Traffic, down...but revenue, up?!
The latest viral moment, and the brand's clapback
👋 Hi, it’s Kaylee Edmondson and welcome to Looped In, my newsletter exploring demand gen and growth frameworks in B2B SaaS. Subscribe to join 1k+ readers who get Looped In delivered to their inbox every Sunday .
As marketers, we all dream of the day we wake up and our brand has gone viral.
We also typically dream that viral moment is positive for the brand. But, if you’ve been on LinkedIn this week, you’ve likely seen that HubSpot blew up and quite literally was everywhere in my feed. Just not for the gorilla marketing execution we’d typically expect.
Instead they’d somehow taken over the feeds because of claims that they’ve lost 80%+ of their organic blog traffic.
This screenshot above seemingly shows HubSpot losing blog traffic (in the US) to brands like Canva, Microsoft, Adobe, Reddit, etc.
And hundreds of SEOs and marketers in general showed up in the feeds expressing their opinions, hot takes, disgruntled comments, you name it, all over LinkedIn – and it’s just kept coming. We’re 6 days in at this point (as I’m writing this) and there are still new posts coming. It’s honestly wild to see.
The root is this though: do we actually care that their organic blog traffic to their US domain is down, but their revenue is…up? 🤔
It feels like on the chase for a good hook, or a viral moment on Linkedin, we’ve just accidentally become our worst nightmare for a minute by assuming that traffic equals revenue.
Taking a step back and making sure I don’t lose the plot. What’s more interesting to me than everyone trying to come up with a new hook for their LinkedIn posts, is how Kipp and Kieran (CMO and VP of Marketing at HubSpot) clapback to all this attention in the feed by going back 5 years and sharing out internal strategy docs about why we might be seeing some of these shifts.
Way back in May of 2021, these are the beliefs Kipp shared with the HubSpot marketing team. These were beliefs they had about how the market was shifting.(I’ll write them out for accessibility as well.)
A SaaS Business has to have a large scale media operation across all content types and channels to drive cost effective influence and demand.
A SaaS Business has to have deep education that includes certifications and accreditations AND a network to connect the community that provides liquidity for those who are certified.
Owned media is a better channel for brand advertising than rented media.
Reducing friction with automation at every part of the marketing experience is critical for customer happiness AND HubSpot’s growth.
Understanding your unfair advantage in a marketing strategy is how you unlock exponential growth.
The message AND how it is delivered must be remarkable.
So check this out. Here’s how they actually showed up and made bets against these beliefs.
When it comes to large scale media across all content types:
↳ They acquired The Hustle in February 2021 to validate this point. And prior to what people might recall, The Hustle was more than just a newsletter. They actually purchased 3 core assets (newsletter, podcast, and a community called Trends).
When it comes to deep education (think certs + accreditations):
↳ They built HubSpot Academy.
Owned media is better than rented media:
↳ They built the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Reducing friction was really just a call to arms to focus on better CRO and UX.
Understanding their unfair advantage was a bet for them to lean into being some of the most creative content creators (because they knew this is where they outshined the competition).
And lastly Kipp held a belief around the fact that messaging as well as how it’s packaged and delivered was starting to matter more than it had previously.
The punch here is that HubSpot saw the era prior to 2021 as the informational era, but then quickly made a bet that the way brands need to be ever-present in buyer’s minds was shifting and they knew their strengths (SEO) and knew where they needed to invest to get ahead of this curve (the ‘influence’ era).
There’s no doubt the market for search has changed. I have to admit, HubSpot was ahead of the game on recognizing this. There’s no way I would’ve been able to predict the level of impact Search Everywhere would have on 2025 marketing strategies. But the point is this. The total addressable market that any company has in terms of search traffic how now shrunk. People are consuming information in so many different ways – and yes, outside of Google Search directly. So we, as marketers, have to be smart, have a unique point of view, unique data set, etc. in order to be successful in this game.
The Net From All The Noise
Kipp and Kieran went deep on this topic in their latest MATG episode. I would definitely recommend checking it out if any of this is at all interesting to you. And to get us all amped up for the week ahead, be thinking about this. What bets are you taking on your brand based on what your seeing with macro market trends? What are your core advantages to win in this environment? And how do those things layer onto the tables you’re placing bets on for your marketing programming this year, next year, 5 years from now? This is how we should all be thinking. This current era of SaaS, growth, whatever is applicable to you, will move 100x faster than anything we’ve seen before thanks to AI and LLMs.
Until next time,
Kaylee