HubSpot is probably the best online marketing company around. It is actually not an online marketing company itself, what they really do is offer a software for other companies helping to facilitate these companies ability to “get found” and optimize inbound marketing initiatives. The company was founded by two smart guys – Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan. I believe Brian is more the business man and Dharmesh is more the technical, analytic thinker, (but that’s just my perception), I wish I had the good luck to already know them both.
I don’t want to spend much time describing the story of HubSpot that you can find in their recently released book called Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (which by the way is a really great book). Instead, I want to focus on all the strategies they have used to promote their business and literally reach the masses.
These are some of the achievements of HubSpot just to name few
1. Dharmesh Shah ranks 1,231 on Twitter with 15,928 followers, and Brian Halligan ranks 9,236 with 3,552 followers. Total users on Twitter to date are 5,729,908.
2. HubSpot owns the following GRADER websites, that have become very popular within the SEO, SEM community:
- Twitter Grader – a website that helps you find high-impact Twitter users in your industry and identify how influential your tweets are.
- Press Release Grader – a press release evaluation software, all you have to do is upload your press release and receive a feedback in real time on different issues.
- Facebook Grader – a tool to help you evaluate the strength of your corporate or personal Facebook page, measuring Facebook fans over time and giving you a score based on the 49,399 pages that have been graded up to day.
- Website Grader – an evaluation tool to review your website based on different SEO topics and offer recommendations for improvements. I believe this is the most popular of these four grader sites with more than 1,000,000 pages graded so far and more than 50,000 incoming links (combined) from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Gobbledygook grader , which evaluates your written content and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words. They developed this tool along with David Meerman Scott when they realized how over used some terms like “unique” are in press releases, making the terms less effective over time.
- Other grader websites include: personality grader and action grader
3. They also own www.inboundmarketing.com an educational community of 10,000 marketing professionals offering classes and inbound marketing certification. I’m currently working towards my certification and will hopefully be certified in January. The site is a great resource for professionals in the online marketing field and has become a true hub for these professionals. One missing feature is a search capability of users by location or interest, although I am hoping and assuming that HubSpot is working on this now.
4. Currently, HubSpot has more than 2,000 clients using their software to build traffic, leads and sales and has won innumerable awards including W3 Awards and Interactive Media Awards.
5. The corporate website is www.hubspot.com which has one of the most compelling blogs in online marketing with 15,940 feedburner subscribers and many more users connected to their feeds. The site drives organic traffic for more than 1,682 keywords according to www.semrush.com including very competitive terms such as “Internet Marketing,” which alone accounts for more than 25% of all organic traffic. Additionally, HubSpot has one of the most successful online marketing campaigns ever and they are bidding on more than 500 keywords currently.
6. HubSpot also owns www.hubspot.tv which is part of the Blog. The website is a weekly video podcast covering all the inbound marketing news of the week including social media, blogging, SEO and more. The program is presented by Karen Rubin @karenrubin and Mike Volpe @mvolpe. Episodes can also be downloaded as podcasts on itunes. http://itunes.hubspot.tv. There are currently more than 70 episodes available.
7. HubSpot currently has one of the largest groups in marketing on LinkedIn, their group rate #13 for the term “Marketing” with more than 40,000 members.
8. Dharmesh also owns www.onstartups.com a project he started while studying at MIT. The website is another helpful Blog for entrepreneurs offering lots of advice and good information. The site drives organic traffic from more than 1,200 keywords including the competitive term “startup,” which provides more than 7% of the total organic traffic.
9. Dharmesh also owns the OnStartups group on LinkedIn, which ranks at the top for the keyword “startup” on LinkedIn, and has more than 117,000 members. OnStartups ranks fourth in the entire listing of LinkedIn groups… An amazing achievement – and a great tool for HubSpot to leverage as it connects with entrepreneurs looking for help with their online marketing efforts.
10. HubSpot has also a strong presence on youtube, with 130 videos viewed more than 250.000 times. They currently have more than 500 subscribers to their channel http://www.youtube.com/user/HubSpot
How have they achieved such amazing success? Well… HubSpot has done so many things right I’ll try to briefly describe some of their most important achievements here.
Content Generation
The Blog at HubSpot is perhaps one of the most compelling and interesting Blogs focused on online marketing. HubSpot is one of the few online marketing companies that have several dedicated people generating exceptional content through blogs, social networks and their own content management system. They have uncommon titles for their marketing professionals like “Blog Managers,” “Customer Success Managers” and “Lead Generation Expert.”
Active social network presence
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan are active participants in the “socialsphere” and “blogosphere” but they are not the only ones. Virtually all employees are graded on a regular basis by their “web reach” or the number of members on the community that they can influence online. Employees at HubSpot are driven to be digital citizens of the world running. I have found Blogs, comments, and articles from HubSpot employees virtually everywhere I look online for “Internet Marketing” or related topics.
HubSpot runs online marketing campaigns in Facebook on a regular basis, (actually that was where where I found them) targeting marketing professionals through this social community. HubSpot does a great job of identifying prospect bio-personas and creating the text as well as the look and feel that matches their interest.
Effective conversion strategies
Believe me on this one, the people at HubSpot will do everything humanly possible to convert you on your initial visit to the website into a prospective client. They have developed all kinds of tools, and techniques to grab relevant data from users visiting their domains. These are just few of the strategies the people at HubSpot use to get your attention – and I have to say they are doing a really good job.
- Free trial
Of course HubSpot offers a free trial of their software platform. Here http://www.hubspot.com/free-trial you just leave minimal information and you can access for a limited time (7 days) the same tools and resources they use to promote their “Inbound Marketing” concept.
- Free white papers and kits
I don’t how many marketing kits, ebooks and white papers HubSpot has created, but I do know that the quality of these documents is outstanding. HubSpot distributes and exposes them in strategic places and domains, especially on their own grader sites where people are already interested in getting marketing information and inside knowledge.
- Live and archive webinars
HubSpot presents webinars on a regular basis; focusing on a variety of topics in marketing online, which grab the attention of a large number of professionals in the industry. Some of the webinars are really good, but unfortunately not all of them are interesting. Once the webinar is over they place the webinar on their site permanently for future download so the webinar can continue to generate interest and buzz for a while.
- Email collection on their grader sites
When you visit their website grader for instance, HubSpot asks for your email in order to send you the final report. HubSpot communicates on a regular basis (about two times per month) with people who have used their tools allowing HubSpot to nurturing prospective clients over time who may not be ready to buy at the moment, but are interested in what HubSpot has to offer. These grader tools are becoming very popular with a lot of online marketing professional already using them. I have used more sophisticated ones, but for a free tool, the HubSpot grader sites are excellent resources.
Great SEO practices
If any company knows about SEO, it is HubSpot. They have mastered the techniques of “In Site” and “Off Site” optimization, from information architecture, coding to community building and link popularity building. If you want to understand better how HubSpot thinks, buy the “inbound marketing book” today and take a look, it speaks for itself. It took me just two days to finish it because of how interesting the material is and how easy it is to understand (not to technical) so average readers can digest it easily.
From keywords used on the URL, keyword density, information architecture, coding language, titles, metatags descriptions, and more… HubSpot has put all pieces carefully together to make organic findability easy. Between December 2008 and November 2009, HubSpot was able to rank 1,063 new keywords in Google alone. This is an outstanding result from an SEO perspective. “If HubSpot were paying for all the traffic they get organically, they would be paying around $80,000 dollars per month.”
Excellent Lead Management and Lead Nurturing
The people at HubSpot understand how visitors to their site are at a different stages in the buying cycle. HubSpot has a sophisticated lead management system where they track and follow up with prospective clients they are already in contact with. They manage their leads by source, time and so on. Most importantly, HubSpot measures their conversions per type of lead. At HubSpot, not all leads are treated equally, a common mistake for companies that have these kind of programs in place. In the inbound marketing book they talk extensively about lead generation and lead management. If HubSpot applies what they said in the book about creating a well optimized landing page, their “untargeted traffic” should convert at 5% and targeted campaigns should convert at 50% making their growth exponential.
Web 2.0 oriented sites
Internet 2.0 is all about sharing, distribution and collaboration. HubSpot understand that well, they have created strong participating communities such as the Inbound Marketing University. They have also established strong relationships with prospects and existing clients through different media channels such as e-mail, twitter, and feeds. HubSpot is expert in creating spaces for conversations and incentive community participation. All of their sites are clean, easy to read and loaded with connection and sharing tools to establish conversations with visitors and prospective clients.
Excellent PR strategy and content distribution
- Social News
HubSpot actively participates in social news sites such as www.digg.com just go here and see how many articles they have sent over time. Some of these articles have pretty high number of diggs such as “Now, Any Business Can Tap 53 Million Facebook Users (For Free)” with 552 diggs.
- Social discovery sites presence
HubSpot is present in social discovery sites such as www.stumbleupon.com. Several of the internet properties of HubSpot appear on stumbleupon and are the favorites sites of thousands of users around the globe.
- RSS feeds everywhere
HubSpot has RSS feeds everywhere on their site along with direct links to share their information on the most popular social discovery sites, social news sites, social bookmark sites and community sites including twitter, facebook and linkedin.
Successful paid marketing campaign
- Google
HubSpot runs more than 500 ads in Google – bidding on more than 500 keywords, including “SEO tool” that generates more than 10% of HubSpot’s paid traffic. This particular campaign leads the user to http://www.hubspot.com/trial. Other landing pages for their campaigns include http://www.hubspot.com/seo-for-lead-generation-kit/ and http://www.hubspot.com/AdWords-Internet-Marketing-ebook, very clean, straight forward and well optimized campaigns.
- Facebook
Aside from their group on Facebook, HubSpot also runs a great advertising campaign for professionals in marketing. This campaign was the first one I saw about them and it immediately drew my attention, after that I’ve been intrigued with HubSpot and its products.
Absolute control on their domain properties.
The guys at HubSpot add value to the domain properties and treat their sites like real assets (they don’t even link to their social groups or store books by using third party links). For example, HubSpot promotes the website www.inboundbook.com to promote their book on Amazon, and if you go to this page you will be forwared to https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470499311?tag=hubspot-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470499311&adid=0KFA9WZWBF6M6Z8RYF41&. This approach is important for several reasons:
- If Amazon decided tomorrow to remove the book from its store, or change the URL where the book is currently located, all the link popularity built around it will be lost. By promoting www.inboundbook.com instead, HubSpot has absolute control on where they are directing users. If the destination URL changes tomorrow on Amazon, no problem, with one line they can update perhaps hundreds of links that otherwise would have become broken links.
- The second advantage of doing this is that they can measure the traction and buzz the book is gaining. By promoting www.inboundbook.com instead the direct link to Amazon allows HubSpot to track the users, information that otherwise would be available just for Amazon. This is extremely important because this kind of analysis can lead to the discovery of new potential markets, for instance if the people at HubSpot noticed a sudden increase in visitors from London to the Amazon store (through their domain), they can recognize that something is going on there and generate new strategies to target this new market.
- By having control of the link popularity built around the book, HubSpot can extend their web reach. If tomorrow HubSpot decided to publish the book online or amplify the content in the book on a website, they can use this domain and immediately benefit from all the backlinks created around it. HubSpot does this with all their groups such as www.facebook.hubspot.com, which points to http://www.facebook.com/hubspot.
In this article I attempted to lay out how a real online advertising campaign and strategy should be done. It is not just a matter of having a good website and a great idea, you need to know who and where your competitors are, what are they doing online, how much they are spending and what strategies they are using to compete with you. The main difference between the brick and mortar world and the online world is that online it is not as easy to identify your competitors and measure their size, just because you don’t see them it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In the offline world you know starbucks is big because you see their coffee shops on every corner. On the internet it is much more difficult to identify your competitors. Everything is virtual and some big players don’t even have storefronts, when they realize they have a competitor it would be probably too late… if you’re not convinced yet, checkout the stories of Blockbuster/Netflix or Amazon/Barnes & Noble.
A good online presence today requires more than SEO, it involves active participation on social sites, social news sites, social groups, social discovery sites and much more. Check out what HubSpot has done and learn from them, this is a real, well planned and executed online marketing campaign.
This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano
Navigating today on the Internet I found a Google advertising that I haven’t seen before. It seems it is a new campaign that started apparently couple of months ago. The campaign called “Search Stories” is a funny and minimalist sequence of searches in Google that end it up with great outcomes. The ads are being promoted through different size animated banners on the Google Ad network; On the screenshot at the right you can see an horizontal top banner promoting the videos, it is just the name of the campaign and the button “watch”.
