Hubspot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.

Issues
 Developing market segmentation and targeting strategies to decide which customer
to serve and which to turn away
 Come up with suitable Pricing Model
 Determining whether inbound marketing programs can generate enough scale or
whether traditional outbound marketing methods need to be employed to
accelerate growth
SWOT

Strengths
 Solid financial foundation
 Has made significant progress over
passed two years in convincing
America that the rules of marketing
have changed
 Has reached noteworthy millstone
of 1000 customers by practicing
what it preached
 User-friendly product
 Complete inbound marketing
system (best practice guides,
training materials, software tools, a
community and support) – selling
more than just software
 Received the W3 Silver Award, the
MITX Impact Award, and named one
of the top ten “Best SEO Companies
in 2009”
 Its “Website Grader” was an official
honoree in the 12th Annual Webby
Awards
 Robust website (whitepapers,
webinars, and podcasts, etc), 8000
member Linkedin group (Pro-
Marketers), HubSpot TV and
Youtube video spoofs – all attract
many potential customers
Opportunities
 Founders recognize transformative
power that the internet possesses
for changing the way small business
operates
Weaknesses
 Fighting with many of the same
issues its customers face when
implementing inbound marketing
practices
 Diverse pool of customers (many
industries, B2B, B2C, small business
larger firms, etc) – difficult to
standardize processes across
customer base
 Mix of customers adds layers of
complexity and cost to sales and
customers service areas
 Prioritizing items in the long list of
potential software updates proves
to be challenging
Threats
 Salesforce.com dominates the
bottom of the customer funnel—
become the industry standard for
managing and tracking sales efforts
  Possesses a willing audience for its
ideas – considered a thought leader
in the Web 2.0 space
 Outbound marketing’s effectiveness
is diminishing as consumers begin
turning out
 Search engines, blogs and social
media (inbound marketing) are
generating new business at high
rates
 Cost of a lead generated using
inbound marketing in 5 – 7 times
less than one generated by
outbound marketing
 Inbound marketing has many
increased efficiencies over
outbound marketing
 Business have increased the portion
of their marketing budgets
dedicated to inbound marketing
 Inbound marketing allows small
business to compete with larger
firms-small businesses allocating
their budgets to inbound marketing
 Uses a software as a service pricing
strategy, allowing customers to
avoid a large upfront fee and
instead pay a smaller monthly fee
 Huge market potential for small and
medium sized businesses.
 Inbound marketing involves fishing
for customers, taking what is caught
and figuring out target market—
causes strategic planning difficulties
 A lot of macroeconomic risk
associated with small business
customers—bad business models
that are risky during recessions
 Ignoring 50% of the leads brought in
by its inbound marketing
 Customer churn rates showing that
some customers are obtaining initial
burst of value from software and
then cancelling it within a few
months
 Restricted from doing outbound
prospecting—could be hindering
scale by not creating outbound
marketing programs

Recommended Solution
 Need not go into expensive and / or aggressive outbound methods like offline
marketing
 Outbound techniques might be partially applied
o Online advertisements
o Logo on the client site
 Outbound techniques might be later used in following scenarios
o For feedback mechanism
 Create two separate areas in the business – one that will focus on services for
smaller business and one that will focus on services for larger business
 Create contracts to prevent customers from leaving after several months and give
the opportunity to present everything Hubspot has to offer
 Increase the upfront price for larger companies