We were very lucky in February to welcome Eric Swain of Equinet Media for an in-depth discussion of Hubspot, the inbound marketing platform.

Hubspot was founded in 2006 in Boston, Mass. and has since gone public. They have around 20,000 customers in 100+ countries, making them an important player in web content and marketing.

Hubspot isn’t primarily a content management system, although it does include one (although they call it a “content optimisation system”). Instead, it’s a series of tools for tracking and identifying potential leads – so, for example, someone who visits your site from a link in an email can be tracked across all their interactions with you as they move from suspect through prospect to customer. As the user visits the site, they’re asked to fill in forms to get hold of more content (white papers and so on).

This tracking allows Hubspot to create a progressive profile of your customers and to present them the content they want to see.

This is the main difference between Hubspot and WordPress is that WordPress is a blogging platform which has evolved into more, while Hubspot is a CRM system which has evolved in to more.

For more details take a look at the Hubspot site, the Equinet Media site, or download Eric’s presentation.