The key to good B2B marketing is knowing your audience and how you drive value for them. Sticking to content that matters for prospects ensures that you aren’t just attracting eyeballs – but creating a good educational experience for people searching for solutions to their problems.
In the age of ChatGPT and AI content generation, it is easy to lose focus on this fundamental point and aim solely for SEO gains. This leads to marketers doing unnatural things to capture attention from markets they don’t serve. Be warned that you do this at your peril, as prospects quickly discover when we waste their time posting inaccurate or deceptive content.
One company that always held to this maxim is HubSpot. In the early days of content marketing, I was always a fan of HubSpot’s content strategy. They set the bar high regarding the content they generate to help marketers (especially B2B marketers) better interact with and engage with prospects. I have also been a customer of HubSpot’s, regularly working within the platform. As an ex-customer, I can attest that HubSpot is a good marketing automation solution for small businesses but is not a competitor in the Customer Communications Management (CCM) market as defined by leading analysts, where Quadient has been the leading provider for over 2 decades. Here is the formal definition of CCM to Gartner, and Forrester.
Customer communications management (CCM) is defined as the strategy to improve the creation, delivery, storage and retrieval of outbound communications, including those for marketing, new product introductions, renewal notifications, claims correspondence and documentation, and bill and payment notifications. These interactions can happen through a widespread range of media and output, including documents, email, Short Message Service (SMS) and Web pages. CCM solutions support these objectives, providing companies with an application to improve outbound communications with their distributors, partners, regulatory bodies and customers.
And Forrester defines CCM as follows:
Software used to compose, format, personalize, and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience. CCM software supports content types such as letterhead, invoices, correspondence, marketing materials, policies, statements, and welcome kits.
So imagine my surprise when I recently saw HubSpot climb to the #1 SEO position for “What is Customer Communications Management?”.
Curious, I clicked through the link, and my heart sank. To gain an SEO ranking for the long-tail keyword “What is Customer Communications Management?”, HubSpot had featured a Quadient explainer video that my team produced titled “What is CCM?”. Worse, someone had mysteriously copied this video and uploaded it to an anonymous “Quadient” YouTube account that is not affiliated with our company.
Kipp Bodnar and Clint Fontanella – are you appropriating our content? And if so, to what end? We had the video and the fake “Quadient” account removed by YouTube due to infringement of Quadient's trademark.
Leading analysts do not recognize HubSpot as a CCM solution
HubSpot is widely known as a marketing automation platform primarily focusing on inbound marketing. Its features include content management, SEO, social media, email marketing, lead generation, analytics, CRM, and more. But analysts do not qualify HubSpot as a CCM system, and here is why:
- Focus on customer lifecycle: CCM encompasses a broader spectrum of communication, including inbound and outbound communications. CCM is not limited to marketing and addresses the entire customer lifecycle, not only inbound marketing. CCM is an operational mechanism for servicing, onboarding, offboarding, and orchestrating document workflows.
- Document management and assembly: Features such as advanced document composition, archiving, and multi-channel distribution of transactional documents (e.g. bills, statements) are integral for every CCM deployment. Documents are delivered across multiple physical and digital channels.
- Customization and personalization: CCM solutions allow for high-level customization of communications based on customer data and preferences. In real CCM solutions, customizations are done in real-time while considering dozens, hundreds or even thousands of variables from many different sources.
- Regulatory compliance and security: CCM solutions often have advanced features for compliance with various regulations that govern customer communications. This is particularly important in industries like finance, insurance, government, and healthcare.
- Integration with legacy systems: CCM solutions usually provide more comprehensive integration options with legacy systems. This is crucial for companies relying on both new and existing technologies for customer communications.
Comparing HubSpot to a Customer Communication Management solution is like comparing a calculator to a supercomputer – CCM solutions require the ability to scale to manage the variable content inputs that power the world’s most complex communications – invoices, statements, welcome kits, etc. – while considering regulations and compliance.
The key is in the word “Customer” – CCM is designed to manage customer communications, that include data from accounting systems, ERPs, CRMs, and more – to create personalized communications at scale. This is why the world’s top insurance, banks, healthcare, and utility companies choose Quadient to orchestrate the omnichannel delivery of these documents at scale.
In fact, NONE of the companies mentioned in the blog post have been recognized by Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Aspire, G2, and others as a CCM provider:
• TrueDialog – a business SMS Texting Solution
• Kommo – a leading platform for selling with messengers
• USU – faster service without tickets
• MessengerPeople - professional messenger customer service
Ask yourself the following: Can these solutions help you build an onboarding application for a bank that replaces hundreds of individual forms and automates a process that takes weeks to complete down to mere hours – managing approvals and signoff along the way?
Do these solutions manage ALL physical and digital channels with one omnichannel design preview – allowing you to design once and deliver across all channels?
This is the power of true CCM – empowering your entire organization to deliver ALL of your customers’ communications needs through one integrated platform.
For an ACCURATE list of CCM providers and the benefits that CCM can bring to your business – we invite you to review the Spark Matrix for CCM and Aspire Leaderboard for CCM.
New to CCM? Get started with our CCM 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Customer Communication Management Technology.
To learn about all aspects of customer communication management, please check out Quadient's official CCM knowledge hub.
