HubSpot Announces LinkedIn, Facebook Partnerships and Free Marketing Automation Edition at INBOUND Conference

HubSpot held its annual INBOUND conference in Boston last week. Maybe it's me, but the show seemed to lack some of its usual self-congratulatory excitement: for example, CEO Brian Halligan didn’t present the familiar company scorecard touting growth in customers and revenues. (A quick check of financial reports shows those are just fine: the company is expecting about 45% revenue increase for 2016.) Even the insights that Halligan and co-founder Dharmesh Shah presented in their keynotes seemed familiar: I'm guessing you've already heard that video, social, messaging, free trials, and chatbots will be big.

My own attention was more focused on the product announcements. The big news was a free version of HubSpot’s core marketing platform, joining free versions already available of its CRM and Sales systems. (In Hubspeak, CRM is the underlying database that tracks and manages customer interactions, while Sales is tools for salesperson productivity in email and elsewhere.)  Using free versions to grow marketing automation has consistently failed in the past, probably because people attracted by a free system aren't willing to do the substantial work needed for marketing automation success.  But HubSpot managers are aware of this history and seem confident they have a way to cost-effectively nurture a useful fraction of freemium users towards paid status. We'll see.

The company also announced enhancements to existing products. Many were features that already exist in other mid-tier systems, including branching visual workflows, sessions within Web analytics reports, parent/child relationships among business records, and detailed control over user permissions. As HubSpot explained it, the modest scope of these changes reflects a focus on simplifying the system rather than making it super-powerful. One good example of this attitude was a new on-site chat feature, which seems basic enough but has some serious hidden cleverness in automatically routing chat requests to the right sales person, pulling up the right CRM record for the agent, and adding the chat conversation to the customer history.

One feature that did strike me as innovative was closer to HubSpot’s roots in search marketing: a new “content strategy” tool reflecting the shift from keywords to topics as the basis of search results. HubSpot’s tool helps marketers find the best topics to try to dominate with their content.  This will be very valuable for marketers unfamiliar with the new search optimization methods. Still, what you really want is a system that helps you create that content.  HubSpot does seem to be working on that.

With relatively modest product news, the most interesting announcements at the conference were probably about HubSpot’s alliances.  A new Facebook integration lets users create Facebook lead generation campaigns within HubSpot and posts leads from those campaigns directly to the HubSpot database. A new LinkedIn integration shows profiles from LinkedIn Sales Navigator within HubSpot CRM screens for users who have a Sales Navigator subscription. Both integrations were presented as first steps towards deeper relationships. These relationships reflect the growing prominence of HubSpot among CRM/marketing automation vendors, which gives companies like Microsoft and LinkedIn a reason to pick HubSpot as a partner. This, in turn, lets HubSpot offer features that less well-connected competitors cannot duplicate. That sets up a positive cycle of growth and expansion that is very much in HubSpot’s favor.

As an aside, the partnerships raise the question of whether Microsoft might just purchase HubSpot and use it to replace or supplement the existing Dynamics CRM products. Makes a lot of sense to me.  A Facebook purchase seems unlikely but, as we also learned last week, unlikely things do sometimes happen.