SEO Werkt!

Consumers have bonded with their smartphones. Companies like AT&T and Google are reporting that users will give up house payments and car payments before they give up their smartphone. And surveys report that a growing number of users would give up their television before giving up their smartphone.

So before we look at the companies who are doing it right, and not so right… let’s look at the important shifts in the mobile experience.

Consumers (really really) love their smartphones

 

Should your company be building on mobile, first?

3 wins and a fail in the mobile space

Click to 1:05 to find out who’s doing a terrible job in the mobile space.

The 2 most important things companies can do in the mobile space

Tip two begins at 0:56.

Kenny Tomlin has led Rockfish from a one-man start-up in 2006 to become one of the most recognized and fastest growing digital innovation companies in the industry. As founder and CEO he actively participates in the management and growth of many client relationships and leads our emerging technologies and product development group, Rockfish Labs, which has launched numerous companies and proprietary technologies such as Silver Joe’s Coffee, TidyTweet.com, PlayNextLevel.com and CouponFactory.com. Rockfish has received numerous awards and recognition including Advertising Age’s Small Agency of the Year in 2009 and Agency A-List in 2010, OMMA’s Agency of the Year, and one of the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies for the past two years. Rockfish’s dramatic growth and award winning work attracted the attention of WPP who acquired Rockfish in August of 2011.

A serial entrepreneur, Kenny also founded I-Soft in 1997, a company that created digital training and commerce solutions. He built I-Soft into an award winning and rapidly growing firm in Dallas, TX before selling it in 1999. In addition to leading Rockfish, Kenny serves as a mentor and investor in numerous startups and is a frequent speaker on marketing, technology, and entrepreneurialism.

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When I started my first company (this was back in my early twenties), I came across the Inc. 500 list. I immediately had to go and figure out what it took to be on the list. The list carried great weight for me, because it was the most recognized national award for fast-growing companies. It was like the Fortune 500, but for private companies. I was thrilled when my first company (Pyramid Digital Solutions) made the list for the first time in 2000 (ranked #121). Then again in 2001 (#192). Then again in 2002 (#328). So, I’ve been obsessed with the list for a while.

So when my co-founder, Brian Halligan and I started HubSpot, I was once again hoping to make the list again someday. I was thrilled when I heard the news recently that HubSpot made the 2011 list at #33 overall (and #2 in the software category). There was much rejoicing in the halls of HubSpot!

To partly share my obsession with you, I thought you might enjoy some fun and fascinating facts about the Inc. 500. Unless otherwise stated, these numbers are for the 2011 list.

Rankings Based on Organic Search

The official Inc. 500 rankings are based on revenue growth. Here’s a re-ranking based on how many different keywords the company’s website is ranking for in the top 20 in Google. I used a new tool I’m working on called Search Grader for these results.  

1. ChaCha.com (#219)

2. BuddyTV (#368)

3. Pandora (#391)

4. Vitals.com (#122)

5. CarGurus.com (#96)

And, here’s the list re-ranked by the value of the organic keywords they’re ranking for (because some keywords are worth more than others).

1. OKCupid.com (#290)

2. LifeLock (#461)

3. Pandora (#391)

4. Carbonite (#180)

5. Hone Insurance (#61)

And finally, here’s the ranking based on how much money they’re spending to advertise with Google AdWords.

1. LifeLock (#461)

2. CarGurus (#96)

3. oDesk (#441)

4. Pandora (#391)

5. Carbonite (#180)

Other Fun, Tweetable Facts About The Inc. 500

1) The Inc. 500 list started in 1981, 30 years ago [tweet]

2) Aggregate revenue of the Inc. 500: $10.5 billion [tweet]

3) 73% of the Inc. 500 use Twitter [tweet]

4) Only 9% of the #inc500 don’t use social media [tweet]

5) Washington DC has the most #inc500 companies – 50 [tweet]

6) 21% of the #inc500 were born outside the U.S. [tweet]

7) Median revenue of the #inc500 companies was $10.7 million [tweet]

8) Median number of employees for the #inc500 was 51 [tweet]

9) 45% of the #inc500 eat breakfast every day [tweet]

10) 87% of the #inc500 drive to work [tweet]

11) 15% of the #inc500 plan to take their company public [tweet]

12) Only 11% of the #inc500 CEOs are women. Need more women entrepreneurs! [tweet]

13) 44% of the #inc500 do business oversears [tweet]

14) 40% of the #inc500 CEOs had an entrepreneurial parent [tweet]

15) Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, Paychex, eTrade and Intuit have all been on the #inc500 [tweet]

16) 21% of the #inc500 CEOs were born outside the U.S. [tweet]

17) Average wake-up time of an #inc500 CEO: 6:15 a.m. [tweet]

18) Average bed-time of an #inc500 CEP: 10:30 pm [tweet]

19) Fastest growth since their debut on the #inc500: Zappos [tweet]

20) 70% of #inc500 CEOs would choose flight as their super-power. 30% invisibility. [tweet]

Want to learn how to make the Inc. 500 list yourself? Join us for our upcoming webinar, “Insider Secrets on How To Make The Inc. 500 List.”

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This morning, we announced that HubSpot made it onto the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies List. Because data and analytics are in our blood, we thought it would be interesting to see what would happen when we analyzed the companies on the Inc. 500 list with HubSpot’s Website Grader.

We came up with some interesting results. Overall, the main takeaway from the data is that the companies on the list score better than companies in general.

Here are some specific data points:

• 160 of the 500 companies (32%) scored in the top 10% of all websites. They earned a Website Grade over 90.
• The top 50 on the list averaged a grade of 67.
• The top 100 averaged a grade of 70.
• Overall the average of companies on the list is 70, which means that, on average, this year’s Inc. 500 companies score better than 70% of all websites scored by Website Grader.

What’s even more interesting is that HubSpot customers who made the list — AppAssure Software, ymarketing, ServiceNow, UnitedLex, Neutron Interactive, SevOne, Nova Datacom, TicketLeap, and Source Consulting — received an average score of 91.

(Note: The websites for highlighted companies did not return a report in Website Grader.)

Marketing Takeaway

Successful companies today are realizing the importance of having an effective web presence that takes advantage of inbound marketing strategies such as SEO, blogging and content creation, social media, landing pages, etc. From our analysis of the data we’ve gathered from Website Grader, it’s obvious that the companies on the Inc. 500 list understand the importance of inbound marketing as well.

As a marketer, you need to be leveraging inbound marketing, too. How does your company fare? Grade your website today to find out!

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Today we’re super excited to announce that HubSpot has been named the second fastest growing software company on the Inc. 500 list and the 33^rd fastest growing company overall. We especially want to thank our 5,000+ customers – this award is actually for you. We just make the software, but you all bring it to life and are responsible for all the awesome results. If you want to read more about the announcement, click on over to the HubSpot Inc. 500 press release.

The purpose of this article is to share with all the marketing professionals and business executives who read this blog what we think are some of the keys to building a hyper-growth company that has potential to make it onto the Inc. 500 list.

#1 – Find a Huge Market Where a Big Disruption Is Happening

Of course you want to find a market where there are billions of dollars (or Euros, etc.) spent every year. However, just a big market isn’t enough; you need a market that is going through or will go through a big disruption. Without this disruption, the established players will have too much of an advantage. Some examples of companies who have successfully leveraged disruption include Apple’s capitalization on disruption in the market for music (originally driven by the creation of digital music formats and services like Napster) or Amazon’s ability to take advantage of the disruption in retail or commerce (made possible by the rise of the world wide web). For HubSpot, billions of dollars are spent on marketing every year, so the market we chose qualifies as big. But there is also a huge disruption happening that is driven by search engines, social media, the DVR, YouTube, mobile devices and more – all of which put the customer back in charge of the sales and marketing relationship. This disruption has given rise to an opportunity for all the companies that sell tools and services for inbound marketing, like HubSpot.

#2 - Create a Blue Ocean by Entering That Market With a Unique Solution

The third article ever published on this blog was about Blue Ocean Strategy (published in September 2006, it is one of the top 20 most popular posts of all time and has generated over 800 inbound links). Read that article to learn more, but the basic concept is that you want to have a different product or service offering than everyone else so you don’t compete directly with other companies in the market. A classic example is how Southwest Airlines entered the market with much lower prices but also far fewer frills and only served secondary airports. The company’s differentiation may not better in every possible way, but it is different in a couple of important ways that appeal to an important set of customers. For HubSpot, there are lots of companies that offer tools for components of inbound marketing (for instance, a blogging tool, a social media marketing tool, an analytics tool, and email marketing tool), but we built a complete inbound marketing software platform that brings everything together into an all-in-one system.

#3 - Build a Scalable Marketing Machine

If you start by growing your company using outbound marketing to purchase leads, perhaps you pay $50 per lead. When you are buying 100 or 1,000 leads per month, that isn’t so bad. But if you need to generate 40,000+ leads per month like HubSpot does today, you’d be spending in excess of $2 million per month on marketing. Ouch! For hyper growth, you need to build a marketing program that allows you to attract more and more potential customers at lower costs. Inbound marketing is critical for that – breaking the cycle of paying for each and every lead and building marketing as an asset that generates new leads at zero marginal cost. We’ve done that at HubSpot, and are spending far, far less than $2 million per month on our marketing while still generating well over 40,000 new leads per month to feed our growth.

#4 - Assemble a Great Team

It may be cliché to say, but the team does matter. Since I joined HubSpot in early 2007 (when the team was 5 people) through to today (we’re almost 300 now), I have always been impressed by the people. They are the smartest and most driven group of people I have ever worked with. We try to have a very thorough interview process; people usually sit through 6-8 interviews before they get hired, and I think we ask some really tough questions during that process. We also have created an atmosphere that attracts a lot of candidates to us, making it easier to find top-notch people.

#5 - Have a Purpose or Mission

Just “trying to build a big company” or “making a lot of profit” is not actually something that most people can get excited about. The reason why folks work on the weekend to build a new feature for our software or stay late at night to help a customer with a problem is not because the company will make more money. The passion behind the team that helps drive the success of the company is around our mission. HubSpot wants to help millions of businesses grow by enabling them to transform their marketing. This is a purpose or mission much nobler than just making money – and while we hope to make some money along the way, what drives us each and every day is seeing thousands of customers using our software and getting great results.

Want more details? Did this article make you interested in a deeper dive into this topic? I will be hosting a free webinar about Insider Secrets on How to Make the Inc. 500 List in a couple weeks. Sign up for that, and I will dive deeper into the topic and take live Q&A from those in attendance. And please let me know what other tips I might be missing in terms of building a hyper-growth company in the comments below.

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