Eating Our Words About Hubspot

Earlier this month, we made a a brief comment regarding Hubspot‘s standing in the world of Marketing Automation.  Undoubtedly they are the thought leader in “Inbound Marketing,” but we said that they were not playing at the same level as some of the leading Marketing Automation platforms such as Pardot or Marketo.   Well, the fantastic listeners at Hubspot caught wind of our blog, and none other than the effervescent Laura Fitton (@pistachio) contacted us to let us know that Hubspot was about to make a big announcement, and last week they let me review a demonstration of their new release in advance of the their announcement which was made at today’s Inbound Conference.  Looks like we’ll have to make a bit of a retraction…First of all, Hubspot has a very attractive UI that should help even the most stressed out Marketers take a deep breath and relax.  It seems to be very intuitive and geared towards the Mac computer/right brainers out there who are being dragged into the left-brained Marketing world.  We liked the way you can create static and “smart lists” also.  One of the things that got us excited was the workflow tool, which graphically helps Markters understand what the heck they’re doing in a much superior way to to Marketo’s Spark tool, which many of our clients have found confusing.

One of the most exciting things about the release is the ability to serve dynamic content based on how you segment your data, for both digital and hard copy output.  While there have been entities doing this from CRM platforms like Salesforce wia the AppExchange for years, this is a great breakthrough that levels the playing field for Hubspot, which has needed to play catch up in the full-fledged Marketing Automation arena.  True personalization, as heralded over twenty years ago by Rogers and Peppers, is really here.

The implications for Marketers, however, may become a little more daunting.  With this kind of razor sharp personalization comes a lot of work.  Not only do you have to worry about generating content in various formats for personas and stages of the buying cycle, you will have to study the data and determine how to optimize the combinations of social, images, video, text, and formats based on the combinations of factors you collect on an individual basis.  Folks, that’s going to get overwhelming if you don’t take baby steps.

Nevertheless, being able to serve a skyline of San Francisco for your NoCal clients and a skyline of Boston for your Massachusetts customers in the same basic email, along with dozens of types of content will be cool.  Imagine sending detailed content about your offering sprinkled with variable content based on these two different prospects:

John

• Likes football
• Drinks beer
• Has a dog
• Drives an SUV

Mary

• Likes NASCAR
• Drinks Jack Daniels
• Has cats
• Drives a high end import

Just those four data points alone can create a completely different serving of content to two people interested in your offerings. Once again, this is going to create more work for Marketers but those that do it right will see a great payoff.   With Hubspot’s leap into the Marketing Automation arena, the concept of “curation” has only started… tip of the hat to Laura and her crew for keeping honest and up to date!