Scale Your Multi-Brand Business With HubSpot’s Business Units

For all businesses, delivering exceptional customer experiences is crucial. However, if you’re managing multiple brands serving separate markets or regions, delivering superior CX becomes a challenging task.

But if you use HubSpot as your CRM, you’re all set to bring everything that you need to deliver a best-in-class customer experience into one place, all while managing multiple brands.

With the introduction of Business Units to the HubSpot account, you can manage your family of brands with ease, build personalized branded experiences, and effectively report on performance at the parent company or individual brand level.

In this article, we’ll talk about Business Units, how they’re different from domains, and what challenges it solves to give businesses a better way to delineate brands within HubSpot.

What are Business Units and Why You Should Use Them?

Business Units are suitable for companies that have multiple brands or divisions serving separate markets or regions and would like to be managed under a single parent account. It is an add-on that gives you the ability to create multiple brands in a shared HubSpot portal across multiple tools.

With a Business Unit, marketers can manage multiple divisions or brands to ensure more targeted and consistent experiences for their customers. Also, it allows marketing teams to keep their respective assets distinct and organize them effectively for each brand.

By using Business Units, you can:

• Delineate contacts by brand or identify your target audience to run cross-sell and up-sell campaigns across your whole customer base.
• Create, design, and organize unique templates and brand assets like logos, making it easier to carry your individual brand identity across all campaign assets.
• Separate marketing assets, conversions, and reports with out-of-the-box CRM properties for Business Units.
• View and manage email subscription preferences. With the Business Unit, you can ensure that preference pages, statuses, and subscription types are independent of each other to streamline customer contact preferences.
• Organize, categorize, and filter web pages, landing pages, emails, forms, and blogs by Business Unit, so you always have the right asset on hand for each brand.

Business Units vs Domains

Business Units are different from domains in the following ways:

A Business Unit is a brand new feature added to confidently, safely, and easily run multiple brands in a single HubSpot account. On the other hand, a domain gives you the ability to host content on an additional domain.

A Business Unit controls and configures the identities of your multiple brands in HubSpot while using extended capabilities of the HubSpot domain, you can now host an additional website on HubSpot for a small fee.

In the Business Unit, you’ll have access to additional domains, email subscription preferences, tools for configuring a brand and organizing accounts, and increased limits of workflows and lists. With domains, you’ll have the ability to host more than one website or domain.

A Business Unit subscription is available in the Marketing Hub Enterprise while domain subscription is available in the CMS Enterprise and Marketing Hub Enterprise.

Use Case for Business Units

If your company has multiple brands and you would like to individually manage under one parent account.

Or

If your company needs separate permission or email subscription preferences for each of your brands.

Use Case for Domain

If your business just needs to host a separate website on HubSpot.

Or

If your company has more than one website hosted on HubSpot but does not mind all marketing communication coming from one parent company.

Common Challenges That Business Units Solve

Business Units solve various challenges for marketers, including:

1. Contact Segmentation

Business Units allow you to assign contacts to one or several units which means you no longer need to rely on the lists to segment your contacts.

2. Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Opportunities

With Business Units, you can easily identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. You can clearly see all your contacts in their swim lanes and track their engagement without any hassle.

3. Custom Contact Fields

Marketers can create custom contact fields by adding custom fields to each unit that are relevant to specific Business Units. This way, you’ll have different details for the same contact, depending on the service or product that the unit provides them.

4. Marketing Assets

Business Units solve the challenge of cluttered assets and help you stay organized. You don’t have to rely on complex naming conventions or properties to make sense of your assets and campaigns. Also, you can create a brand kit unique to a specific brand. It will include a brand logo, brand favicon, and brand colors.

5. Reporting & Analytics

Business Units allow marketers to confidently report on individual brand performance as well as how well the overall company is performing. HubSpot provides a Business Unit overall template that helps you create customized dashboards to monitor performance.

Things to Remember While Implementing or Using Business Units

• Ensure that the brand domain is connected before setting up Business Units if you want to associate the Business Unit with a brand domain.
• Sufficient access to permission rights is not granted in default settings because of which you may not be able to disable Business Units on your own. If you want to remove the Business Units feature, you will need to reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
• Whether it is the database, deal/ticket pipelines, or workflows, these will be commonly shared across all the Business Units. Hence, segmentation of either of the add-ons may be a challenge in the current BETA version. Despite this challenge, you can still filter out the HubSpot database on the basis of the “Business Unit” Property.
• On the brighter side, assets, and reporting & analytics can be segmented easily as per multiple Business Units. Additionally, you can create separate properties for unique Business Units as per the business requirement.
• Emails and forms can only be associated with Business Units when being created and cannot be reassigned after their creation.

Conclusion

HubSpot’s Business Units are crafted with specific goals and a customer-centric approach in mind. They allow you to manage multiple brands from one HubSpot account, all while confidently managing contacts, assets, and settings across multiple brands.

And if you need an extra set of hands to implement HubSpot Business Units in your business, our experts will be happy to pitch in. Just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.