This Company Helps Start-ups Up Their Marketing Game Hubspot develops cloud-based, inbound marketing software apart providing sales and customer support software to boost sales
By Shreya Ganguly •
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Marketing a brand in the right way is extremely important for businesses and good techniques for marketing require a lot of time, effort, skills and tools. These requirements might be taxing for start-ups, especially the smaller and early-stage ones.
US-based marketing company HubSpot is working towards solving this issue. Founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot develops cloud-based, inbound marketing software to help companies up their marketing game. Apart from marketing software, the company also provides sales and customer support software to boost sales and customer management.
Shift From Outbound To Inbound Marketing
Speaking to Entrepreneur India, co-founder and CTO Shah said the founders first noticed that marketing trends had fundamentally shifted. "People traditionally did marketing by attending events, sponsoring food and such activities but those things were just not working," Shah said.
Following this they decided to focus on inbound marketing rather than outbound marketing. "We decided to build a software platform to make it easy for small businesses to do marketing right. That was the original kind of genesis of HubSpot." With this in mind, Hubspot developed a content management system, social media tools, Web analytics and brought all the things under one platform.
Shah also explained that while methods like meeting face-to-face and talking is an important way to forge relationships with consumers but the major problem with outbound marketing is that it reaches out to the entire audience without understanding if they are adding value to customers and if they are the right audience.
According to him, the core idea of Hubspot is to help companies reach out and add value for potential customers.
Sell Your Idea and Not The Product
Shah explained that when HubSpot began its blog called Small Business Hub, the company did not focus on selling the product but put out the ideas out there to be evaluated by consumers.
"It wasn't until years later that we can move that from small business hub to becoming a little more self-promotional than we used to be back then," Shah said.
Focus On Telling Story
According to Shah, their marketing technique is applicable for both tech and non-tech companies. He added that the companies mainly focus on telling their story and creating a content which will prove to be helpful for their potential customers and serve localized markets.
"Build a content management system with social media tools and Web analytics and put all that into one "hub' that attracts visitors naturally through search engines—essentially earning people's attention by creating content that others share," Shah added.
