March 19thHubSpot Develops Business Blogging Platform
Christopher Kenton
If you’ve ever tried tuning a blog for business, you know how hard it can be to accomplish some of the basic requirements businesses take for granted. Blogging platforms are primarily focused on content delivery, and not on building, cultivating and understanding customers. If you want to customize your blog to match your branding, you have to get down and dirty with template coding. If you want to monitor your performance, you’re limited to traffic and subscription stats with a package like FeedBurner, or you have to aggregate a number of seperate point solution tools.
[tag]HubSpot[/tag] is developing a platform designed to make the management and tracking of business blogging a lot easier. The platform promises to bring together simple blog management for non-technical users with a suite of built-in business tools, including “automatic” Search Engine optimization, surveys and questionnaires for customer research, integrated Web analytics, and basic CRM tracking to follow customers through engagement on the site.
The HubSpot product is currently in beta, and appears to be privately funded by its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met at MIT’s Sloan Fellows Program, and who share extensive backgrounds in enterprise software and technology.
I’ve signed up for the beta to get a closer look at the platform, and if it lives up to its billing, I would strongly consider it for my agency, MotiveLab. I’m currently running a heavily customized version of WordPress, which honestly does all of the site management functions HubSpot offers, but at the cost of a lot of hard work and coding. But the real attraction is the integrated customer engagement tools and analytics, which still feel like a big blindspot on most blogging platforms. If Hubspot is truly built for business, then it will be a great step forward.
If you’ve ever tried tuning a blog for business, you know how hard it can be to accomplish some of the basic requirements businesses take for granted. Blogging platforms are primarily focused on content delivery, and not on building, cultivating and understanding customers. If you want to customize your blog to match your branding, you have to get down and dirty with template coding. If you want to monitor your performance, you’re limited to traffic and subscription stats with a package like FeedBurner, or you have to aggregate a number of seperate point solution tools.
[tag]HubSpot[/tag] is developing a platform designed to make the management and tracking of business blogging a lot easier. The platform promises to bring together simple blog management for non-technical users with a suite of built-in business tools, including “automatic” Search Engine optimization, surveys and questionnaires for customer research, integrated Web analytics, and basic CRM tracking to follow customers through engagement on the site.
The HubSpot product is currently in beta, and appears to be privately funded by its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met at MIT’s Sloan Fellows Program, and who share extensive backgrounds in enterprise software and technology.
I’ve signed up for the beta to get a closer look at the platform, and if it lives up to its billing, I would strongly consider it for my agency, MotiveLab. I’m currently running a heavily customized version of WordPress, which honestly does all of the site management functions HubSpot offers, but at the cost of a lot of hard work and coding. But the real attraction is the integrated customer engagement tools and analytics, which still feel like a big blindspot on most blogging platforms. If Hubspot is truly built for business, then it will be a great step forward.