Webinars, and Product Launch campaigns. These typically fall under Lead Generation Campaigns but may involve multi-channel strategies, pre-event promotion, and post-event follow-up. 

Adding Assets to Campaigns 

By linking emails, landing pages, social posts, and ads within a campaign, you create a cohesive customer experience and gain full visibility into how different channels contribute to engagement and conversion. 

Assets that can be connected to Campaigns include Ad campaigns, CTAs, forms, marketing emails, SMS, social posts, blog posts, case studies, landing pages, podcast episodes, website pages, static lists, sequences, workflows, external website pages, marketing events, and tracking URLs. 

Campaign Attribution and Marketing Influence

In HubSpot, influence refers to the impact a campaign has on customer interactions and conversions. Attribution reporting assigns credit to different touchpoints in a buyer’s journey—helping teams understand which marketing activities drive results. 

HubSpot Campaigns intersect with HubSpot attribution reporting under the ‘Attribution’ tab and can be used to display three types of attribution reports. These reports help measure the influence of marketing efforts by tracking how campaigns contribute to contact creation, deal generation, and revenue. 

• Contact created: Number of new contacts attributed to this campaign.
• Deal created: Number of new deals attributed to this campaign.
• Revenue: Total revenue attributed to this campaign

Pro tip: For Pro customers, attribution is available for Contacts, while Enterprise customers get attribution for Contacts, Companies, and Deals. 

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Use Campaign Attribution Reports
• Understanding Attribution Reporting 
• Create Attribute Reports 

Campaigns vs. Source Properties 

It’s important to understand the difference between Campaigns and Source Properties in HubSpot. 

Campaigns provide insight into marketing-driven engagement by grouping multiple assets into a single initiative. While they help measure influence across the buyer’s journey, campaign attribution depends on proper asset association and may not account for every entry point into HubSpot. 

Source Properties, on the other hand, offer a more automated and reliable way to track a contact’s first and most recent interactions across Contacts, Companies, and Deals—without requiring manual asset association.

Native HubSpot Source Properties 

• Original source: Identifies the first known source through which a contact interacted with your business.
• Latest source: Displays the most recent known source of interaction

HubSpot automatically assigns the following values for Original Source and Latest Source, which cannot be altered: Organic search, Paid search, Email marketing, Organic social, Paid social, Referrals, Other campaigns, Direct traffic, Offline sources.

Email

Marketing > Email 

HubSpot's Marketing Hub revolutionizes email marketing with its advanced automation capabilities and personalization options. Marketers can create dynamic email campaigns tailored to the recipient's behaviors and preferences, significantly enhancing open rates and engagement. The platform's sophisticated segmentation tools allow for granular targeting, ensuring that the right message reaches the right audience at the optimal time. 

Email Types 

HubSpot provides different email types to support various marketing and communication needs. Each type serves a distinct purpose, whether for one-time broadcasts, automated sequences triggered by specific actions or schedules, or content distribution to keep audiences engaged. 

• Regular emails: One-time emails sent manually or scheduled for a specific date and time.
• Automated emails: Emails triggered by user actions, behaviors, or workflows. 
• Blog/RSS emails: Emails that automatically notify subscribers of new blog posts or content updates. 
  

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Improve Email Deliverability
• Warm up your email domain

Email Templates

Marketing > Email > Create Email > Select Type > Create new template 

Email templates in HubSpot streamline your email creation process, ensuring consistent branding and messaging.

To create a new email template, follow the chain above and design your template to your brand and UX specifications.  

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Save Marketing Emails as a Template 

Drag-and-Drop Emails

HubSpot’s drag-and-drop email editor allows marketers to create professional, visually engaging emails without needing coding expertise. This intuitive tool provides flexibility in designing, customizing, and structuring emails, making it easy to align with branding and campaign goals.

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Create Emails in drag-and-drop Editor 

Email Subscription Types

Settings > Marketing > Email > Subscription Types 

Email subscriptions allow your customers to select the types of communications they wish to receive. This is critical for several reasons: 

• Improves Engagement: When contacts receive content, they care about, they are more likely to open, read, and interact with emails. 

• Reduces Unsubscribes: Giving recipients control over what they receive helps maintain a healthy, engaged list. 

• Ensures Compliance: Helps businesses stay aligned with regulations by allowing users to manage their preferences. 

• Optimizes Marketing Efforts: Enables segmentation based on subscription preferences, allowing for more targeted and effective initiatives. 

Pro Tip: Create different categories tailored to your audience, such as Partnerships for business collaborations, Customer Success Stories for testimonials and case studies, or Industry Insights for trends and thought leadership. This ensures contacts receive only the most relevant content. 

Data Privacy & Consent

Settings > Account Setup > Privacy & Consent 

Enable general data protection regulation (GDPR) friendly features like opt-in checkboxes on forms and customize consent language to match your brand’s privacy policies. 

Opt-in checkboxes allow users to explicitly consent to receiving communications, ensuring compliance with data privacy laws. They also help improve email deliverability, build trust with your audience, and reduce spam complaints by ensuring that only engaged users receive your emails. 

Pro Tip: Keep subscription options simple and clear to encourage more sign-ups and reduce opt-outs. 

Social

Marketing > Social 

Connecting your social media accounts to HubSpot allows you to manage your social media presence more effectively and track the performance of your social activities. By integrating your social accounts, you can streamline your social media marketing efforts and engage with your audience more efficiently. 

You can connect your accounts from popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

How to connect social accounts 

Settings > Tools > Marketing > Social > Connect Account 

Once social accounts are connected to HubSpot you can leverage: 

• Social Monitoring: Monitor the performance of your social media posts, including likes, shares, and comments, directly within HubSpot.
• Post Scheduling: Schedule posts to be published on your social media accounts at optimal times to reach your audience. 
• Integration with CRM: Integrate your social media data with your CRM system in HubSpot to get a comprehensive view of your contacts' interactions with your brand. 
  

Digital Ads

Marketing > Ads 

Ads integration in HubSpot allows you to manage and track your advertising efforts directly within the platform. By integrating your ad accounts, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your ads and optimize them for better results. 

You can integrate your ad accounts from platforms like Google Ads, Facebook (Meta) Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and more. Once integrated, HubSpot can track the performance of your ads, including impressions, clicks, and conversions. 

How to connect ad accounts 

Settings > Tools > Marketing > Ads > Connect Account 

Once Ads are connected in HubSpot you can leverage: 

• Ad Tracking: Track the performance of your ads directly within HubSpot, including key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions.
• Ad Management: Manage your ads, create new campaigns, and adjust existing campaigns from within HubSpot 
• Integration with Other Tools: Integrate your ads with other tools in the HubSpot marketplace for a seamless marketing experience. 
  

Pro Tip: HubSpot lists can be turned into audiences for targeted advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook. This allows you to retarget engaged leads, build lookalike audiences, and refine your ad strategy. 

Marketing Events

Marketing > Events 

HubSpot Marketing Events allow you to create a record of live or virtual event participants in HubSpot and specifically tag registrants and attendees. For virtual events, we recommend augmenting with an integration like Zoom Webinars or Eventbrite. 

For live events, we recommend creating a Marketing Event for in-person events to fuel richer attribution reporting by associating that Event to a HubSpot Campaign. 

Helpful HubSpot Resources 

• Import marketing event participants 

Forms

Marketing > Forms 

Forms in HubSpot are powerful tools for capturing information from your website visitors and turning them into leads. They allow you to collect contact details, feedback, and other valuable information from your audience. 

Standalone Forms 

Standalone forms are forms that exist independently of your website pages. They can be used for various purposes, such as event registrations, surveys, or feedback forms. Standalone forms are hosted on a unique URL provided by HubSpot and can be shared via email, social media, or other channels. 

Embedded Forms 

Embedded forms are placed directly on your website or on HubSpot landing pages. They are integrated seamlessly into the design of your site and are typically used for capturing lead information on specific pages, such as contact forms or download forms. 

Pro Tip: When creating forms that will be placed on non-HubSpot webpages, turn on the toggle to set forms to raw HTML.  

CTAs

Marketing > CTAs 

Calls-to-Action (CTAs) guide visitors towards key actions, turning engagement into conversion. HubSpot’s CTA tools allow you to create customizable, visually appealing buttons or links that effectively capture audience interest. 

Ways to Use CTAs in HubSpot 

• Lead Generation: Encourage downloads, webinar sign-ups, or form submissions with action-driven CTAs like “Download Now” or “Sign Up Today.”
• Event Promotion: Drive event registration with clear CTAs such as “Reserve Your Spot” or “Join the Webinar.” 

• Stimulate Engagement: Direct users to product demos, free trials or key content with CTAs like “Learn More” or “Try It Free”.

Best Practices for CTAs 

• Be Clear and Actionable: Use strong, direct language like "Download," "Start," or "Register."
• Make CTAs Stand Out: Use bold colors, eye-catching designs, and compelling placement.
• Strategic Placement: Position CTAs in high-visibility areas like blog post conclusions, landing pages, or email headers. 
• Optimize and Test: Regularly analyze performance and A/B test CTAs for better results.

With HubSpot’s analytics, you can track CTA performance, refine strategies, and optimize conversions to meet your marketing and business goals effectively. 

Workflows

Automations > Workflows 

HubSpot’s workflows are a powerful tool for automating your marketing efforts and streamlining engagement with leads and customers. By setting up workflows based on specific criteria or user behavior, you can automate repetitive tasks, nurture leads and ensure a personalized experience at scale. 

Why use workflows 

• Automate Lead Nurturing: Guide prospects through the sales funnel with timely, relevant touchpoints.
• Save Time and Increase Efficiency: Automate manual marketing tasks, freeing up your team to focus on strategy. 
• Deliver a Personalized Experience: Tailor messaging based on a contact’s interactions with your brand. 
• Ensure Consistency: Maintain a structured, reliable approach to customer communication. 

Landing Pages

Content > Landing Pages 

Note: While Landing Pages are a part of HubSpot’s Content Hub, they remain a critical tool for marketers looking to convert visitors into leads. 

With HubSpot, creating high-converting landing pages is intuitive, requiring no web development expertise. The platform provides a drag-and-drop editor and A/B testing capabilities, allowing marketers to design, test, and optimize landing pages for maximum effectiveness. 

Ways to Use Landing Pages in HubSpot: 

• Live and Virtual Event Promotion: Create landing pages to promote live or virtual events, such as webinars, conferences, or product launches. Include event details, registration forms, and compelling visuals to drive registrations.
• Hosting Gated Content: Use landing pages to host gated content, such as eBooks, whitepapers, or guides. Visitors can access the content by filling out a form, allowing you to capture lead information. 
• Contests and Giveaways: Run contests or giveaways using landing pages to capture entries. Include details about the prize, entry requirements, and a form for participants to submit their information. 
• Special Offers and Promotions: Promote special offers, discounts, or promotions with landing pages. Include details about the offer, a compelling call-to-action, and a form for visitors to redeem the offer. 
• Thank You Pages: After a visitor completes a form or takes a specific action, redirect them to a thank you page. This page can include a confirmation message, next steps, and additional resources or offers.
  
  

1. Tactic-Level “Analyze” Tools
2. Campaign-Level Attribution
3. Reports & Dashboards 

Using these tools together ensures marketing teams have the right insights to refine strategies, improve conversions, and drive business growth. 

Key reports in HubSpot 

• Custom Dashboards: Build tailored dashboards to view metrics from multiple tools (e.g., web traffic, email, ads, social) in one place. Dashboards can be shared with stakeholders for better transparency. 

• Campaign Reporting: Evaluate the impact of your campaigns through attribution metrics like contacts created, deals generated, and revenue attributed. Access campaign performance directly under the Campaigns tool. 

• Funnel Analytics: Understand how leads progress through your marketing funnel, from awareness to conversion, with lifecycle stage analysis and lead journey insights. 

• Attribution Reports: Analyze the impact of various channels, campaigns, and assets on key marketing outcomes. Choose from first-touch, last-touch, or multi-touch attribution models to gain different perspectives. 

• Ad Performance: Leverage HubSpot’s ad tracking to measure ad impressions, clicks, and conversions. Use these insights to refine your ad spend and target audience. 

• Email Analytics: Track open rates, click-through rates, and engagement trends for marketing emails to optimize subject lines, design, and timing. 

• Social Media Analytics: Monitor post engagement, reach, and conversions to understand the effectiveness of your social media strategies. 

• Traffic Analytics: Gain insights into how visitors are finding and interacting with your website. Track metrics like sessions, bounce rates, and time on site. 

Pro Tip: Customize your Dashboards under Reports > Dashboards to bring together key metrics from emails, ads, campaigns, and attribution into one view for better tracking and transparency. 

Reporting Best Practices 

1. Set Clear Goals: Define specific KPIs for each campaign or marketing initiative to measure success effectively.
2. Leverage Pre-built Reports: Utilize HubSpot’s pre-configured reports to save time while ensuring you’re capturing essential metrics. 
3. Customize for Stakeholders: Tailor dashboards and reports to the needs of different stakeholders, such as executives, marketing managers, or sales teams. 
4. Use Filters: Segment reports by date range, campaign, or contact properties to drill down into the data most relevant to your objectives.
5. Iterate and Optimize: Regularly review performance data and use insights to refine your marketing strategies and tactics. 

By incorporating these reporting capabilities into your workflow, your team can make data-driven decisions that enhance the impact of your marketing efforts and ensure alignment with broader business objectives. 

AI Features That Drive Marketing Efficiency

HubSpot’s AI-powered tools make it easier than ever to scale marketing efforts without adding complexity. From content creation to automation and optimization, AI helps marketers move faster, work smarter, and drive better results. 

• Content Remix: Quickly repurpose blogs, emails, and social content to maximize reach. Plus, configure and train a brand voice in the brand kit to ensure consistency across AI-generated content. 
• AI Agents: Automate customer interactions with smarter, more human-like responses. 
• Predictive Lead Scoring: AI-driven insights that prioritize high-value leads. 
• A/B Testing & Optimization: AI-powered testing to refine messaging and improve conversion rates. 

Pro tip: Lean into AI to eliminate busywork—so your team can focus on strategy and creativity. 

HubSpot Marketing Hub isn’t just a tool—it’s a growth engine for your business. When implemented correctly, it enables you to execute, measure, and refine your marketing strategy with precision. From AI-driven insights to automation and campaign optimization, Marketing Hub helps you streamline operations and drive sustainable growth. 

With the right strategy, you can turn data in decisions, efficiency into impact, and engagement into revenue.