Hubspot spells out Linkedin, Youtube audience strategy
Linkedin’s recent video focus is offering content creators one of the few easy wins left in earned media, according to Hubspot’s content boss.
Speaking with Mumbrella in Sydney, VP of Hubspot Media Jonathan Hunt also outlined an AI workflow where text newsletters are converted into scripts, and then into generated video to be distributed on Linkedin and Youtube shorts.
Hunt’s sizeable team – around 60 staff plus freelance contributors – creates content that reaches tens of millions of people every month across many different formats. That attention is then used to sell Hubspot’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.
Jonathan Hunt (Mumbrella)
“[My team is] a media company within a B2B company, and the only difference between this model and traditional B2C media models is that the advertiser is Hubspot,” he said. “The monetisation is that we try to sell software. That’s not the goal of the content.”
In chasing audience engagement, Hunt is sensitive to the changing fortunes of content on different platforms. At the moment, his focus is video on Linkedin and Youtube, and he is beginning to explore Reddit. Newsletters are also naturally important for Hubspot.
Hunt identified Linkedin as one of the best places to get a start with video.
“LinkedIn’s an interesting one. I think for a long time it was seen as a place where people would post really cringey inspirational posts. And with the advent of video, I think they’ve done a good job at rebranding themselves. And you’re seeing a lot of B2B creators start to take the platform seriously.”
“Right now what we’re seeing is this artificial boosting of video within the platform to the point where if you’ve got some good short form video, you can get millions of video views in a given month, even if your page is a small page,” he said.
With the video push, Hunt says that creators are beginning to warm to Linkedin and the platform “ is working more directly with them”.
Youtube remains Hubspot Media’s main video platform, with 50-60 long form videos a month across 12 channels, targeting entrepreneurs, marketers and “ any audience that maps back to a core product of Hubspot”. Hunt’s team has activated advertising across Youtube not because of the direct money-making potential but as a signal to the algorithm.
My First Million is one of Hubspot Media’s Youtube channels
“ If you go to Youtube, for example, you’ll see Adsense running, and that’s purely an audience development play because running ads in the beginning of the video signals to Google and Youtube to prioritize that video because they make money off of it,” he said. “And we’re making money off of that. Is it a substantial amount of money? Not really. It’s just supplemental revenue.”
Short form video, with its big engagement but low brand awareness, acts as marketing for long form channel subscriptions. In an average month, Hubspot’s channels will garner 30 million video views, 3-4 million of which is long form and the balance short form.
“16 by 9 [16:9 landscape format video] is definitely coming back. The recommended TRT, the total runtime, continues to get longer and longer so they can serve more Adsense ads,” he said. “Right now the sweet spot [for long form] is somewhere between 8 and 20 minutes.”
Starting from nothing
Mumbrella asked Hunt what he would do if faced with the challenge of starting from scratch, with no audience.
“ There’s two things that I would do. One is I would find who’s the best, most trustworthy under-the-radar creator in the space that I’m going after, and partner with them tomorrow.”
“I want to use them as a marketing vehicle to get exposure to the content that I’m creating for my channel, and hopefully use that as a way to siphon some of their audience over to my channel.”
“I would invest in short form too. We know that short form is being prioritized. While it’s not necessarily as monetizable as long form, and in some cases not monetizable at all, it’s driving subscribership for my channel, so when I do start posting long form videos, I’m not starting from zero.”
“Those are the two tactics I would use starting out.”
Newsletter-video-newsletter flywheel
Hunt’s slide on the AI workflow (click to expand)
Hunt outlined a technique for growing newsletter subscriptions from AI-generated video.
”If you have a blog or if you have a newsletter and you want to turn that into video, the motion is take the newsletter, plug it into [Anthropic’s] Claude, prompt Claude to give you a video-ready short form script based on a certain time length.
“[Claude will] give you something that I would say is 80% there. You might wanna punch it up, edit a little bit. You plug that into [AI video generator] Heygen, you can use an out of the box avatar or you can take your photo or a video you film with Heygen, and then use that to create a lot of good A-roll – the primary video footage.
“Where a lot of these AI video products are lacking right now is with the B-roll – the behind the scenes content, the supporting content. So that does require a bit of human intervention … but end-to-end, that’s a four-hour process to create a 90-second video that can be pushed to Linkedin at a time when Linkedin is prioritising video.”
The Reddit opportunity
Hunt said his team was “kicking the tires on” Reddit in terms of a content platform and that it represented a big opportunity.
”There was a time and place where there was a way to ‘hack Reddit’: you would do an AMA with a known quantity and you would link off to a thing you wanted to promote, and that would be a huge fire hose of traffic for a day. And you could rinse and repeat that.
“You can’t really do that as much as you once could, but I think once Reddit started doing deals with the LLMs, a light bulb went off in a lot of marketers’ heads where they’re like, ‘oh, we gotta take this a lot more seriously now’.”
Hunt was in Sydney for Hubspot’s Grow conference, where he presented “Why Marketing Today is Broken and How to Fix It”. Have a listen to this week’s Mumbrellacast to hear more from him.
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topics
content marketing
Gen AI
Hubspot
Jonathan Hunt
LinkedIn
Mindstream
My First Million
Newsletters
Reddit
The Hustle
YouTube
So the strategy is basically taking text and converting it into video AI slop for platforms. That’s no different to the ‘cringey inspirational posts’ mentioned in the talk
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