Published on the 20/10/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson

The company may be a little obscure to most: established in 2006, it offers SaaS solutions which automate and manage ‘inbound’ marketing.

What’s that, you say? For techie/CIO types, that’s a fair question. Inbound marketing refers to a collection of promotional activities, such as blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, physical products, social media marketing – collectively known as content marketing – to make customers come to you (hence inbound). It is positioned as an alternative to those most annoying of marketing tactics such as cold calling, advertising, spam and telemarketing, which while still effective, also potentially turn prospects off.

HubSpot’s tools allow marketers to execute, manage and measure those inbound activities, explained COO JD Sherman. Most of the company’s traction is in its home market of the USA, but, he said, even there penetration is ‘pretty small’.

“We target the midmarket; estimates of the potential client base in the US and English speaking markets is that there are around 3 to 4 million in the target zone, that’s organisations with a website and doing business online. At the moment we have around 16 000 customers, so we’re really only at between 1 or 2 percent penetration,” he said.

Typical of SaaS companies, Sherman confirmed that HubSpot is big on growth at present and less so on profitability. “We are expanding rapidly with US$175 million in revenue and growing in the 55 to 60 percent range. The company recently went public and we’re investing heavily; we’re not yet profitable, but we did hit a cashflow breakeven last quarter.”

Brand awareness for the vendor, which has just recently kicked off its APAC activities, isn’t anywhere in particular, conceded Ryan Bonnici, APAC marketing director. “It is very early days right now, but 15 percent of visitors to the HubSpot blog are from the APAC region. That’s a decent chunk and it represents a massive opportunity for growth in the region. But we have a long way to go on brand awareness.”

With a team of 25 located in Sydney focused predominantly on sales, the company will (unsurprisingly) use inbound marketing to attract prospects. Sherman said this approach is preferred by consumers today. “The world has changed in the way people consume content, how the buy receive products. It used to be that you could interrupt your target audience, show them an ad and they would watch it, but people don’t work that way any longer. Inbound marketing is less about your wallet size [to spend on traditional outbound marketing] and more about brain size and how you engage with prospects.”