How HubSpot Created an Industry: The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Case Study

Founded in June of 2006 by Brian Hal­li­gan and Dharmesh Shah, Hub­Spot is a com­pany that has seem­ingly taken the Inter­net by storm, rack­ing up top ranked blogs, twit­ter accounts, viral videos, and mil­lions in ven­ture fund­ing along the way.

The Ulti­mate Case Study

In the Inbound Mar­ket­ing space every­one is look­ing out for the next great case study. Pio­neers like Dell and Zap­pos are brought up any­time a mar­keter needs to show a client that inbound mar­ket­ing strate­gies do in fact work.

But could we be miss­ing the biggest case study of them all?

Hub­Spot, the com­pany that owns the term Inbound Mar­ket­ing, got to the top by asso­ci­at­ing them­selves with a phrase that up until 2006–2008, had mostly been used in an entirely dif­fer­ent con­text (typ­i­cally refer­ring to a form of mar­ket research).

In the process, Hub­Spot has cre­ated mea­sur­able demand for a clas­si­fi­ca­tion of mar­ket­ing that never existed before, while at the same time, flood­ing the Inter­net with rel­e­vant con­tent for an (at the time) uncom­pet­i­tive market.

How did they do it?

“All we try to do is build things we think peo­ple will like – both soft­ware like Hub­Spot and the free mar­ket­ing tools at Grader.com and other things like our blog arti­cles, Webi­nars, videos, and Hub­Spot TV – and then share these things with peo­ple and ask them what they think.” — Mike Volpe, VP of Mar­ket­ing for Hub­Spot in a 2009 ZDNet inte­view.

The Hub­Spot team is fre­quently known to men­tion that the secret to their suc­cess is “eat­ing their own dog food”, and Hub­Spot must be full.

In the course of their mar­ket­ing, Hub­Spot has created:

• A suite of pop­u­lar, free ana­lyt­ics & bench­mark­ing tools (grader.com)
• A top ranked mar­ket­ing blog (#29 on AdAge’s Power 150)
• A series of pop­u­lar YouTube videos yield­ing over a quar­ter of a mil­lion views

They’ve also been instru­men­tal in push­ing the term “Inbound Mar­ket­ing” by:

• Spon­sor­ing the Inbound Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit, fea­tur­ing many of the top minds in the Social Media and SEO industries.
• Cre­at­ing the Inbound Mar­ket­ing Uni­ver­sity, a resource and edu­ca­tion site that’s very sub­tly branded as being run by HubSpot.
• Cre­at­ing a series of music video spoofs which extol the virtues and process for suc­cess­ful Inbound Marketing
• Pub­lish­ing the first Inbound Mar­ket­ing book (affiliate)

Notice in the charts below, the growth in search demand for the term “Inbound Mar­ket­ing” has a strong cor­re­la­tion with the growth of HubSpot’s business.

Inbound Mar­ket­ing Search Growth

HubSpot’s Explo­sive Growth

Wrap­ping Up

Hub­Spot has man­aged to grow a suc­cess­ful com­pany by pro­mot­ing and brand­ing a set of mar­ket­ing tac­tics that had pre­vi­ously been clas­si­fied as two sep­a­rate enti­ties. They’ve cre­ated a self-​​fulfilling mar­ket­ing machine: they gen­er­ate demand for a mar­ket­ing strat­egy they cre­ated, which builds inter­est in the ser­vices they alone can provide.

Do you think the Inbound Mar­ket­ing term is here to stay?  Or is Inbound Mar­ket­ing itself too nar­row to cover the full scope of the Inter­net mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties that must be con­ducted for a suc­cess­ful online cam­paign?  Fur­ther, has Hub­Spot built the foun­da­tion for long term suc­cess by push­ing the idea of Inbound Mar­ket­ing?

Related posts:

1. The 5 Prin­ci­ples of Inbound Marketing
2. Five Prin­ci­ples of Inbound Mar­ket­ing Presentation
3. How To Set Up The Ulti­mate Lis­ten­ing Sta­tion Using Google Reader