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To break through in business-to-business marketing, a message has to look beyond improving the performance of a business to impressing and exciting the people behind it.
Customer data platform Hubspot, for example, just acquired third-party B2B data provider Clearbit in early November. While HubSpot’s offered Clearbit to its App Marketplace customers since 2019, it can now use its new subsidiary to track website visits, monitor company news announcements over roughly 20 million companies to indicate who’s buying what and when.
This is genuinely exciting stuff at the highest levels of B2B, but HubSpot’s spent much of 2023 attempting to make big steps like that sound far less wonky.
For example, HubSpot announced in October that it’s linking up with TikTok to help B2B brands use the short-form video platform to track down sales leads and drive growth. Even TikTok can sound bland if you throw a heavy blanket of customer-relationship-management speak over it, but if you stick to video and point out that half of TikTok users find brands there—with nearly 60% buying something if they see an ad on TikTok—you’re suddenly hitting a nerve.
At HubSpot’s Inbound event in Boston in September, it unveiled its HubSpot AI generative AI tools for marketing, sales and service teams as well as small businesses. It also debuted its reworked Sales Hub platform for sales reps with streamlined AI-enabled features and connection to LinkedIn’s tools.
It couched all of this in talks by Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter and Andrew Huberman—as well as an announced partnership with Angel City Football Club of the National Women’s Soccer League. Afterward, HubSpot launched a national campaign across YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket, television, DraftKings and TikTok touting its revamped Sales Hub.
Adweek spoke with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar about how the company is using big-picture marketing to break through the B2B clamor and call attention to its biggest plans and products.
Adweek: What was HubSpot’s marketing strategy for 2023 and how has it worked so far?
Bodnar: We have always been obsessed with education and creating content, creating media, doing everything we can to basically build trust and credibility with our audience. That’s how we’ve grown the business over the years.
This year, we took that and then leveled it up with the best brand marketing and product marketing work we’ve ever done. Part of it was relaunching the Sales Hub product … That’s a big, huge audience [that’s] very different from our historical marketing audience. At the same time, our product had grown up a lot, so we’re repositioning. You’ve got to get everybody from your internal teams to your customers aligned on that story.