About a year ago, we asked marketers for the primary motivation behind their most recent website redesign. The top response was ... well, it was boredom. A third of marketers said they redesigned because it was time for a change. Another third were undergoing a corporate rebranding. Some had seen a change in management, and new leadership led to new approaches. But ultimately what we found was that the decision to redesign is often driven by internal marketing needs.
Here’s why this is interesting. In that same study, we asked regular consumers and website visitors what they most look for in the design of a website. Any guesses what that was? 79% of website visitors want a site that “makes it easy for me to find what I want.”
So there’s a disconnect there, between what marketers offer and what people really need. And this is bigger than the website. The truth is, we do this across all marketing channels. We push when we should pull. We force when we should adapt. Even in the channels where we’ve started to make some progress -- even in email which has developed more and more targeting capabilities over the years -- we end up personalizing the message, but then directing recipients to a lifeless landing page.
We’ve got to stop thinking like marketers. And start acting like humans.
We founded HubSpot with a basic observation -- that people navigate to content, products, and companies they find interesting. It’s really that simple. So why not make it easier for marketers to understand what it is that drives each person?
We made a major stride last year when HubSpot introduced the first version of its Inbound Database, which included detailed contact profiles. The Inbound Database is the class historian of HubSpot. It maintains every interaction, every signal of readiness or indication of interest your leads and customers convey, so you can understand the full context of that individual and market to them like a human being, not visitor X.
But having context isn’t enough. You have to use it for the good of the customer. And that’s why today, I’m happy to unveil the latest generation of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Platform, an integrated system that helps marketers put that context to good use, creating the most relevant marketing experience possible. This new release includes a new Content Optimization System, a new blogging application, and new adaptive site and landing pages. Also included in the release are new analytics at the enterprise tier and Social Inbox, a social monitoring tool that helps you scale personal attention.
I could give you the specs of each of these apps, but that’s what the product page is for. Instead, let’s talk a bit more about humans. And if you missed the INBOUND 2013 keynote address in which we unveiled these new releases, please feel free to watch it now:
Humans use multiple devices. The new COS optimizes your content for mobile.
Every year the marketing pundits get together and proclaim that “This is the Year of Mobile.” The numbers would suggest they’re a bit late. Fifteen percent of all traffic on the internet today comes from a mobile device; five years ago, that was less than 1%.
Not wanting to leave HubSpot customers alone in the masses, we recently analyzed hundreds of millions of visits to our customers’ websites over the same 5-year period. We saw something similar -- a full 13% of our customers’ traffic is now coming from mobile devices. Stunningly, 12 months ago, that figure was 9%. That’s a 44% increase in just the space of a year.
So we know mobile is important. But we also know there’s not just one cut of the mobile cloth. According to Google, 90% of mobile users who start a task using one device, later pick it up on another device -- a problem for mobile sites built predominantly for one device. Which is why we’ve rebuilt the entire HubSpot Content Optimization System on responsive design. Instead of creating separate sites for phones, tablets, and whatever device comes next, responsive design automatically repackages your landing pages, blog, and site pages to best fit the device viewing it at any given moment. It recognizes that people are not smart phone users or tablet users. They are human. And humans use multiple devices.
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Humans use multiple channels. HubSpot’s Social Inbox helps you make the most of your social strategy.
We’ve long known that as marketers, we cannot keep people confined to the website, or force them to read only the information we provide on our products. According to CEB, the average B2B buyer is through 57% of the purchase decision before engaging a supplier sales rep.
But up until this point, our approach to marketing in social media has resembled trying to shove our existing marketing into the format of social. That’s why you get Twitter contests and Facebook click-gimmicks instead of authentic conversations. And why the majority of customer comments in social media go unanswered. It’s not that businesses aren’t interested in talking with customers. It’s that amid the fire-hose of social media activity, it can be hard to find those conversations.
That’s why in Social Inbox, we’ve created a way to surface the mentions of the people who matter most to your business -- your subscribers, leads, and customers. We’ve also infused each Twitter comment with insights about the person making it -- their customer lifecycle stage, relationship manager, and history of interactions with your site and emails -- so you have context when you go to respond. Because context changes everything.
Humans evolve. The COS helps you personalize your content as your visitors change.
I am not the same person I was a year ago. Undoubtedly, neither are you. And yet, in most marketing channels we treat people the same regardless of whether they are just finding you for the first time or have been talking with your sales team for weeks.
Over the last year, HubSpot and our customers have been using Smart CTAs to customize calls-to-action depending on where someone is in their decision-making process. We just looked at the data for more than 93,000 of these calls-to-action and hundreds of millions of views and found that calls-to-action targeted to the viewer had a 42% higher submission rate than calls-to-action that were the same for all.
So with this latest release, we decided to spread that relevancy through the entire website. Now on the new Content Optimization System, you can use Smart Content to swap out whole modules of content (text, images, and video) based on who the viewer is and where they are in their decision-making process. We’ve started using this customization on our own homepage and product pages -- see if you can spot where.
Additionally, we borrowed the personalization tokens HubSpot customers are accustomed to in email and spread them throughout COS site pages and landing pages.
The goal here -- and it will take strategy and practice to get right -- is to give HubSpot customers the tools they need to create marketing that will be relevant to each of their website visitors at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
This is more than a software release for us. We believe this is a route to a better kind of marketing. But even the best marketing software does nothing without a good strategy. That’s why we’re rolling out a brand new HubSpot Academy course and an in-depth collection of tutorials, guides, and ideas for the marketer who wants to get inbound marketing right. We’ve also launched free designer accounts for any designer who wants to design templates for our marketplace. And finally, we’re making a pledge to make our own marketing more relevant, adaptive, and personalized to each member of our broad audience.
I could not be more excited about the direction of the coming year and the product launches that have yet to come. Thank you to all of our customers who work every day to create the sort of marketing we all aspire to: marketing that people can actually love.
