When it comes to online marketing, the name Hubspot is no stranger and known to all professionals. Using the grand “all in one” approach and making sure you get every useful tool possible, Hubspot has undoubtedly lifted the bar to a whole new level.
As a marketing director, I believe that good marketing software providers should practice what they preach. When it comes to Hubspot, there are no questions asked. From the first moment you enter their website, you realize that this product was built by marketers for marketers.
Full of curiosity I approached Ellie Mirman Head of Marketing, Mid-Sized Business Segment at HubSpot and requested to conduct a short interview with her. The result was a series of wonderful answers to some of my most pressing questions which you will find below.
Interview With Ellie Mirman Head Head of Marketing, Mid-Sized Business at Hubspot:
Please tell us a bit about your background and how you came to realize the market need that hubspot answers?
I came to HubSpot in its early days and experienced the incredible demand for – and success of – a new way to do marketing. From the beginning, HubSpot has eaten our own dogfood (or, drank our own champagne) by practicing the inbound marketing methodology we teach our customers. From blogging to creating educational content offers to using data to make decisions, we’ve been able to grow to generate over 60,000 new leads every month and continued revenue growth. Companies were not doing inbound marketing but the explanation of how outbound marketing has become more and more expensive and ineffective resonated with people and it’s incredible to see the success of our customers who have since adopted inbound marketing.
Incoming lead generation has radically changed the way companies communicate with their clients and market their business. Which key developments are you forecasting in the near future?
One of the biggest changes happening now in the world of inbound marketing is that many more businesses are adopting new marketing strategies, creating content, using social media, doing lead nurturing. This will raise the bar for what a business needs to do in order to be remarkable and connect with prospects and customers. Also, more marketers will turn to technology to implement new marketing strategies and become more data-driven and accountable as more organizations and the industry demand. Here are a few more marketing predictions for the New Year.
How do tools such as hubspot help Saas companies increase their market awareness?
The technology that HubSpot provides enables marketers to do more. It makes things like blogging or creating landing pages or automating email workflows possible for a marketer to own, implement, and manage without going through an IT department or knowing how to code or spending hours doing setup or configuration. Even the analytics are built with a marketer in mind – categorizing all traffic, leads, and customers according to the marketing source such as Organic Search or Social Media or Email Marketing. Marketers can spend more time creating content or getting actionable takeaways rather than formatting or staring at a pile of data. Inbound marketing, more generally, is all about attracting qualified visitors and leads to your business instead of paying for the attention of people who don’t care about your product or service.
What are the key marketing challenges that software providers need to overcome in order to sustain growth? How have these challenges changed over the past 3-5 years?
Not have data in one place to do effective targeting – having demographic as well as behavioral data across channels (social interactions, email responses, website activity) in one place to use for effective segmentation and personalization of marketing, which is critical today.
Building long term assets – creating content, building your thought leadership, growing a database that continues to bring results over time, rather than going for short term pay per lead results, which is like renting your results – you get those leads only as long as you pay.
Generating leads, not just nurturing them – most marketers are turning to marketing automation to nurture their existing database, but it’s even more critical to fill the top of the funnel with more qualified leads.
Here is some more info on marketers’ major challenges.
What in your opinion are the key milestones that best determine successful marketing efforts?
The measure of success comes down to a company’s goals – both in terms of volume and in terms of growth. I’d suggest setting your revenue goals and working backwards to determine what marketing needs to achieve to support those revenue goals and using that as the benchmark for success. That may be in the form of number of leads, number of quality leads, sum of the value of leads generated, or some other metric that is tied to the company’s revenue goals. Of course, you could also simply focus on the metrics the CEO cares about.
If you had only one marketing tip for new SaaS start-ups, what would it be?
Set goals and measure your progress. These are key steps in actually being successful, but too many companies skip these steps. Being clear and transparent about your goals and how you’re tracking towards them will affect your strategy as well as the company’s perception of the marketing team‘s contribution to the bottom line.
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