What is HubSpot and Inbound Marketing?

This year I became an independent software consultancy business GeminiBlue and I now have the choice to work with any software vendors on the earth which I’m excited by. When it came to choosing a CRM vendor to partner with, HubSpot was a natural choice for me because over the last few years HubSpot has rocketed to glory, fame and market share and disrupted the landscape for CRM systems.

So if you are a very large corporate or UK PLC the chances are you’re working with tools like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, marketing automation tools like Marketo and Pardot and if you’re a small or a medium sized organisation there’s a whole myriad of different software systems available to you.

HubSpot is the most talked about, most trafficked, most tweeted, most commented, most actively social platform on earth. The reason for that is because a few years ago when HubSpot was created as an American company, it was based entirely around the inbound marketing methodology. So we need to understand why that’s been so successful.

In the past marketing was interruptive so outbound marketing meant cold calling somebody or showing them a TV ad or radio ad when they’re watching their favourite soaps and in interrupting their day with a message. Humans generally now, because of the internet, their behaviour has changed in subtle but very important ways and one if the ways its change is that were extremely good at screening out hose messages, so we don’t watch the TV ads in the way that we used to when we’re streaming, we can get caller ID on our phones so we don’t answer calls we don’t want to receive, and it’s much more difficult now especially with GDPR coming in to interrupt people with email. So inbound marketing has risen to be the best practice in digital marketing, why is that?

In the past marketing business methodologies and theories were written, hypostatised and published by individual theorists and business academics, that’s no longer the case. Another way that the internet has changed things is that marketers everywhere can try thing out, test things, create content, put it out there and see what happens, and then tell the world, via blogs, what happened.

When you take all of the stuff that worked and you can identify important trends that time and time again became best practice, you can but all those trends and best practices together you can sum it all up as the inbound marketing methodology.

The hallmarks of the inbound marketing method are to be customer focused and customer first and the method of attraction using content. So you use content to attract and then you are able to convert, close and the delight those new customers to gain referral and to grow your business.

So the idea of being customer first to grow referrals means that rather than thinking about your own business, your own revenue, and your own time, and your own growth, you think about your customer’s growth, what’s it going for them to make more revenue to acquire more customers and how can you help them achieve those things. If you grow your customer, you grow your business effectively.

In order to do that, to attract, convert, close and delight, a big part of that is software systems and process that your teams can work with to make that happen, HubSpot was built entirely around that thinking and that methodology of trying and testing and learning through trial and error with digital marketing to get success.