HubSpot has been rolling out AI-driven tools at a rapid pace, urging marketers to jump on the hype train. The question is: should you? Are these tools actually ready for prime time, or are we just getting half-baked features dressed up in AI buzzwords?
In this blog, we’re taking a hard look at one of HubSpot’s latest additions, Marketing Studio. We’ll break down what it is, what it does and whether it’s worth your time in its current form.
Put simply, Marketing Studio is HubSpot’s answer to the campaign craziness most teams live with. You know the setup: campaign plans in spreadsheets, assets scattered across different tools, feedback buried in Slack threads and reporting that’s hard to look at when it’s finally pulled together.
Marketing Studio aims to address this by providing a central hub within HubSpot. It’s a big-picture, visual board that maps out every moving piece of your campaign, emails, landing pages, ads, workflows and more. Instead of guessing how everything connects, you can actually see it.
It also packs in some handy extras:
Sounds pretty slick, right? That was my first thought too. But the real question is: does it actually deliver on all that promise in its current state?
One thing to keep in mind: Marketing Studio isn’t available to everyone. You’ll need HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise to use it, so if you’re on the free or starter tiers, it won’t show up in your account.
Once you’re on the right tier, you can access it directly from your HubSpot dashboard under Marketing → Campaigns → Marketing Studio. From there, you can start creating campaigns, adding assets and experimenting with the AI suggestions. For teams already deep in HubSpot, setup is straightforward, and it integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM and assets.
So, while it’s a promising tool, there’s a gate: you’ll need the proper subscription to even give it a spin.
To see how Marketing Studio works, we tested it on our podcast planning for Q4. On the surface, it shines for one-off campaigns; it’s quick, visual and makes ideation less painful. When you’re mapping out something like a single webinar, event or podcast episode, you can pull in existing assets, create placeholders for what’s missing and see exactly how the promotion will come together. That’s where we found it most valuable.
However, to begin the test, we first prompted the AI using the provided campaign brief. After intensely filling this out to the best of our abilities, it created a few bare-bones assets to get us started. We were admittedly less than impressed with what it produced, but it at least gave us a few pieces to begin with. These assets were mostly quickly replaced with what we actually needed.
We then started mapping out all the episodes for the quarter. Since the episodes aren’t published yet, we used HubSpot’s empty cards as placeholders. From there, we attached the assets each episode would need, social posts, blogs, an email promo and so on. This was surprisingly useful. Instead of juggling docs and task lists, we had a clear visual of how every episode would be supported.
In fact, It wasn’t just helpful. Our project manager could log in and instantly see how each episode would be promoted, what assets were needed and where things stood. We also liked being able to drop in details directly on the card, like the cocktail for the episode, the main goal and other important details, so everything lived in one place.
However, for something like mapping out an entire quarter of content, it still feels a bit bare-bones. The AI is more like a brainstorming buddy than a full-on team member. It’ll help spark ideas, but you’ll need to do the heavy lifting, actually, to build a cohesive plan.
Marketing Studio isn’t a silver bullet, but it does make campaign execution less chaotic, especially for one-off projects where speed and visibility matter. If you’re expecting it to replace your entire content strategy process, you’ll probably be disappointed. The AI support is still pretty surface-level, and the long-term planning features need more depth before it can fully replace your spreadsheets and external tools.
That said, it’s a promising start. The fact that HubSpot is investing in a more centralized, visual approach to campaign planning is a big win for marketers who’ve been duct-taping together workflows for years. If you’re already in HubSpot, it’s worth experimenting with for smaller campaigns and building from there.