HubSpot, Inc. published its annual 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report. Data is based on a January 2012 survey of 972 professionals familiar with their business' marketing strategy. Professionals include marketers, busines owners, entrepreneurs, and executives at companies of various sizes.
Here at ProActive we apply this to the investor relations world:
As clients begin to see the value of Blogging as a way of positioning their company as a "Thought Leader" in their industry, we continue to get more and more questions about which Blogging software to use. As with many things in life, it depends on what you want. Here are three that we like. The following is a combination of internal and external reviews of Squarespace, Hubspot, and Wordpress.
Over the past four or five years, blogging has become undeniably mainstream. Blog networks compete with traditional newspapers and magazines in a number of content areas including technology, and some — including Sugar, Gawker Media and AOL’s Weblogs Inc — have become major publishing entities in their own right.
Squarespace - In July of 2010, Index Ventures and Accel Partners led a $38.5M minority investment into Squarespace, representing the first outside capital the company raised to date. Squarespace has received recognition from publications such as the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and the Washington Post. It has grown to 46 employees, and is headquartered in downtown Manhattan. Squarespace is a hosted content service that competes with WordPress.
This was the first financing round for Squarespace, which has mostly flown under the radar compared with some of its more high-profile competitors. The company was started in 2003 by Anthony Casalena, and has been self-funded until now.
One reason Squarespace doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other blog-hosting and content services could be that it doesn’t offer a free version — the company’s publishing packages, which include hosting and a variety of themes and other services, start at $8 a month and go as high as $50 — and because its user base is made up primarily of:
Companies (including communications firm Porter Novelli and ABC News), and
Professional entities rather than individual bloggers.
The size of the investment that Squarespace has managed to attract from Accel and Index indicates that these investors see the potential to take the company’s software and services beyond simple blogging and into the broader world of content-management systems. Although some media companies have been experimenting with open-source software such as Drupal and Joomla for web publishing, both of these are fairly complex to manage, and a hosted solution could appeal to publishers such as the Telegraph Group, which is already using a number of cloud-based services.
This website and Blog - www.TheProActiveNetwork.com is written on Squarespace. I have used Squarespace for years and the tool is easy to work with and is relatively inexpensive when compared to Hubspot. The support from my experience is all online rather than phone based. Simply stated the social media integration and backend data does not compare with Hubspot, but it is much cleaner looking than Hubspot.
WordPress — The Company raised $29.5 million in 2008 from a range of investors including the New York Times. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Squarespace’s funding news on his personal blog, saying the company “has come after our VIP program before, when they made a screencast showing how they could recreate Scoble’s blog in 15 minutes using their design tool.” Mullenweg added that the financing was “quite a chunk of change, so it will be interesting to see what they apply it to.”
Wordpress is not a competitor of HubSpot, and they actually have a relationship with Wordpress. The HubSpot for WordPress plugin allows WordPress users to take advantage of HubSpot lead nurturing, website analytics, and assorted features of the HubSpot CMS that are missing in WordPress.
You no longer need to be a HubSpot customer to use this plugin. Non-Customers can use a majority of the shortcodes, widgets and the "Call to Action" post type with stats.
HubSpot customers benefit from Lead API integration and additional sidebar widgets that can be set up in a HubSpot dashboard. Customers can also easily view their HubSpot dashboard and stats right within WordPress.
Wordpress is simply a Content Management System and blogging platform. If a client wants to build out their site on Wordpress that is totally fine. HubSpot is different as they are the marketing engine behind getting found, converting visitors to leads and analyzing the way the website is working for the company.
Hubspot - Hubspot has raised $65 million to date in private venture capital money including Google Ventures. After their recent funding in May of 2011, Google Ventures Partner, Rich Miner (co-founder of Android) stated:
“We agree with HubSpot’s belief that search engines, social media, and mobile devices have fundamentally changed how businesses should market themselves. We’re thrilled to support their efforts to help thousands of small and medium businesses reach potential customers.”
Squarespace and WordPress are very good blogging tools in many ways. However, many customers, now want to see the data and they see the value of integration, of having all their "Inbound Marketing" in one place working together. With Hubspot you get:
Access to the support team,
Automatic submitting of all your content for SEO,
Hubspot host the data.
Most companies spend way too much time trying to tell people what their product or service does and way too little time trying to attract more people using inbound marketing by creating content that their prospective customers care about.
Hubspot is graphically limited and I don't compeletly understand why. They seem to take a little too much pride in "we are not pretty but we smoke the back end". HubSpot spends the majority of their time focused on inbound marketing as the world continues to block out annoying cold calls, junk mail, and spam emails. They focus their CMS on simplistic design because they are all about content creation and SEO. ProActiveNewsroom.com (built on Hubspot) dominates the search engines and blows most other small-cap companies away in terms of traffic results. When it comes to internet success, simple, combined with SEO best practices and great content, is the ultimate combination for success.
Here is an interesting review of Hubspot from The Sales Lion:
"When it comes down to it, I think the great difference of Hubspot (HS) is the fact they are changing the culture of internet/inbound marketing as we know it. They believe in teaching the masses (see their blog and self-help articles, they’re amazing) as much as possible so that any man or woman, no matter their background, can be their own webmaster and SEO. They give, give, give with the hopes that businesses will understand this great paradigm shift and therefore embrace the HS way. In fact, when I think of HS, this phrase always comes to mind, as it’s a perfect reflection of their business model:
Give a man a fish and feed him for a day….Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.
So that’s my suggestion to you. It’s time to learn how to fish. It’s time to change your life. If you’ve been considering HS and haven’t pulled the trigger, then I’m here to tell you that you’ve wasted enough time, so let’s get with it. Why delay success?? And remember this critical key:
If you just follow the HS inbound marketing system and use all their tools, you’ll automatically be ahead of over 90% of the businesses in your industry who are still living in the stone-ages.
Think about that for a second. It ain’t an exaggeration. Again, once you truly understand this you’ll stop waffling over whether or not HS is worth it and you’ll start realizing that this decision will impact your business likely more than any other decision you’ve made since opening its doors.
The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. For example it would evolve like:
Biotech research
Cancer biotech research
Brain cancer biotech research
Pediatric brain cancer biotech research
As the keyword gets longer, it also gets more specific. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant targeted traffic that convert well. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating. These keywords are very effective because there is little competition for most of these keywords on major search engines.
At ProActive, we would much prefer to get 100 clicks per month for a client landing page for a long tail phrase than zero clicks for the high-volume phrase.
It is no secret that ProActive Newsroom.com is based on Hubspot's leading "inbound marketing" platform. Visually, Hubspot is not the prettiest platform around. This Blog is hosted on Squarespace.com, which has a cleaner look.
Hubspot has one clear advantage over their competitors as Google Ventures joined Salesforce.com and Sequoia in a $32 million round of funding for HubSpot helps companies figure out how to show up higher in Google search results.
This is ironic because Google has come under fire recently for the quality of its search results. In response, it's gotten more aggressive busting companies like JC Penney and Overstock.com for using tactics that artificially boost their placement in search results.
But Google draws a line between the "black hat" tactics used by these companies and "white hat" tactics like creating content that has lots of frequently searched keywords. HubSpot is one of these white hat companies, offering various SEO analysis tools for Web sites, as well as help with other types of online marketing, like social media and blog publishing.
Hubspot had previously raised $65 million from investors including General Catalyst and Matrix Partners.
Taking the base Hubspot platform and creating a vertical niche like ProActive Newsroom for Small-Cap companies is where we add significant value for our clients and partners. Below is Hubspot's CEO Brian Halligan on raising the latest round of financing:
Hubspot has been a leading provider to ProActive Newsroom for over two years, and we are one of the pioneers in using the platform as an agency in the public company market. It takes much behind the sceans manipulation to make their platform work in our market. That said, they are the leader in "Inbound Marketing" and yesterday's on-line seminar gave a good overview:
We often talk to clients about being "Thought Leaders" in their space. One CEO Blog that we have always used as an example of delivering Thought Leadership in the Stem Cell Research market is Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (OTCBB: ACTC – News). The Chairman's Blog is now written by Interim-Chairman Gary Rabin.
ACTC is a former client that specializes in the development of cellular therapies for the treatment of rare and common diseases that impact millions of people worldwide. The company applies stem cell-based technologies and other proprietary methods in the area of regenerative medicine to bring patient-specific therapies from the lab to the bedside. So why did we lose them as a client? In a nutshell, the former chairman died suddenly in Boston and we are working to re-engage with the new management team. Regardless, The Chairman's Blog at ACTC is a great example of how a company can reachout to their investors, clients, and stakeholders.
1. Content: Let’s be realistic: you need a lot of content to make your corporate blog effective as a marketing tool. While you don’t need every post to be world-changing for your clients and prospects, roughly one out of five should be. In an ideal world, I’d suggest running multiple posts a day. Do the math on this. You need solid writing and editing capabilities.
2. Perspectives: how many people are contributing to your blog? While you may only have one writer, you do need many sources of information. Talk to executives and experts all over your organization. Ask them to contribute time for an interview, data for a chart or even bullet points for an article.
3. Talent: not everyone is a writer. It’s sad but true. It’s natural for people to want to express themselves, but a corporate blog isn’t a platform for that. Rather, it’s a tool for communicating a message. Remind your contributors and other corporate blog stakeholders of this fact. Hire (or otherwise engage) a talented writer to do the actual writing. This will make your content more accessible to your target market.
4. Accountability: yes, it’s an ingredient. In fact, it’s probably the most important one. There needs to be one person in charge. This person is ultimately responsible for ensuring that objectives are hit and that the process runs smoothly. Communication by committee is stupid. Process management by consensus is idiotic. At the end of the day, there must be a “single throat to choke” (to borrow the indelicate words of a former client).
5. Design: when I got started in corporate blogging, I downplayed the importance of visual impact. In the five years that have passed, I’ve changed my mind (take a look at this piece I wrote late last year). Include lots of visuals. Charts are best, but reality is such that you probably won’t have the resources to produce an endless supply. Photos and videos are great, too. When in doubt, even a closely related video on YouTube can be useful.
6. Editorial plan/calendar: I don’t care what you call it, as long as you know you need one. It doesn’t need to be etched in stone, but you should have a decent sense of when your major stories will be published. You can be flexible, especially with “filler,” but direction is crucial. Remember that you’ll be vying for the time and brain power of busy executives and experts – your editorial calendar will help you give them sufficient notice to contribute effectively.
7. Innovation and growth: your blog should look different every few years (or sooner) – and that includes functionality. If you have text and images now, plan for audio and video in the near future. Maybe you’ll want to protect some content behind a registration wall. Like your editorial calendar for the content side of your corporate blogging operation, you should have an upgrade/new features roadmap that you’ll use to mature the environment.
8. Public/media relations: you need to get the word out about your blog. You want readers, press pickups and so on. PR can help. Make sure you invest in developing the right (targeted) media contacts. The goal is to get them to see your corporate blog as an excellent source of ongoing story material.
9. Advertising: PR will get you only so far. Invest in some advertising on the likes of Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. Experiment with different environments to see where you get the best results. Over time, you’ll be able to modify your approach to maximize value.
10. Marketing integration: no blog is an island unto itself. As the PR and advertising points above suggest, you need to integrate your corporate blog into your broader marketing operation. Make sure everything is sync’ed up!
Here at ProActive, we have created a "vertical niche" in Digital Investor Relations. Most public companies spend way too much time trying to tell people what their company does and way too little time trying to attract more investors using inbound marketing by creating content that their prospective investors care about.
HubSpot is our platform for www.ProActiveNewsroom.com, and we use Hubspot's "inbound marketing" to attract investors to our clients.
The result of that extreme focus is that we get more web traffic than 99% of ALL WEBSITES and are even higher when referenced against competing investor relations firms. Hubspot recently made a short, fun, animated answer to the question "What is HubSpot?".
Here are the specifics of how Hubspot is integrated into our PRISM product.
We have been talking to a number of partner, clients and friends of ProActive about application that investors are looking for in the future. One possibility is to build applications on the Hubspot platform, and here is an update on their base product.
What stock applications would you like to see at ProActive?
Our friends at HubSpot have posted their newest collection of 100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts & Graphs. This list is based on original research and data from a variety of sources, including analysis of Hubspot's 4,500 customers, surveys with hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses, and dozens of top-notch publications like MarketingSherpa, eMarketer, Pew Research, McKinsey, and more.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 12:55PM 
