HubSpot vs Leadpages – Get More Clients and Manage Your Freelancing Business Better
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When you’re starting as a freelance writer, you can get one or two clients without much effort if you’re lucky enough to have a family member or friend refer a client or two your way. However, if you want to grow your freelance writing business, you need more than what your family and friends can offer.
Specialized marketing software can help you build a website, landing pages and online forms, and grow your contact list. The software will also help you increase your conversion rate, analyze your website traffic and integrate with other apps.
Choosing the right marketing software for a solopreneur or small writing business is not easy. Lucky for you, we did the research and have chosen two great tools: HubSpot and Leadpages, which we’ll break down and compare below.
HubSpot vs Leadpages: Similarities
Website Builder
Having an online presence is key to getting your prospects/clients to know and trust your brand. On the internet, it’s not about location but content and design. Every freelancer needs a website. But designing and building one from scratch without proper knowledge and skills is challenging.
That’s where HubSpot and Leadpages come in, as they enable you to build beautiful and branded websites. Each offers drag-and-drop website builders, which means it’s easy to build a custom website for your freelancing career in no time.
Templates
You can choose from hundreds of professionally-designed themes giving your website a unique look. Then you can leverage built-in page templates, style settings, custom modules, and more to ensure your website stands out from the competition.
HubSpot and Leadpages offer free and premium themes and templates for your website. The templates have more than 100 prebuilt sections that you can easily drag and drop onto your website or landing page. They are customizable to fit your needs. In fact, you only need to use the drag-and-drop builder to customize the templates. No coding required.
And all the templates are fully mobile responsive. This means potential clients can access your website from multiple devices including smartphones, allowing you to reach a wider audience.
Lead Generation Landing Pages
As a solopreneur, it’s critical to not only have a professional-looking website but also an effective landing page. Unlike a website, a landing page is a standalone web page specifically designed to market your skills and experience. Also, unlike a website, a landing page does not direct prospects to different pages to learn more about your freelance writing career. What a landing page does is give your prospects a point of conversion.
Using HubSpot and Leadpages website builders, you can create lead-generation landing pages with ease. All you need is:
- A form to capture lead information
- A stellar headline
- One image or video about you and your business
- A testimonials section
- A description of what you offer and how you can help potential clients
Your landing page should solve a visitor’s pain point, be valuable, be unique and deliver results to your prospects. The more unique your landing page is, the higher the chances of attracting more viewers, and hopefully, more customers.
Remember, people coming to your site are seeking instant gratification. The faster you make them feel good, the faster they’ll associate your brand with that value.
Free Online Form Builder
Besides landing pages, you can also generate leads from your website using an online form builder. HubSpot and Leadpages provide a free online form builder that allows you to create conversion-ready forms. You can also customize your forms without coding skills.
Every online visitor who fills out the form will be automatically added to your database. From there, you can use HubSpot or Leadpages to nurture them by sending them personalized messages and email campaigns.
All you need to do is connect the forms with your CRM. Every online visitor who fills out the form will have their data saved to your CRM database. The CRM can also send a follow-up email after a visitor completes your online form. Then you can enroll your contacts in lead nurturing campaigns to convert them into paying clients.
Powerful Integrations
HubSpot and Leadpages are powerful marketing tools that help solopreneurs and small businesses reach new audiences. They also help freelance writers and other content creators drive conversions and enhance customer experiences. While they are powerful, they are not the only apps you have.
For example, you probably use Google Calendar to schedule meetings with your prospects. Or you use Zoom to chat with your clients before and during projects. Now, you can still use these apps and more, but from a single dashboard instead of having multiple apps running on your device.
Both HubSpot and Leadpages allow you to integrate more than 50 apps of your choice, and you can do so in one click. Examples of apps you can integrate include Zoom, Sage Accounting, Google Calendar, Mailchimp, and many more.
HubSpot vs Leadpages: Differences
Email Tracking Software
HubSpot comes with free email tracking software that lets you know when a lead opens an email. In fact, the software sends you a desktop notification the second a prospect opens an email and clicks a link inside. You can also set up push notifications to follow up after a lead opens an email, clicks a link or downloads an important document.
Leadpages lacks email tracking software. This means you’ll never know if your prospects opened your emails, clicked on links, or downloaded your attachments.
Meeting Scheduler App
HubSpot has a free meeting scheduler app that allows you to schedule meetings faster. With this app, you’ll avoid getting stuck in a back-and-forth email chain as you try to find time to meet with your prospects.
The scheduling app also allows prospects to automatically book meetings with you. Since it’s connected to your HubSpot contacts database, every time a prospect books a meeting, your contacts database grows.
Leadpages lacks a meeting scheduler app. As such, potential clients will not be able to book meetings directly on your website or landing page.
Lead Management
HubSpot comes with many useful tools for freelancers, like lead management and tracking software. The software allows you to manage all your lead records from a single dashboard. In fact, you make sales calls, assign tasks, send emails, leave detailed notes, and more without leaving HubSpot.
Unfortunately, Leapages lacks a lead management app. As such, you cannot track and score leads, create segmented lists, streamline outreach, and do many other tasks that are essential to running a freelancing business. Since you’re unable to segment your contact list based on collected data, you won’t be able to run automated campaigns and nurture your leads.
Customer Relationship Management
Besides being a marketing tool, HubSpot also has a CRM component. A CRM is critical to every solopreneur and small business, as it helps grow your contact list and converts leads to paying clients. The software also consolidates calls and handles all your email marketing from a single dashboard.
Leadpages is not a CRM. As such, it cannot help you handle contacts more effectively. Also, you won’t be able to use email marketing, sales automation, and other CRM features. Without this, it will be hard for you as a freelancer to find prospects, grow your contacts database, or market your services.
HubSpot vs Leadpages for Freelancers: The Verdict
If you’re starting as a freelancer or are looking to grow your business, your priority is to get the word out there. However, to do so, you usually need to send cold emails, run several marketing campaigns on social media, make calls, and pursue other tedious outreach avenues.
Enter marketing software like HubSpot and Leadpages. These tools can automate your email marketing, help you grow your contacts database, help you create landing pages, and more. While both are great, you definitely need marketing software that has extra features specifically for freelancers and small businesses and that’s why we recommend HubSpot as the top choice.
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