Name: Shashi Bakshi

Track: 1

Hubspot: Inbound Marketing & Web 2.0 case write up

Many a success & failure stories have been written by passionate entrepreneurs running high on
emotions. Here are a bunch of Individuals who are on a mission to change the way marketing is
done in America. John Wanamaker once said that he knew half his marketing budget was getting
wasted, just dint knew which half. Trying to address this rhetoric sentiment, Halligan & Shah
have forbidden the concept of outbound marketing & evangelizes inbound marketing. The
invasive nature of outbound marketing which tries to pull away people from family or TV or
dinner to something unimportant in their lives does not go down well with the consumers.
Inbound marketing on the contrary focuses on consumers who are in search of your product,
instead of people who do not care and hence gives you a bigger bang for your buck!! Trying to
convince others about inbound marketing, Hubspot themselves promote through this technique,
which speaks a lot about their confidence and belief in the new technology and hence is a critical
aspect of their promotion strategy.

Speaking of the Product, How does inbound marketing actually work? First you are to write
compelling content that would attract consumers with information which is useful to them and
not just promotion. Second is to distribute the content such that it is easily found by potential
customer. Finally the ability to engage those who are interested in your content. A blend of Sales
& marketing, convincing few to call it smarketing, this concept is doing half the job for Sales,
where the customer would walk up to them instead of them cold calling the customer. Hence
providing a lead at 5 times less the cost!

Hubspot value proposition to its customers would be Content Management System which would
help one prepare online website, form, blogs, amongst others, while the Keyword grader would
help realize the Search Engine Optimization for customer’s particular product, as to what product
seekers input on search engines when they are looking for customer’s product? This in turn helps
customer increase their exposure on Internet. Along with a set of other fancy tools like the link
grader, lead tracking & intelligence; Hubspot had a winner in the house, which basically
attracted 2 types of customers, small business owners aka “Owner Ollie” (OO) & marketing
professional aka “Marketer Mary” (MM). The ease of getting business from OO was far more
easier than MM, in addition to this the acquiring cost for OO was just $1000 as against that of
MM came was $5000. The 2nd way in which segmentation was realized was in the form of B2B
& B2C clients. An insight of how Hubspot was able to make a larger impact on the OO - B2B
segment tempts me to concentrate on this segment alone as a marketer who wants to add
maximum value to the consumer. But I personally feel that the OO-B2B & MM-B2B customers
are two segments which can be concentrated on heavily from here on. This strategy, where we
create a Niche market, would require us to divide the available resources into two and maybe
recruit heavily for more resources to achieve exceptional product development in each segment.

This then brings us to the Question of pricing for these 2 types of customers. While low cost is
critical in attracting new customers, forgoing revenue stream is not a good idea either. Hence
Hubspot need to make the customers sign a yearly contract once they have made a sale. This will
ensure that the customer is bound by commitment and increase customer retention. Also
practicing 1st degree price discrimination would be a plausible option since the products are not
of the shelf.

Finally as I have mentioned in the initial part of my write up, that Hubspot should not use
outbound marketing techniques as it will give out wrong signals to the market and besides the
very fact that there are more than 1,00,000 visitors, & only double digit final customers in the
Hubspot funnel, proves that to increase the customer base, we just need to make more converts in
our inbound funnel itself and need not venture out into outbound marketing strategy.