Years ago, when Brian and I started HubSpot, we were on a singular mission. We wanted to help companies get off of the sidelines and into the game. The internet had changed everything, and too many businesses were missing out on the massive potential this created.
The way we saw it, eight years ago, was that the problem companies had was not a lack of great marketing tools. There were many. The challenge was that pulling them together was a daunting task, and many companies just didn’t have the time or resources.
We decided to meet that challenge and build a single, integrated marketing platform to help companies grow. We built into the platform everything you needed to attract, convert, close, and delight customers — in one integrated place. The power of one place is not just that it’s vastly simpler for the user. It’s that when built together, natively, each component begins to amplify the potential of the whole. One plus one starts to equal three, so to speak.
Along the way, we’ve had more ideas on how to improve the platform to help our customers get more growth. But, some of the best ideas we’ve ever had are ideas we’ve never had. They were not our ideas to start with. They were your ideas. Submitted by you, through ideas.hubspot.com. You told us what features and improvements would make your life better and help you grow faster.
Yesterday, on stage at the INBOUND 2014 conference, I got the pleasure of announcing that we’ve made 143 of those ideas a reality in the last year alone. Today, you can watch the video of the keynote or read along with the recap below to learn about the biggest announcements coming out of the HubSpot Marketing Platform this year.
When we set our sights on which new apps and features to add into HubSpot, we tried to think about one thing: growth. What can we provide to customers that will help them gain leverage in the marketplace and grow faster than ever before? To that end, here’s what we’ve added into the HubSpot Marketing Platform.
Growth From a More Efficient, Coordinated Team
When it comes to growth, time is more valuable than any commodity. We invested this year in features that would make your team more efficient and coordinated.
Calendar: You’re creating a lot of content. We created a HubSpot Calendar to help you organize it all. The Calendar enables you to more efficiently assign content, schedule publishing, and organize campaigns from one central location. We hope it will become the command center of your inbound marketing.
Campaign Wizard: We know that creating marketing campaigns takes time, so we’ve added a Campaign Wizard to speed up the process of creating and organizing all your campaign assets.
Social Inbox Suggested Streams: To help you get the most out of social media in 20 minutes a day by finding the conversations that matter most, HubSpot has added tabbed monitoring and suggested streams.
Growth Through Measuring and Replicating What Works
More than ever you need cohesive marketing analytics to decipher your audience, your content, and how the two interact with each other to grow your business. HubSpot has always been data-driven; this year we took that to a new level.
Attribution Reporting: At the Professional and Enterprise levels we’re adding a new report to help you figure out which marketing channels, referring sources, or URLs led to conversions anywhere in the funnel.
Revenue Reporting: At the Enterprise level, we’ve expanded revenue reporting so you can connect your CRM and tie marketing channels, content offers, and campaigns back to the revenue generated for the company. (Speaking of CRMs, did you see Brian’s big announcement yesterday?)
List Analytics: Marketing databases decay at a rate of 23% per year. Keeping your contact lists healthy and growing requires a deep understanding of the contacts in your list. At the professional and enterprise level, we’ve added list analytics to help you diagnose the health of your lists, how engaged the contacts are, and how quickly your lists are growing or decaying.
Email Optimizer: The odds are against marketers in the modern inbox. So we’ve added a new Dashboard and Email Optimizer to the HubSpot Email App to give you the best chance possible. The Email Optimizer examines each email you compose and helps you catch email errors, improve deliverability, and optimize your send times.
Growth Through Raving, Virally Happy Customers
Rapid growth comes not only through hard work, but also through finding ways to delight your customers. The most wildly successful companies have wildly happy customer bases and those customers — they have reach.
Anonymous Personalization: In the past you’ve been able to use HubSpot to personalize content on your website to each contact or customer in your database. But the relationship with customers starts long before they first convert. So at the Professional and Enterprise levels, we’ve added the capacity to personalize content from the moment someone first steps on your site.
Conditional Logic in Workflows: Professional and Enterprise customers use workflows to trigger emails, notifications, and other actions based on a contact’s behavior. Now, if that contact’s behavior changes mid-workflow, you can use conditional logic (or “branching”) to alter that workflow to make it even more relevant.
Tally: You can’t make your customers happy if you don’t listen to what they say. To make this easier, we introduced an exciting new app called Tally. Tally is like a temperature check that you can place on any page of your website to get feedback from customers. Because it’s tied into HubSpot, you can keep track of that feedback and use it for more targeted communications. Tally is in beta right now, but if you’re a customer, we’re looking for early users.
These releases are just a fraction of the features we’re adding into HubSpot. My hope is that with these new features, one plus one will not just equal three for your companies, it will begin to equal five … or seven … or ten. Speaking of ten …
Let’s Talk About “10” for a Moment
Too often in business we focus on incremental growth. How do we beat last quarter’s numbers by 5%? How do we generate more leads than last month? While that’s good for short-term planning, we should never lose sight of big ambitions. Everyone, from interns to executives, should be thinking about how to achieve 10X growth.
Why? This is not just fantasizing about fatter wallets. It’s about reorienting your team, strategy, and mindset for the long-term. You didn’t start or join a business to be tepid. You work so that you can make a dent in the universe. Yes, in that process you need to nail short-term goals; but you also need to find points of leverage where you can turn episodic growth into escalating growth.
We’re excited to see you do it. We’ll be here, on our own growth mission, cheering you on.
