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HubSpot pairs community with a connected platform

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HubSpot pairs community with a connected platform

It was an ambitious message to deliver. The last few years have left many of us feeling disconnected in our homes and work lives as well as increasingly intolerant of disconnected digital experiences, whether as consumers, as B2B buyers, or both.

But the first in-person Inbound conference since 2019 seemed the right forum to articulate it.

Bringing us back together

“Everything we do tries to be a reflection of the world and the customer,” said HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar. “We started by looking at ourselves and thinking how we were feeling – and man, it’s been really hard. But we weren’t the only ones feeling that. We saw Inbound as starting to bring us all back together and we wanted a message and an experience to reflect that.”

The twin message was almost too neat. Two kinds of disconnection — personal and technological — two solutions — building community and building a natively connected marketing, sales and service platform.

“Software is necessary but not sufficient,” explained Bodnar. “There are some problems software can’t solve that need to be solved for our customers and for the broader B2B go-to-market community — and those are problems that really need to be solved by communities and networks.” HubSpot’s community initiatives, including the new connect.com networking space, respond to a perceived need to build not so much a community of product but a community of practice; spaces where marketing, sales and other professionals can explore common challenges. “We have a great foundation,” said Bodnar. “The content, the HubSpot Academy; it’s not an overnight thing for us.”

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Indeed, HubSpot’s content offerings have burgeoned, not least through last summer’s launch of the HubSpot Podcast Network. As we reported yesterday, the network is seeing some nine million monthly downloads. “That’s audio only,” said Bodnar. “Once you start taking those things to YouTube, that’s several more million.”

Read next: Why community could be the next big thing in marketing

The network effect

It’s early days for connect.com. It features several thousand early adopters who have created profiles designed to indicate their interests, skills and certifications. In some ways, it almost looks like a nascent LinkedIn. Is HubSpot going head-to-head with LinkedIn, at least within the parameters of marketing and marketing operations, sales and service?

Bodnar balked at that. “There are probably some overlapping use cases, right? I don’t think the two will be mutually exclusive, it’s not going to be an either/or situation. There are more focused use cases we think we can deliver from a community perspective that LinkedIn under-addresses today.”

There are, of course, many highly focused — not to say niche — use cases to be found in private Slack channels. Is connect.com looking for a sweet spot between Slack and LinkedIn? “I think that’s a really nice way to describe it,” Bodnar agreed. “The Slack channels are too decentralized. There’s great communication but there’s no network effect. To discover new things to learn, new people to learn from, people who can help you, people who you can hire for your business, you need the network component more than just the base community that exists in a private Slack channel.”


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The platform effect

HubSpot proselytizes not just for connected communities but for connected technology. After all, if technology is not sufficient, it is at least necessary. Perhaps uniquely among the big players in the marketing suite space, HubSpot has built its offering for the most part natively rather than through acquisition of existing third-party solutions. In HubSpot’s view, this is something that can increasingly be turned to their advantage.

“Data is hard, it’s messy,” said Nicholas Holland, general manager of Marketing Hub and VP of product, looking back to the decision to rebuild the early Marketing Hub offering on the then new CRM platform rather than leave them as two separate but integrated platforms. “We weren’t having system A talk to system B. Everything was on the singular, unified data layer.”

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The opportunity Holland saw was to leverage CRM data, which is much richer than list data, directly in the marketing automation part of the solution. “Every piece of data should be available in reporting, every piece of data should be available in automation, every piece of data should be available in content.”

Competitors, Holland said, are in a different position. Marketo marketing automation needs to integrate with a separate CRM; the various separate Salesforce clouds need to synch together.

It’s this connected platform that it supporting the new Customer Journey Analytics tool announced at Inbound. “If you have the object data — contacts and companies — the event data — everything they’ve done across the journey — and you can string that together in a reporting framework, now you have everything you need [for attribution].”

While an individual customer journey can look fragmented and unpredictable, tracking a cohort of customers can deliver a clearer path. Having the common data layer, Holland argued, obviates the need for yet another product, like a CDP, to pull disparate data together.

As for attribution models, there are many out there, as well as plenty of disagreement about which are most insightful. “Because something is not perfect,” said Holland, “doesn’t make it not valuable.” Despite noise and complexity, he said, attribution models can be directionally accurate.

Read next: Why marketing automation is both a challenge and a necessity

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Evolving concerns, evolving leadership

HubSpot registered some 50,000 audience members for Inbound 2022. That includes virtual attendees, of course. The in-person crowd seemed less of a crowd than usual — partly perhaps because some of the expo floor was turned over to small stages; audiences tended to appear when the stages were in use, then disappear to other parts of the enormous Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Bodnar admitted that in-person attendance was somewhat down: “It’s slightly smaller, like 10-15% smaller than 2019.” In many ways that’s not surprising.

There have also been significant changes in leadership since 2019. Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan succeeded to the CEO slot last year, with co-founder Brian Halligan becoming Chairman. “Brian gets to still be Brian in the Chairman role but doesn’t have to do as much of the day-to-day admin stuff you have to do when you are the CEO of a business like this,” said Bodnar.

It’s interesting both for HubSpot users and users of other platforms and solutions to contemplate the deliberate evolution of the offering, especially over the last eight or so years as it has both added new capabilities to its original inbound marketing solution, and elevated its market focus to include the enterprise.

“We’ve always been clear about where we’re trying to go and we’re just evolving the next step of leadership to get us there,” Bodnar said.


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About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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