PROBLEM STATEMENT:
Hub Spot is an Internet Marketing startup business that builds and sells inbound marketing software for helping businesses where needs the software platform. This platform is the marketing analytics tool for professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO (Search Engine Optimization), blogging, social media, and landing pages that related with SEO. Hub Spot focuses on being a leader of the inbound marketing firm to attract prospective customers, who need to manage a customer funnel, for providing software and consulting. From the recent activities, Hub Spot generated critical stage of the business and reached their milestone goal.
Hub Spot is facing challenges to define their effective way to market themselves. The company is facing with a diverse pool of customers from many industries, B2B, B2C, small businesses, and larger businesses, so it is difficult to standardize processes across the customer base for Hub Spot. So, Hub Spot is trying to get more specific market segmentation and targeting strategies and deciding which customer to serve and to turn away. Hub Spot also wants to come up with suitable pricing model to prevent the company not only being profitable but also from keeping current customers as well. Last, prioritizing items in the long list of potential software updates proves to be challenging for Hub Spot. So, the company needs to make a balance with their current inbound challenges before the company could address their own message to customers for accelerating growth. ALTERNATIVES AND ANALYSIS: The first alternative, Hub Spot has to carry out Marketer Mary’s and B2B’s with sophisticated analytical tools. The current customers identified in this report are Small Business Owners (Owner Ollie, OO) and Marketer Mary (Marketing professionals who are working in larger firms, MM). Both are included B2B and B2C companies as well. According to customer portfolio in December 2008, Mary’s percentage of customers is 46% lower than Ollie (Exhibit 6). And also despite the fact of churn rates by segment, Ollie’s churn rate is approximate 1% higher than Mary’s rate. Although the cost to acquire a customer is approximate $5,000 for Mary, and $1,000 for Ollie, the Mary will more likely to use Hub Spot for long-term. …show more content…
Based on the number of existing competitors to Hub Spot that are Ektron, Eloqua, Buzz Metrics and so on, the entry of barriers are currently low and the threat of substitutions is high. So, any other may offer similar inbound marketing service at a lower price about software and consult service. In other words, Hub Spot’s offer could be duplicated or will be studied by outsiders. So, it may show that Hub Spot has to increase the incentives from the consultation hours for the customers like Marketer Mary and B2B. The current Hub Spot’s differentiator will not be longer that they will be the major leader in the current market and it is not guaranteed that Hub Spot’s current software tools are not mastered to optimize content, track competitors and etc. In other words, this current software is still an on-going investment and the customers still not aware of these tools. So, making new financial model would be the best alternatives to Hub Spot such as contracting or increasing the higher start-up fee need to be charged for all or big business firms that maximize the Hub Spot’s
Hub Spot is an Internet Marketing startup business that builds and sells inbound marketing software for helping businesses where needs the software platform. This platform is the marketing analytics tool for professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO (Search Engine Optimization), blogging, social media, and landing pages that related with SEO. Hub Spot focuses on being a leader of the inbound marketing firm to attract prospective customers, who need to manage a customer funnel, for providing software and consulting. From the recent activities, Hub Spot generated critical stage of the business and reached their milestone goal.
Hub Spot is facing challenges to define their effective way to market themselves. The company is facing with a diverse pool of customers from many industries, B2B, B2C, small businesses, and larger businesses, so it is difficult to standardize processes across the customer base for Hub Spot. So, Hub Spot is trying to get more specific market segmentation and targeting strategies and deciding which customer to serve and to turn away. Hub Spot also wants to come up with suitable pricing model to prevent the company not only being profitable but also from keeping current customers as well. Last, prioritizing items in the long list of potential software updates proves to be challenging for Hub Spot. So, the company needs to make a balance with their current inbound challenges before the company could address their own message to customers for accelerating growth. ALTERNATIVES AND ANALYSIS: The first alternative, Hub Spot has to carry out Marketer Mary’s and B2B’s with sophisticated analytical tools. The current customers identified in this report are Small Business Owners (Owner Ollie, OO) and Marketer Mary (Marketing professionals who are working in larger firms, MM). Both are included B2B and B2C companies as well. According to customer portfolio in December 2008, Mary’s percentage of customers is 46% lower than Ollie (Exhibit 6). And also despite the fact of churn rates by segment, Ollie’s churn rate is approximate 1% higher than Mary’s rate. Although the cost to acquire a customer is approximate $5,000 for Mary, and $1,000 for Ollie, the Mary will more likely to use Hub Spot for long-term. …show more content…
Based on the number of existing competitors to Hub Spot that are Ektron, Eloqua, Buzz Metrics and so on, the entry of barriers are currently low and the threat of substitutions is high. So, any other may offer similar inbound marketing service at a lower price about software and consult service. In other words, Hub Spot’s offer could be duplicated or will be studied by outsiders. So, it may show that Hub Spot has to increase the incentives from the consultation hours for the customers like Marketer Mary and B2B. The current Hub Spot’s differentiator will not be longer that they will be the major leader in the current market and it is not guaranteed that Hub Spot’s current software tools are not mastered to optimize content, track competitors and etc. In other words, this current software is still an on-going investment and the customers still not aware of these tools. So, making new financial model would be the best alternatives to Hub Spot such as contracting or increasing the higher start-up fee need to be charged for all or big business firms that maximize the Hub Spot’s