9 Most Underused Tools in HubSpot's Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a powerful platform that can help you attract, engage, and convert leads through a range of marketing tools. While many businesses are familiar with the basic features like email marketing and landing pages, several lesser-known tools often go underutilised. These underused tools can enhance your campaigns, improve engagement, and provide deeper insights into your marketing efforts.

In this blog, we’ll explore the nine most underused tools in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and show you how to leverage them for better marketing results.

1. Smart Content

Why It’s Underused: Smart Content allows you to personalise content based on who is viewing it. Despite its potential, many marketers overlook this feature and deliver the same content to every visitor, missing opportunities for personalisation.

How It Can Help: With Smart Content, you can tailor website copy, emails, and CTAs based on the visitor’s behaviour, location, or lifecycle stage. This personalised experience can increase engagement, click-through rates, and ultimately conversions.

Tip: Use Smart Content to show returning visitors different messages or offers based on their previous interactions with your brand.

2. Attribution Reporting

Why It’s Underused: Attribution Reporting allows you to track which marketing efforts are driving the most leads and conversions. Many marketers stick to basic reporting, such as traffic and form submissions, and miss out on the deeper insights that this tool can provide.

How It Can Help: Attribution Reporting helps you understand which touchpoints—whether it's a blog post, email, or ad—are influencing your leads to take action. By knowing which channels or content types perform best, you can focus your efforts on the most impactful strategies.

Tip: Set up multi-touch attribution models to get a comprehensive view of how each channel contributes to your overall marketing success.

3. Blog Topic Clusters

Why It’s Underused: HubSpot’s Topic Cluster tool helps you create content that is better organised and more effective for SEO. However, many marketers still create random blog posts without a strategic, interconnected structure.

How It Can Help: By grouping related blog posts into topic clusters, you signal to search engines that your site is an authority on that subject. This can improve your organic search rankings, driving more relevant traffic to your website.

Tip: Use the Topic Cluster tool to plan content around a central "pillar" page, with related blog posts linking back to it to boost SEO.

4. Social Media Monitoring

Why It’s Underused: While many marketers use HubSpot’s social media publishing tool, the Social Media Monitoring feature often goes unnoticed. Monitoring allows you to track brand mentions, relevant conversations, and industry trends in real-time.

How It Can Help: With Social Media Monitoring, you can engage with your audience more effectively by responding to comments, questions, and brand mentions quickly. It also helps you stay on top of trending topics and customer sentiments, allowing you to tailor your content accordingly.

Tip: Set up monitoring streams for important keywords, competitors, and your brand name to stay informed and respond in real time.

5. Custom Behavioural Events

Why It’s Underused: HubSpot’s Custom Behavioural Events allow you to track specific actions that visitors take on your website, such as button clicks, form submissions, or video views. However, many businesses overlook this tool, missing out on valuable behavioural insights.

How It Can Help: By tracking these specific actions, you can better understand how visitors engage with your site and where they drop off. This data allows you to refine your user experience and marketing campaigns for better engagement and conversions.

Tip: Set up custom events for key interactions on your website and use this data to create targeted follow-up campaigns based on visitor behaviour.

6. A/B Testing for Emails

Why It’s Underused: A/B Testing allows you to test different variations of an email campaign to see which performs better. However, many marketers send the same email to their entire list without experimenting with subject lines, copy, or CTAs.

How It Can Help: By running A/B tests, you can identify which email elements resonate most with your audience, improving your open rates and click-through rates over time. This leads to more effective email marketing campaigns and higher engagement.

Tip: Test different subject lines, images, or CTAs in your email campaigns to see which version performs best, then apply those learnings to future campaigns.

7. Campaigns Tool

Why It’s Underused: The Campaigns Tool in HubSpot allows you to group all of your assets—such as emails, landing pages, and social posts—into a single campaign, giving you a holistic view of how each component contributes to overall success. Despite this, many marketers track their assets separately, missing the bigger picture.

How It Can Help: By grouping all your marketing efforts into a campaign, you can track performance across all channels and assets in one place. This makes it easier to measure ROI and see which elements are driving the most conversions.

Tip: Use the Campaigns Tool to track the effectiveness of product launches, seasonal promotions, or other key marketing initiatives.

8. Lead Scoring

Why It’s Underused: Lead Scoring is a powerful feature that ranks leads based on their behaviour and engagement with your content. Many businesses, however, either don’t set up lead scoring or don’t fully optimise it for their sales process.

How It Can Help: Lead Scoring helps your sales and marketing teams prioritise leads based on their likelihood to convert. By focusing on high-scoring leads, your team can engage with the most qualified prospects, improving efficiency and closing rates.

Tip: Collaborate with your sales team to refine lead scoring criteria based on actions that indicate strong purchase intent, such as content downloads or demo requests.

9. HubSpot Ads Tool

Why It’s Underused: HubSpot’s Ads Tool integrates with platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, allowing you to create, manage, and track your paid campaigns directly within HubSpot. However, many marketers continue to run ads separately without taking advantage of the full integration.

How It Can Help: By managing your ads within HubSpot, you can track how your paid campaigns contribute to lead generation and conversions alongside your organic efforts. You can also create custom audiences based on HubSpot data, allowing for more targeted advertising.

Tip: Sync your HubSpot contact lists with Google or Facebook Ads to run more personalised, targeted campaigns based on the specific stages of your marketing funnel.

Unlock the Full Potential of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub offers far more than just basic tools for email marketing or landing pages. By exploring and implementing underused features like Smart Content, Attribution Reporting, and Lead Scoring, you can significantly improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. These tools provide deeper insights, greater personalisation, and more efficient workflows—helping you drive better results across all your marketing efforts.

Start exploring these features today and watch your marketing strategy become more streamlined and effective.