Yes, we can.

After my parttime student job at a large beer brewery, I started an internship at a B2B company selling plastic pipes, were I was responsible for the online part of their digital transformation. One of the challenges that I faced, was the content presentation on the website. We had four different types of customers. Customers which were all very different from each other and that varied from Joe the plumber to the boardroom members of larger building companies. Using the company website as a marketing tool hereby became quite hard, since I could not present marketing content on the homepage that was relevant for all of these different customers. At the time, I was not aware of a simple and relatively cheap solution for this problem, but last week I was confronted with a company that created a tool which could solve just that.

This company was Hubspot. World’s largest inbound marketing and sales platform (Hubspot.com, 2015) and provider of a marketing automation tool which gives answer to the what, when, and how question. Like I said, people have different needs in what sort of content they want. Presenting the same content hereby could decrease the effectiveness of the marketing activities on a company website, but still a lot of (mostly small and medium size) companies do not offer different content for different customers. Visitors could also be in very different stages in the sales funnel. If a potential customer is orienting what sort of product to buy, this customer does not want to be bothered by very specific product advertisements. The format how people want their content could also vary among consumers. Some people want to know every detail, while others are primarily interested in the bullet points of content and hereby the optimal format in which the same sort of content should be presented could differ among customer as well.

But what does the Hubspot tool deliver that overcomes these problems? How could the Hubspot tool provide even smaller companies with the almost the same a level of website personalized website adaptability that was formerly only achievable by the bol.com’s of this world? The Hubspot tool gives companies the ability to bundle of all of there online activities togethers and by letting these companies build a database that watches and listens to all of what your online customers are doing (Halligan, 2012). This database data could then be used to personalize company websites for different their customer groups. Customer groups which exist of consumers with the same sort of online behavior.

If I would have implemented this during my former job, I would not have had the content trade-off’s,  because I did not have to present all customer groups with the same content. Instead, I would have made four different content variants, belonging to the four different groups of customers. Joe could hereby enjoy his Brazilian product babes, while mister CEO would be presented with high level CSR stories and case studies.

Click here to read the former post of this author: “Marketingfacts, watch out, the students are coming”

• Halligan, B. (2012). HubSpot — Inbound Marketing Meets Marketing Automation.
• Hubspot.com, (2015). HubSpot | Inbound Marketing & Sales Software. [online] Available at: http://hubspot.com [Accessed 3 May 2015].