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If you’re a marketer, you can’t help but hear about HubSpot’s massive growth. The company was founded in 2006 and grew from zero to $271 million revenue in 10 years.
Moreover, HubSpot has a#5 traffic ranking worldwide in the online marketing tech space and has built an audience of several million people between their blog visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and LinkedIn connections (according to their most recent Annual Investors Report).
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In this piece, Chris Von Wilpert, Chief Content Sumo at Sumo Group, examines the latest marketing tactics HubSpot is using to generate over 25 million website visits per month.
Since its launch, Facebook Messenger bot has quickly become one of the top marketing tools, especially in the tech industry. Its rapid growth isn’t an accident. Facebook Messenger average open rates are over 80% compared to average email opens rate of around 20%. That’s four times more people opening your messages!
HubSpot’s marketing team is focusing on creating lead magnet opportunities wherever possible. Using a Facebook Messenger bot on their fan page is another way they generate new leads.
Besides hosting the Messenger bot natively on their Facebook page, HubSpot also gets their brand in front of other people's audiences by doing content partnerships with other businesses. Here is what HubSpot’s chatbot landing page looks like for a recent content partnership teaching people how to build chatbots:
To prove how effective messenger bots are in the marketing space, HubSpot acquired Motion.ai, one of the top chatbot builders in September this year.
Key Takeaway: Build a Facebook Messenger list by using a Facebook Messenger bot and ask people to sign up to the bot to get new content from your business. This list will serve as another source of lead generation for your business.
Nearly every business is on social media today but not everyone gets ROI out of their social media effort. HubSpot maximize their social reach by combining the strengths of multiple social platforms and then turn this traffic into leads with lead magnets.
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HubSpot’s native Facebook videos consistently get thousands of views, likes and shares. They then turn their Facebook videos into lead magnets by offering free tools related to their videos in the comments section.
HubSpot’s second largest social network is LinkedIn where they have over 191,000 followers. But instead of posting native video content on LinkedIn, HubSpot uses LinkedIn to drive traffic to their Facebook posts.
With this strategy, HubSpot successfully funnels all their social reach to their most effective lead generation platform (i.e. Facebook) and turns them into leads.
On YouTube (HubSpot’s third largest traffic driving social network), instead of driving traffic to their Facebook posts (because click-through rates on YouTube video are low), they drive traffic to a free inbound marketing strategy assessment so they can collect leads to sell their software to their most engaged audience.
Key Takeaway: Take a look at which of your social media channels has the most followers and engagement, then find a way to growth hack organic engagement on that channel. Use lead magnets on your social posts to collect leads from all your traffic.
Inbound.org is an online hub for marketers to connect, learn and find jobs. It is funded by HubSpot Labs, an R&D department within HubSpot. This website alone generates around 250,000 website visitors per month.
HubSpot helps promote Inbound Original posts written by community members to the top of the Inbound homepage and on social media.
It’s incredibly challenging to manage and grow a community due to churn (i.e. people who join the community, then leave after a few months). Here are two things the HubSpot team do well to keep people active in their community:
With these, HubSpot gives marketers a real reason to be part of their community. The company also extends the value of this community with their Inbound live event in Boston every year.
Key Takeaway: Build a thriving community around your brand by adding value that people can’t get in other communities. Focus on making the people in your community successful.
“At Sumo, one of our favorite lead generation strategies is a content upgrade,” says Von Wilpert. “In case you haven’t heard of a content upgrade yet, it’s to include an additional piece of content as a lead magnet in your blog posts.”
Von Wilpert explains: “This strategy is incredibly effective because you warm up visitors first before trying to convert them into customers. If you take a look through HubSpot’s blog, you will see that they include a content upgrade for every blog post they write. This strategy makes the lead magnet more irresistible because they’re more relevant to what the visitors just read.”
HubSpot uses three ways to get people to opt-in:
Key Takeaway: Research blog post ideas and create one specific content upgrade for every blog post you write. Then use an email marketing tool that sends an email drip automatically to add more value, engage and promote your products to your leads.
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HubSpot’s free Website Grader tool was the first ever project to come out of HubSpot Labs in 2007. A person enters their website URL and email address to see how strong their website is out of a score of 100.
You then get recommendations on what you need to improve that score broken down by performance, mobile readiness, SEO and security. Under every website grading element, HubSpot has a call-to-action that links to an educational article on their blog about how you can fix it.
But it gets even better. HubSpot gives you a summary of what you should do next at the bottom of the page and provides their software as the solution if you don’t want to waste your time doing it all yourself.
To stand out in a crowded marketplace, your lead magnet needs to great. When every business is giving away free e-books, give out a free software tool that helps solve your customer’s pain point so you can set your business apart from your competitors.
Key Takeaway: Use a free software tool to add value, build trust, and most importantly, surface your customers’ core problems. Then give them recommendations on how to solve the problems themselves by using your product as an easy solution.
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