HUBSPOT’S BIG NCAA PLAY

Social listening has been a tool in the toolboxes of many great social media leaders. Over the last three years we’ve been inundated with brands who listen & engage with consumers in showstopping ways. The OG being OceanSpray and more recently The North Face & Stanley. But that’s been a trick of the trade for B2C brands. And with B2B social media heating up, it was only a matter of time until someone tried it.

Enter Hubspot. 

That’s right, a B2B brand that has been on a mission to revamp their social media presence in a more B2C fashion. Talking to their customers like they are one of them. A casual, cool tone. Not a boring, dry one. Earlier this year they hired  Bryna Corcoran (Director, Head of Global Brand Social Media) who previously ran social for B2C juggernauts like Lyft, Dolby and HP. To say we were expecting big things would be an understatement 

Hubspot’s social team’s ear perked up when Alex Lieberman, co-founder of Morning Brew and B2B Influencer, put out the following call on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Why would Hubspot be interested in funding Alex’s trip?

Audience Fit & Stunt Marketing. As a B2B Influencer , Alex has over 400k followers across Linkedin & ‘X’. Mostly business-minded individuals, speaking right to Hubspot’s audience. Morning Brew has over 4M subs to it’s weekly newsletter. Second, stunts like this have the potential to go viral (cc” North Face, Stanley Cup and Ocean Spray). 

And they weren’t the only business interested. Alex had several execs at large companies sliding into his DM’s wanting in on the action. But Hubspot won out and the announcement on social made for the most engaged content of the campaign. People were clearly watching this play out.

And then the story really began to take shape. Over the course of the next week, Alex shared the run up of creating the story, the drama of last minute issues in getting it all together and ultimately sharing the gamification strategy for audiences to play in real time during the game. The objective was to find Alex & his crew anywhere around the stadium or on TV, snap a picture and share to social with #hubspotted to win a cash prize. Not only did he manage to involve his existing and new followers, their mere presence evoked the curiosity and interest of the crowd, not to mention 3-seconds of completely organic air-time on ESPN. And we even heard it was temporarily trending on X.