What is the best HubSpot set-up for organisations with multiple brands?

If you work for an organisation managing multiple brands, there are various ways that HubSpot can support your business. At HubGem, we have worked with many groups of schools, colleges and universities using HubSpot that have multiple brands to manage. So, let’s look at some of the different ways that this can be done and the pros and cons of each:

Separate HubSpot accounts

The first and perhaps most obvious way of managing multiple brands using HubSpot is to have separate accounts for each brand. This will allow you to keep confidential data segregated easily, allow each brand to decide how they set up their accounts – giving them more control over their specific HubSpot instance - and also allow each brand to have its own GDPR opt-in pages. The downside of having separate accounts for different brands is this will provide no functionality to allow for group-level reporting and can often end up being less cost-effective depending on the HubSpot subscriptions required by each brand.

Brand domains

When you create a HubSpot account, your brand domain, for example: hubgem.co.uk, will be linked to your account and a tracking code will be created which can be added to your website to track engagement from your contacts. Additional brand domains will allow you to connect additional websites using different domains to your HubSpot account and track interactions from multiple brand websites in one HubSpot account. You can filter your analytics to include or exclude specific brand domains and you can also create different subdomains for content hosted on HubSpot allowing you to create content on landing pages and blogs specific to each of your brands. Additional brand domains can be added to Marketing or CMS Hub Enterprise HubSpot accounts. These handy add-ons can be purchased for £90 per month – making it an affordable way to report on, and track, how your contacts engage with different brands in one account. Brand domains are specific to websites and do not allow for any additional segmenting of assets.

Business units

Business units can be added to Marketing Enterprise HubSpot accounts from £700 per month per business unit. Business units are a way to segment assets and data in your HubSpot account by different brands. Each business unit includes one additional brand domain and once set up will allow you to create marketing assets specific to each of your brands. You can also create Contact properties specific to each business unit to ensure that data is being kept confidential. When using business units to segment brands it is important to note that GDPR subscriptions are managed on a group level and are not specific to each brand. Business units are popular for groups wanting group-wide reporting in one account and effective segmentation of brands, but they can be an expensive way to manage multiple brands.

Hierarchical teams

Available with all HubSpot Enterprise products, hierarchical teams allow you to lock down groups of data by allocating record owners and using ‘Team only’ viewing permissions. This means that if brands should not have access to each other’s records, you can prevent this by creating one ‘Team’ per brand. Using hierarchical teams also allows for group-level reporting for senior leaders, whilst still enabling brands and their subsequent teams to access reports specific to their brand.

If you would like some advice on the best way to structure your HubSpot account to manage multiple brands, then you can contact us today for a chat.