Mediaboss Marketing

Ah, those sociable humans, they're always up to something online texting, tweeting, messaging, Googling.

HubSpot (HUBS) Chief Executive Brian Halligan says he's staying on top of all that, and making it work to his company's advantage.

XAutoplay: On | Off"We are really watching the way the marketplace and humans are changing, and building products to match that," Halligan said on a recent company earnings call.

HubSpot is an 11-year-old maker of sales and marketing software based in Cambridge, Mass., and it sells to small- and midsize businesses. Itsown pitch is that potential customers aka those sociable humans find businesses through digital channels like blogs, internet search engines and social media. HubSpot's expertise lies in attracting people to websites and optimizing content so that visitors are converted into paying customers.

Its mantra: Help customers create more personalized interactions with their prospective buyers to close the deal.The strategy has helped HubSpot see its revenue shoot up 38% to $171 million in the first six months of 2017.Shares are up 52% this year.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect 2018 revenue growth to slow to 25% from 34% this year. HubSpot could beat those earnings estimates if new initiatives gain traction, says Derrick Wood, an analyst at Cowen & Co.

"Their rate of growth has come down. Marketing tech in general is a tough market to scale. It's fragmented with lots of small vendors. So to come out as a single winner and take a lot of market share has been challenging,"said Wood, who has a neutral rating on the stock.

Further, HubSpot's main challenge is maintaining a sales growth rate that will support its valuation.

HubSpot has evolved into a multi-product company adding sales automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Many of HubSpot's customers have 10 to 50 employees, with some in the low hundreds. Analysts say HubSpot targets firms with up to 2,000 employees.

The company has focused on the midmarket as opposed to competing head-on for large corporate accounts vs. the likes of Oracle (ORCL), Salesforce.com (CRM), SAP and Adobe Systems (ADBE). That way HubSpot has avoided the cost of investing in its own sales staff to chase down and close deals, says Wood.

"What's different about these guys is the focus on midmarket. They have to keep the new-customer growth engine going. They're looking at new ways to acquire customers," said Wood. "Also going into new markets, like they're doing with sales force automation and CRM, is going to drive growth. But I don't think you'll see them go upmarket into (larger) enterprise (firms)."

HubSpot's customers mostly engage in business-to-business marketing. They buy online subscriptions to software that ranges from $2,500 to $30,000 annually. The average marketing customer spends about $13,000 a year.

HubSpot also has laid claim to what it calls "Inbound Marketing." Halligan and co-founder Dharmesh Shah wrote a book on using Google, social media and search-friendly blogs to attract customers via the internet.HubSpot sells tools that track the online activity of website visitors and personalize content as their interests are identified.

Halligan says people are spending less time texting, emailing back-and-forth, or searching on Google. Instead, Halligan says, they're using messaging platforms more, including Slack, in the workplace.

And, humans consume tons of video. So HubSpot helps its customers evaluate video platforms such as Facebook (FB) Live for marketing purposes.

"If you look how people spend their day, they're spending an awful lot of time on social media," Halligan said on the earnings call. "There are big shifts going on, and HubSpot's going to be there to help our customers through it."

HubSpot has used Twitter (TWTR), Facebook and Instagram to build its own follower base. In late September, HubSpot will host its annual "Inbound" user conference to rally the troops.

Still, there's more to HubSpot's marketing than social media engagement.HubSpot has built up sales channels, such as website design and marketing agencies, that point people toward its products. About 40% of revenue comes from customer-referral channels, says Wood.

HubSpot aims to borrow some techniques from Intuit (INTU) and Autodesk (ADSK), which have successfully targeted accountants and architects, as partners. HubSpot aims to partner with sales agencies.HubSpot also works with industry players. HubSpot has growing ties to Microsoft's (MSFT) LinkedIn and its sales tools.

IBD'S TAKE: HubSpot has formed a cup-with-handle chart pattern with a buy point of 76.20. The stock is hovering near its 50-day moving average. Alarm.com, Realpage, and Appfolio have the highestComposite Rating, aCAN SLIM investing metric, of companies in IBD's Computer Software-Specialty Enterprise group.

The company also provides help in integrating its software with Salesforce.com's biggerplatform. And, HubSpot's tools work with e-commerce payment platforms such as Shopify (SHOP).

HubSpot recently rolled out a $50 monthly marketing starter package. New visitors to its website are greeted with offers for free versions of HubSpot products. After using free versions for a while, or "freemiums," the company figures users will upgrade to paid products.

"If you roll the clock forward two, three, four years, that's just the way I think humans are going to buy products because they're going to want to try it and use it (first)," said Halligan on the earnings call. "This freemium thing is going to be here to stay."

Indeed, HubSpot has added two new board members one from software firm Atlassian (TEAM) and one from data storage provider Drop both of which use freemium business models.

HubSpot has more than 34,300 customers, up 40% from a year ago, with roughly 27,000 of them buying marketing tools. Average revenue per customer has been falling, however, due to the lower-priced offers.

Nate Cunningham, a Guggenheim Securities analyst, says HubSpot has a "greenfield" opportunity to target small companies that never bought marketing software. He says HubSpot needs to improve operating margins as it adds customers in new ways.

"The No. 1 determinant of HubSpot's growth is probably not competitive displacement, to gain share vs. Salesforce or IBM," said Cunningham. "It's more about how can they get people to try their product who never have had a marketing product before. I think greenfield is where the bulk of the opportunity is."

HubSpot had over 5,000 "Growth Stack" customers as of June 30, up from 3,000 at the start of the year. These high-spending customers buy more sales, CRM and marketing software tools. And, they're more likely to renew subscriptions annually as opposed to leaving.

Bhavan Suri, analyst at William Blair, says HubSpot is on the right track.

"We believe HubSpot's customer growth is a good indication of the health of the business," he said in a note to clients, "and provides significant up-sell and cross-sell opportunities longer term, which we believe could ultimately lead to an acceleration of the business as soon as next year."

Shares of HubSpot have been in decline while forming a deep handle, but were up 2.2% at Friday's close to 67.35.

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HubSpot: A Marketing Software Firm That Uses The Human Touch - Investor's Business Daily

You may have heard about Chiara Ferragni, who started a personal style blog as a 27-year-old that now generates $8 million per year. Or Johnny Ward, who started blogging about his travels as a budget backpacker and ended up with a successful media company. Or the food blogger who earns $150,000 per year.

The internet is overflowing with how-to guides on how to imitate their successes by becoming a full-time Instagrammer, blogger, and fashion guru.

But you have probably never heard of the women featured in (not) getting paid to do what you love, a book by Cornell researcher Brooke Erin Duffy that examines the myth that working hard on a personal brand will pay off in the long run.

She compares this premise to that of unpaid internships. The expectation is, if you invest yourself now, this will pay off in the future with this glamorous, fantastic job, Duffy says. But the reality is much less auspicious in terms of how often these actually do turn into full-time employment.

Just as not everyone can make it based on unpaid internships, which inherently favor those with connections and families who will pay for their living expenses, not everyone can build a huge online presence and find enough advertisers to make a living. You have to think about the investments theyre making upfront, the investments in the fashion or the makeup or the food, she says.

Social influencers with 1,000 to 100,000 followers can be paid between $50 to $1,000 to advertise for a brand, according to influencer marketing firm Hireinfluence, which works with brands such as Oreo and Microsoft to place products in the social feeds of popular personalities.

Most of the dozens of women who Duffy interviewed, despite many hours of unpaid work, have little to show for their efforts.

Meanwhile, companies are benefiting from the free labor, which Duffy calls aspirational work, by running influencer marketing campaigns that sometimes only pay in free swag.

Q: What is the myth that powers aspirational labor?

The myth is very much a meritocratic one: That if you are putting the most creative, unique content out there, and you have a special voice, you will rise to the top. And by rise to the top, I mean you will earn an income.

The reason that I call this a myth is that if you look at people who have actually risen to the topthe super bloggers, the super influencersI dont see them as people just like us. They have some sort of existing capital. They have the right connections. And so, the myth is one of digital meritocracy. If we work hard enough, if we have this creative vision that nobody else has provided, we can get our dream job and do what we love and get paid.

What is the difference between aspirational labor and posting on Facebook once in a while?

What is different with aspirational labor activities is that they are very much seen as something that will provide a return on investment. Theyll provide you access to the right people who will turn this into a job.

How much work did the people you interviewed put into their personal brands?

Lets take the case of someone uploading an image on Instagram. We see the final image and the cutesy caption, but we dont see the amount of thought and strategy that goes on before any of this happens.

You have them preparing the photo, staging the photo, doing the photo shoot, afterwards editing the photo and coming up with a caption. And then you have this self-promotion.

A lot of people who had been doing this for years were shocked at how a culture of self-promotion eclipsed the creative elements. They got into this because they really enjoyed styling or writing or photos. They would say, Im coming up with my creative product, and then Im spending hours promoting itsharing it on Instagram, sharing it on Facebook, sharing it on Twitter. It cant be the same content. They have to vary it depending on the audience for each platform. And after that, they would say, we have to go through and respond to all of our followers, and we have to engage this culture of reciprocal following. I follow a blogger because shell follow me.

It was just staggering to hear all of the work that goes into this.

Was anyone you interviewed successful?

A lot of people who were successful had worked for years moonlighting as a blogger while maintaining their full-time jobs. They were essentially doing two jobs in order to make enough to subsist on.

There was also a sense that they always had to be on. You cant just abandon your blog for a week, or you see a huge dip in your followers, which directly links to your advertising income. And so, theres this kind of, what is this doing to my personal life? But also, when is this going to pay off enough for me to leave my job? Or is it not?

How are companies benefiting from this myth that anyone can make it on social media?

Native advertising and influencer marketing is all predicated on this idea that real people are promoting their favorite brands and products. Its much cheaper for an advertiser to reach out to a young person with their own organic following than it is to place an ad in a magazine or on TV.

Brands kind of dangle this promise of hope. Youll see campaigns where brands will say, hey, hashtag your favorite jeans look and post on Instagram and maybe well feature your image for people to see. There are also more dubious promises of exposure. I talked with people who said the companies would not offer them any sort of financial compensation. In one case, this woman was a cosmetics blogger and she had a sizable following. She said companies would sometimes send her products unsolicited and say, hey, could you just do us a solid and blog about this?

You drew a parallel between aspirational labor and other types of traditional womens work. Can you explain?

Womens work is a form of invisible labor that goes unrecognized and uncompensated. Child care, domestic work are seen as activities that women inherently do and theyre naturally good at. Its invisible in that its unseen and also there are no economic rewards associated with it.

We now see the lineage of this devaluing of work in the social media economy. I see these investments of time and energy as a form of work, but theyre often seen as leisure, theyre seen as fun, and theyre seen as something that shouldnt be materially compensated.

After interviewing all of these women, did you come away with a conclusion about what you think should change?

I think the best place to call attention to that are in the very same places where this activity is happening, which is online, across social media.

I would love to see more attention to how few people are making it in this industry, how few businesses are willing to compensate influencers. They have this incredibly saturated market, its teeming with young people who are willing to work as so-called influencers. I think transparency about how lopsided the system is is what Id like to see as the first step.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Becoming a social media influencer is the new unpaid internship, and just as exploitative - Quartz

First, fragmentation

"Brands need to streamline teams in order to eliminate inefficiencies and inaccuracies. This has become even more critical because the number of internal and external teams that touch a single campaign are at an all-time high. On average, we see more than six different companies touching a single social campaign, a number up 224 percent over the past 24 months," said Jason Beckerman, CEO and Co-founder at Unified. "Without a data management platform to deliver the right business intelligence to all the players involved-- there's been an uptick in lost learnings and data. It's more people, more problems right now."

Second, complexity of supply chains

"The demand for connectivity is at an all-time high as we watch social advertising continue to grow. To visualize this complexity, picture a global consumer-packaged goods brand with hundreds of sub-brands within its portfolio (along with multiple partners and agencies coordinating to advertise across several social channels...)," said Beckerman. "Brands must place a larger focus on staying organized as it's only going to get more and more complex."

Third, more customization

"The hyper-personalization of campaigns is also expanding. To be exact, 184% increase in average campaigns per client YOY. Social is unique in that it is more conducive to deploying one-to-one or extremely personalized targeting that is much more challenging to achieve in other forms of digital advertising-- allowing you to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time," said Beckerman.

Fourth, ownership concerns

"The number of teams, supply chains and campaigns are three times the amount they were just one year ago. The data produced (or rather, data exhaust) by these factors has followed suit. As a result, brands that do not have total control over their growing number of ad accounts do not actually own their own data," said Beckerman. "The scope of this challenge is daunting, making it mission-critical for marketers to get on centralizing and aggregating their data. As this trend is expected to continue, it is critical for marketers to confidently own their data and leverage business intelligence to take command of and optimize the fastest-growing piece of their paid media mix."

Tags: advertising, social marketing, social marketing tips, social marketing trends, Unified

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Top 4 trends to watch in social - BizReport

DH Vancouver Staff Aug 09, 2017 10:05 am 220

Digital agency 6S Marketing has acquired Vancouver-based social media company Motive Communications, the company announced today.

6S Marketing,a leading digital agency with offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York, will now offer broader social media services, as Motives client roster will be transitioning over to the company.

The deal is the beginning of 6S Marketings expansion plan in the social media division across their North American offices.

Were investing in an essential evolution of our services, Chris Breikss, 6S Marketing Co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. Social media and content-centric marketing are core components of a successful digital strategy. This unlocks an incredible opportunity to leverage Motives resources and capabilities to ensure 6S remains at the forefront of the industry.

Sheng Li Digital, 6S MarketingsChinese-language marketing division, is also hoping to grow its social media services withWeChat and Weibo.

Motives founder, Mitchell Fawcett will join the 6S Marketing team as VP Partnerships & Social Strategy.

Fawcetts new leadership role is expected to bring new and vital services to the companyincluding strategy development, content marketing, influencer marketing, community management, paid media, and training, as well as a full range of creative production services.

DH Vancouver Staff

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6S Marketing acquires Vancouver social media agency - Daily Hive (registration)

EXCLUSIVE: What does An Inconvenient Sequel, Fruitvale Station,The Zookeepers Wife, Leonardo DiCapriosdoc Before the Flood, Lion, The Hunting Ground andWhere to Invade Next all have in common? Its Picture Motion, a New York-based company that develops social impact and grassroots marketing campaigns for films. The company was founded in 2012 by Christie Marchese and joined one year later by Wendy Cohen. Both are former marketing executives from Jeff Skolls Participant Media.

Since opening their doors, they have shepherded through the grassroots efforts on scores of films documentaries and features with very specific social impact messages. I feel like I have activist ADD, joked Marchese. Weve done over 80 films now.

Ina Maria, Erin Mayhugh

The idea for Picture Motion started while both worked at Participant. Wendy and I always had this idea of this company and often talked about what our dream company would be. Marchese left Participant and began consulting for independent filmmakers and ended up helping Righteous Pictures with The Last Survivor about the survivors of genocides across the globe and then Web, a story about Peru getting the Internet for the first time.

I love documentary film because it is cinema as investigative journalism, said Marchese. Soon, she began getting more and more projects to work on and then Cohen came and joined. When they first started they had three films to work on: all three were documentary films Its A Girl, Speak and Bully.

Documentarians take note. There are two things that Picture Motion has found that works best in helping to promote these kinds of films (and what they have had great success with). Finding the rightnon-profit partnership and having a grassroots distribution network.

Cohen noted that they have helped market films that cover such a wide range of topics adoption in China, healthcare, climate change, education, homelessness, immigration, sexual assault, women in the military, the refugee crisis, gender politics, and economic, social and racial justice. They have covered such a gamut that it seems it would make them experts on these topics.

We stay away from calling ourselves experts in any area, but we are experts in finding the experts, said Marchese. We really pride ourselves on our relationships. We have great partnerships with the issuary leaders, non-profits and activists on all the campaigns.

How long do campaigns run? Some are one month and one campaign First Generation they worked on for two years. First Generation was about four high school students who strived to become the first ones in their families to go to college and thereby break the cycle of poverty. We came on for two months at the beginning and as we worked, we learned because the filmmakers themselves were experts, said Marchese. Eventually, Wells Fargo bought the digital distribution to the film and it was on the Wells Fargo website. It was funded by impact, driven by impact and Wells Fargo came in to have a recognizable brand and that gave it a distribution boost.

On another project, the eight-part, original docu-series from Epix,America Divided aboutinequality in education, housing, healthcare, labor, criminal justice and the political system, Kellogg came in and supported it. Norman Lear executive produced the film and Marchese previously worked for a time with Lear.

One of things that we pride ourselves most on is the number of filmmakers whom we have worked with, said Cohen. When they return to us, its a validation of our work and its so easy because you already know each other. Our company is all about relationships whether it be with filmmakers, producers or studios.

One of those filmmakers who has come back more than once is documentarian Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) who worked with Picture Motion on his Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare and is working with them again on City of Ghosts, which documents Syrian rebel journalists who are risking their lives to make sure everyone knows about the atrocities committed by ISIS in their country.One of these men had his father and brother executed to get him to stop, but he will not back down, determined to lay pure evil bare to the world and to fight the ideology of ISIS to the death if need be.

One of the reasons that I worked with Picture Motion on both of these films is their understanding of the documentary landscape, and they understand in a way that a lot of people dont. Its so hard, as we all know, for people to get their films seen, to get people out of their homes and even to get the word out, said Heineman. They are able to tap into existing networks so that constituencies pertinent to the film are aware of the film and then are motivated to go. They use both traditional and non-traditional means to do so. They are constantly thinking and finding novel ways to mobilize audiences.

On City of Ghosts, they identified and found a number of non-profits that were interested in helping promote the film and engaged them to move the needle, he said.

Picture Motion has also worked on many Nat Geo projects, including Before the Flood, Gender Revolution, L.A. 92, Hell on Earth and the Earth Live series.

Over the past year, weve worked with Picture Motion on several issue driven films, including Leonardo DiCaprios climate change documentary Before the Flood, Katie Courics special Gender Revolution and Sebastian Jungers decent into Syrias unbridled chaos with the film Hell on Earth, said Chris Albert, EVP Global Communications at National Geographic. For us, its not always aboutdriving ratings,its aboutamplifying important conversations on subjects that truly matter, thoughas many platforms as possible. Through our collaboration with Picture Motion, weve organized over 750 grassroots screenings to date, built several strategic partnerships with brands that share our vision and developed impactful social campaigns that have helped to advance social change.

Picture Motion started working with National Geographic in 2015. They have been the most incredible partner. Weve organized over 1,000 college screenings for them across most of America. Each screening tour has a different goal, but its not just about raising awareness, it gives college students a discussion guide and give them very concrete ways to take action, said Cohen.

And the work is continuing, now with HBO on the documentaryAtomic Homefront abouta group of St. Louis moms who rose up to fight to keep their children safe after finding out that radioactive waste was dumped into their neighborhoods; Magnolias Whose Street? about the Ferguson uprising,and Blood Stripe about a female marine who returned her deployment and how to get back to civilian life. They are also continuing efforts onAn Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Heres the trailer:

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Social Impact Marketer Picture Motion: The Secret Weapon Behind Some Of The Best Known Films - Deadline