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When it comes to work events, trade shows, or promotional campaigns, they can really be hit or miss. It’s not solely the product that motivates people to come back to a brand, but rather the way they experience it. This is where experiential marketing comes in.

While a surprising number of people haven’t heard of the concept, it’s kind of a big deal — 77% of marketers use experiential marketing as a vital part of a brand’s advertising strategy.

In this post, we’ll be taking a deep dive into what experiential marketing is and share 14 of the coolest campaigns that break down how this strategy effectively works. By examining these campaigns, you’ll be able to apply the lessons learned to your own business to get the most out of your advertising efforts.

Experiential marketing (also known as xm marketing, engagement marketing, event marketing, on the ground marketing, live marketing, or participation marketing), might sound a bit like event marketing, which makes sense — experiential campaigns do tend to be event-centric. But there are also times when they have nothing to do with a specific event, as you’ll see from the examples we picked.

When an engagement marketing campaign is event-centric, it’s dedicated less to the type of event — like a concert, festival, conference, etc. — and more to interactions between the brand and the customer. (If you already have an event in the works, check out this guide to adding experiential elements to it.)

What do experiential marketers do?

An experiential marketer is in charge of creating and executing on the strategy for a client’s live, interactive marketing campaigns or in-person events.

An experiential marketer’s role is similar to a brand ambassador, event planner, or brand manager, and typically involves the following duties: 

Brainstorm innovative experiential marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness, interact with the public, and create positive brand perception 
Perform market research to understand what types of experiential marketing campaigns would perform best with a specific audience 
Create events or live, interactive campaigns to help businesses effectively connect with its target audiences
Lead events and take charge of logistics as it relates to event management 
Track, analyze, and report on all experiential marketing campaign performance
Work with cross-functional teams including brand, creative, digital, social, and public relations
Travel to events as necessary to ensure vendor compliance and execution, sales support, and overall event success

Why Experiential Marketing Matters Today

According to Forbes, experiential marketing can bolster a lasting connection between customers and a brand. It can also allow you to collect vital data about participating consumers, which can then help you improve your strategy. 

These campaigns can take an integrated approach. The primary purpose is to experience a brand in a tangible, offline way, but you’ll still want an online dialogue around it.

When you consider that 87% of video marketers say video gives them a good return on their investment — and that people are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content — it makes sense to incorporate a digital element. A branded hashtag, for example, can get people talking about the experience.

1. Warner Bros Pictures: Barbie Movie Selfie Generator

The highly anticipated film, Barbie, has been creatively marketed to fans of all ages and backgrounds — through unique trailers and immersive generative AI that let you become your own Barbie doll cover.

By visiting the website BarbieSelfie.ai, users were greeted with the message, “Welcome to Barbie Land, where you can be Barbie (or Ken). Click below to become an instant icon! #BarbieTheMovie”.

Greta Gerwig’s interpretation of Barbie supposedly leans into all the diverse and rare releases of Mattel toys, and their marketing team built on that idea by making an AI tool that allows users to identify as professionals in different fields, personalities, and color stories.

This marketing campaign is a good example of an experiential marketing campaign as it makes moviegoers feel good to see themselves represented in the coming Barbie movie and makes them feel as though they’re a part of the Barbie fantasy experience that kids (and now adults) feel when they play with Barbie products.

It also serves as movie promotion between friends, family, and followers as those who post the photos spread the movie release date as every image has its premiere date, July 21st, 2023, on every image generated.

Takeaways for Marketers

Lean into new tech like generative AI for your next marketing campaign. Its newness and image-creation capabilities make it an engaging tool that gets attention.
Inclusion is key. The marketing team behind the Barbie movie could have strictly marketed the film to young women, but instead, it’s done an amazing job of capturing the attention of all ages and identities — building some remarkable hype for this Summer.

2. Red Bull: Stratos

Red Bull has been at the forefront of extreme sports coverage for almost as long as the brand has existed. But the company brought its content marketing to new heights — a world-record height, actually.

Affectionately named Stratos, Red Bull’s superterrestrial marketing campaign featured Felix Baumgartner, a skydiver from Austria who partnered with Red Bull to set the world record for highest skydive.

That record: 128,000 feet, about 24 miles above Earth’s surface. Gulp.

To pull off this amazing stunt, Red Bull housed Felix in a small communication capsule and sent him up to the stratosphere using a large helium-filled balloon. And what’s truly remarkable is that his ascent and preparation to jump, alone, allowed him to break another record before landing safely back on Earth (spoiler alert): Red Bull streamed the entire event online, and saw the highest viewing traffic of any live stream ever broadcast on YouTube — at just over 8 million viewers.

Want to see that experience again? Check out Red Bull’s recap video below. I won’t lie, I indulged in a rewatching as I wrote this article.

Takeaways for Marketers

Don’t underestimate the power of suspense when hosting an event your audience can own a piece of themselves. Being able to witness something new, and maybe a little scary, is such a personal experience. And the better the result, the longer your audience will remember and reminisce over it.
Oh, and if you can put your brand in the record books while you’re at it, that’s pretty cool too.

3. Refinery29: 29Rooms

For about three years now, lifestyle brand Refinery29 has hosted the 29Rooms event: What it calls “an interactive funhouse of style, culture, & technology.” As the name suggests, it consists of 29 individually branded and curated rooms — and attendees can experience something different in each one. The rooms are designed and created with brand partners, who range from personalities like artists and musicians, to consumer-facing companies like Dunkin’ Donuts, Dyson, and Cadillac.

Each year, 29Rooms has a different theme, with this year’s being “Turn It Into Art.” Attendees, it seems, are encouraged to enter each room and use the surroundings to create something — one room, for instance, invites participants to put on punching gloves and hit punching bags that each produce a different sound when contacted to create a symphony of sorts. A truly hands-on experience, indeed.

Takeaways for Marketers

Go nuts, but keep it on-brand. An experience should be memorable, but relevant to the people attending.
Partner with creators like artists and musicians to create experiences, especially if they are recognizable within the region where you’re trying to build or augment an audience.

4. Lean Cuisine: #WeighThis

It’s disconcerting how many commercials today tell women to change something about themselves. Sitting on the couch and watching TV for just two minutes, I had already lost count of the number of times that message came up.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to see brands like Lean Cuisine, whose marketing used to center solely on weight loss, stray from diet-centric messaging. And its #WeighThis campaign is a great example of just that.

As part of the campaign, Lean Cuisine curated a gallery of “scales” in New York’s Grand Central Station, and invited women to “weigh in.” But here’s the catch: The scales were actually small boards where women could write down how they really wanted to be weighed. And rather than focusing on their weight in pounds — or anything pertaining to body image — the women opted to be measured by things like being back in college at 55, caring for 200 homeless children each day, or being the sole provider to four sons.

What’s particularly cool about this experience is that none of the participants actually interact with a Lean Cuisine product. No one was interrupted, asked to sample something, or stopped to answer questions. In fact, no one was really asked to do anything — the display itself was enough to make people stop, observe, and then voluntarily interact.

Lean Cuisine figured out what message it wanted to send: “Sure, we make stuff that fits into a healthy lifestyle. But don’t forget about your accomplishments. That matters more than the number on the scale.” But instead of blatantly advertising that, it created an interactive experience around the message.

Still, the experience was clearly branded, to make sure people associated it with Lean Cuisine. The company’s Twitter handle and a branded hashtag were featured on the display in large text, which made it easy for people to share the experience on social media. And that definitely paid off — the entire #WeighThis campaign led to a 33% increase in positive brand perception, and earned a 6.5 million reach just during week one.

Takeaways for Marketers

Don’t interrupt — especially if you’re trying to grab someone’s attention in New York City, like Lean Cuisine was. If you create an experience that provides value to the people who pass by it, they’re more likely to participate.
Figure out the message you really want to your brand to send — that may or may not be directly tied to an actual product, and it might be something that your brand hasn’t said before. Then, build an experience around it.

5. M&M: Flavor Rooms

If you’ve ever had a peanut M&M versus regular M&M debate, you know people can get passionate about candy. So, when M&M needed to choose its next flavor, the company chose to do so with an immersive pop-up in New York City. 

The experience included “flavor rooms”, which were each complete with decor and fragrances unique to a certain flavor. The pop-up also included snack and drink lounges with M&M-themed cocktails — which, I’m willing to bet, we’re great opportunities for M&M to appear on different attendees’ social pages. 

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Takeaways for Marketers

With every marketing campaign you launch, find the “fun” factor. It’s easy to get caught up in how much your brand helps solve your customer’s problem. But what about them, as people, would also bring them enjoyment?
Consider how you might leverage your audience for key business decisions. If they’re the ones who will be buying and using your product, they’re also the ones best-equipped to tell you what’s working, and what isn’t. An experiential campaign is one good opportunity to connect directly with your consumers and create enjoyable experiences in which they can provide perspective. 

6. Benefit Cosmetics: ‘A Lashtastic Virtual-Media Campaign’ 

In today’s digital-first world, a good experience doesn’t have to be in-person. But traditionally, consumers still want to test out new makeup products before purchasing — which created a challenge for Benefit Cosmetics during the worldwide pandemic, in which most retail locations were closed. 

To draw attention to its new Magnet Extreme Lengthening Mascara, Benefit, working with Because Creative Experiences, chose to create an immersive experience in which users could collect tokens and exchange those tokens for discounts, mascaras, or virtual beauty consultations on Benefit’s website. Best of all, they used Augmented Reality to create a fun, unique experience for their users. 

Here’s how it worked: Once users signed into Benefit’s Virtual Reality platform, they were asked to drop their location. Next, thanks to Augmented Reality, the prospects could use their phones to find tokens in their physical space. 

The campaign proved incredibly effective — including a conversion rate of over 50%, a CTR of 39.4%, and an average gamification dwell time of 2 minutes and 22 seconds. 

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Takeaways for Marketers: 

Even adults love games. Consider how you might gamify your own experience and provide unique challenges or contests to drive engagement. In this case, the experience is fun whether or not a user purchases the product — which is key towards creating a good user experience. 
If an in-person experience isn’t feasible, get creative with technology, VR, or AR to create the next best thing. Nowadays, digital experiences can feel just as real as in-person. You might need to think beyond traditional social campaigns to grab your audience’s attention.

7. Misereor: Charity Donation Billboard

When was the last time you used cash to pay for something?

Tough to remember, right? We’re kind of a species of “mindless swipers” — globally, an estimated 357 billion non-cash transactions are made each year. And knowing how often we whip out our cards, German relief NGO Misereor decided to put our bad habit to good use with its charitable giving billboard.

It was what they called SocialSwipe. Set up in airports, these digital posters would display images of some problems that Misereor works to resolve — hunger was depicted with a loaf of bread, for example.

But the screen was equipped with a card reader, and when someone went to swipe a card — for a small fee of 2€ — the image moved to make it look like the card was cutting a slice of bread.

Even cooler? On the user’s bank statement, there would be a thank-you note from Misereor, with a link to turn their one-time 2€ donation into a monthly one.

Needless to say, this experience required a lot of coordination — with banks, airports, and a mobile payment platform. Because of that, the experience couldn’t just be a one-time occurrence. The people who interacted with it were later reminded of it during a pretty common occurrence: receiving a bank statement.

Takeaways for Marketers

Visually represent the impact of participating in the experience. People interacting with this display were shown exactly where their money was going — like slicing bread for a hungry family. (Infographics work nicely here, too — check out our templates.)
Partner with another brand to create an even better experience. In this instance, Misereor worked with Stripe.com for the payment technology, and with financial institutions to get a branded message on users’ bank statements. (And stay tuned — we’ll talk more about the value of co-branding here later.)
Don’t be afraid to nurture your leads. Even if you don’t use a branded hashtag to integrate the experience with an online element, find a way to remind someone that they participated.

8. Lululemon: Proud & Present

To celebrate Pride Month, Lululemon worked with MKG to create an immersive, thoughtful experience that combined an engaging social media campaign with real-life community-centered events. 

First, the athletic brand asked its own employees and ambassadors to reflect on topics relevant to the LGBTQ+ community. The brand shared their responses via images and video on Lululemon’s Instagram page throughout the month. 

Next, the brand created an art installation at Hudson River Park that reflected those same responses. This space, which stayed in the Park for two weeks, encouraged passersbys to read and reflect. That’s not all, though — Lululemon also created a community-focused yoga practice in the same park, which aimed to raise money for The Trevor Project. 

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Takeaways for Marketers

Consider how you might create a cohesive experience to unit your online and offline presence. In this case, Lululemon leveraged its social accounts to reach its 3.7 million followers, but then created a few special, in-person experiences to drive the point home for its New York-based community. 
An experiential marketing campaign shouldn’t just focus on selling a product or service — it oftentimes can, and should, focus on a larger issue. In this case, Lululemon’s dedication to Pride Month increased brand awareness and loyalty.

9. Häagen-Dazs: Strawberries & Cream with Wimbledon

To draw attention to its new, limited-edition ice cream flavor Strawberries & Cream, Häagen-Dazs worked with Wonderland to create a GIF photo booth at the tennis championship Wimbledon. 

The booth included a swing (playfully alluding to tennis), which encouraged famous tennis players, models, and influencers to take pictures to post on social media — a good opportunity to collect user-generated content and expand their reach quickly. 

Naming itself “the official ice cream of Wimbledon”, Häagen-Dazs created a commercial for the limited edition flavor, as well: 

Takeaways for Marketers 

 Consider how you might create fun opportunities to encourage user-generated content. This doesn’t have to break the bank, either — there are plenty of budget-friendly options to create small booths at business conferences that still embrace that Instagram-worthy look. 

10. Facebook: Facebook IQ Live

Facebook — who also owns Instagram — has always understood how much data it has on how people use these platforms. For that reason, it created the Facebook IQ Live experience.

For this experience, that data was used to curate live scenes that depicted the data. Among them was the IQ Mart: A “retail” setting that represented the online shopper’s conversion path when using social media for buying decisions. There was also a quintessential Instagram cafe, chock full of millennial-esque photo opportunities and people snapping them — latte art and all.

The campaign wasn’t just memorable. It also proved to be really helpful — 93% of attendees (and there were over 1500 of them) said that the experience provided them with valuable insights on how to use Facebook for business.

But what makes those insights so valuable? Momentum Worldwide, the agency behind Facebook IQ Live, puts it perfectly: “When we understand what matters to people … we can be what matters to them.” In other words, we can shape our messaging around the things that are important to our target audiences.

And by creating this experience, Facebook was able to accomplish that for its own brand. In creating this experience, it also created a positive brand perception for a few audiences — including, for example, the people who might have been unsure of how to use the platform for business.

Takeaways for Marketers

Build an experience for people who aren’t sure about how they would use your product or service. Find ways for them to interact with your brand in a way that creatively spells out how it can benefit them.
Bring your data to life. We love numbers, but creating a live installment that illustrates them can help people understand exactly what they mean. And since 65% of people think that live events help them understand a product, this setting is a great place to do it.

11. Vans: House of Vans

Recently, Vans hosted House of Vans pop-up locations at skateparks within major cities like NYC and Chicago. This gave skateboarders a place to meet up, connect, listen to live music, and shred. 

Vans also used these skatepark-based popups to promote the launch of their new shoe line which honored David Bowie. 

With Vans being a leading shoe line of skateboarders, pop-ups in and near skateparks seem like a natural fit for an experiential marketing experience. 

Takeaways for Marketers

Identify your audience’s hobbies and embrace them. In the example above, Vans knew that they had a big skateboarding audience, so they crafted an event to reward them while intriguing other skateboarders.
Similarly, if you know you have audiences based in certain locations, go to where they are for your experiential campaign. This will provide less friction and make your audiences feel like you are literally meeting them where they are.

12. Rick & Morty: Rickmobile

To promote the return of the animated Adult Swim series Rick & Morty, Cartoon Network sent a car around the country shaped like Rick, a main character and mischievous time-traveling grandfather on the show. By marketing primarily on social media, the company was able to get the campaign to go viral. 

People began following where the Rickmobile was via a live destination page on the adult swim site.

When the Rickmobile hit major cities, people flocked to it to take a picture with Rick’s face and enter the mobile where they could purchase products related to the TV show.

Takeaways for Marketers

It’s okay to embrace social media to create anticipation and excitement around your pop-up or experience, just as Adult Swim and Cartoon Network did. 
Embracing weirdness, like that of a giant cartoon head driving around the country, can be a helpful way to make your event shareable or intriguing — even to people who might not follow the content or company that you’re promoting.
If you can work in product sales, consider it. In this example, the network not only promoted the television show, but it also sold products related to it. So, essentially, people directly paid for aspects of a large scale ad.

13. Coca-Cola: FIFA World Cup VR Experience

In Zurich, during the FIFA World Cup, Coca-Cola placed a VR experience in front of a train station. With the experience, you could stand in front of a screen and see a popular soccer player next to you. You could then practice a soccer move with the athlete or compete in your own mini soccer tournament.

Takeaways for Marketers

While VR isn’t accessible to many marketers, this experience did have a few scaleable strategies associated with it.

To give your attendees an experience of value, consider hosting an expert who can answer questions or give tips related to your marketing campaign.
Embrace major events. If you know a city or area will be highly populated due to a game or another event, consider placing a pop-up there that somehow relates to that audience or the event itself.

Clearly, taking some very calculated risks worked out pretty well for these companies. So when it comes to creating an experience with your brand, don’t be afraid to think outside of the box — and don’t be afraid to work together on it with someone else.

Invest some time into thinking about the ways people could interact with you, even if it seems a little nutty. If it’s aligned with what you do and executed thoughtfully, people will be talking — in the best way possible.

Our State of AI Survey Report found that one of the top challenges marketers face when using generative AI is its ability to be biased. 

And marketers, sales professionals, and customer service people report hesitating to use AI tools because they can sometimes produce biased information. 

It’s clear that business professionals are worried about AI being biased, but what makes it biased in the first place? In this post, we’ll discuss the potential for harm in using AI, examples of AI being biased in real life, and how society can mitigate potential harm.

What is AI bias?

AI bias is the idea that machine learning algorithms can be biased when carrying out their programmed tasks, like analyzing data or producing content). AI is typically biased in ways that uphold harmful beliefs, like race and gender stereotypes. 

According to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023, AI is biased when it produces outputs that reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes that harm specific groups. AI is fair when it makes predictions or outputs that don’t discriminate or favor any specific group.

In addition to being biased in prejudice and stereotypical beliefs, AI can also be biased because of: 

Sample selection, where the data it uses isn’t representative of entire populations, so its predictions and recommendations cannot be generalized or applied to groups left out
Measurement, where the data collection process is biased, leading AI to make biased conclusions.

How does AI bias reflect society’s bias?

AI is biased because society is biased. 

Since society is biased, much of the data AI is trained on contains society’s biases and prejudices, so it learns those biases and produces results that uphold them. For example, an image generator asked to create an image of a CEO might produce images of white males because of the historical bias in unemployment in the data it learned from. 

As AI becomes more commonplace, a fear among many is that it has the potential to scale the biases already present in society that are harmful to many different groups of people. 

AI Bias Examples

The AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Incidents Controversies Repository (AIAAIC) says that the number of newly reported AI incidents and controversies was 26 times greater in 2021 than in 2012.

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Let’s go over some examples of AI bias.

Mortgage approval rates are a great example of prejudice in AI. Algorithms have been found to be 40-80% more likely to deny borrowers of color because historical lending data disproportionately shows minorities being denied loans and other financial opportunities. The historical data teaches AI to be biased with each future application it receives.

There’s also potential for sample size bias in medical fields. Say a doctor uses AI to analyze patient data, uncover patterns, and outline care recommendations. If that doctor primarily sees White patients, the recommendations aren’t based on a representative population sample and might not meet everyone’s unique medical needs.

Some businesses have algorithms that result in real-life biased decision-making or have made the potential for it more visible. 

1. Amazon’s Recruitment Algorithm

Amazon built a recruitment algorithm trained on ten years of employment history data. The data reflected a male-dominated workforce, so the algorithm learned to be biased against applications and penalized resumes from women or any resumes using the word “women(‘s).”

2. Twitter Image Cropping

A viral tweet in 2020 showed that Twitter’s algorithm favored White faces over Black ones when cropping pictures. A White user repeatedly shared pictures featuring his face and that of a Black colleague and other Black faces in the same image, and it was consistently cropped to show his face in image previews.

Twitter acknowledged the algorithm’s bias and said, “While our analyses to date haven’t shown racial or gender bias, we recognize that the way we automatically crop photos means there is a potential for harm. We should’ve done a better job of anticipating this possibility when we were first designing and building this product.”

3. Robot’s Racist Facial Recognition

Scientists recently conducted a study asking robots to scan people’s faces and categorize them into different boxes based on their characteristics, with three boxes being doctors, criminals, and homemakers. 

The robot was biased in its process and most often identified women as homemakers, Black men as criminals, Latino men as janitors, and women of all ethnicities were less likely to be picked as doctors.

4. Intel and Classroom Technology’s Monitoring Software

Intel and Classroom Technology’s Class software has a feature that monitors students’ faces to detect emotions while learning. Many have said different cultural norms of expressing emotion as a high probability of students’ emotions being mislabeled. 

If teachers use these labels to talk with students about their level of effort and understanding, students can be penalized over emotions they’re not actually displaying. 

What can be done to fix AI bias?

AI ethics is a hot topic. This is understandable because AI’s bias has been demonstrated in real life in many different ways. 

Beyond being biased, AI can spread damaging misinformation, like deepfakes, and generative AI tools can even produce factually incorrect information. 

What can be done get a better grasp on AI and reduce the potential bias?

Human oversight: People can monitor outputs, analyze data, and make corrections when bias is displayed. For example, marketers can pay special attention to generative AI outputs before using them in marketing materials to ensure they are fair.
Assess the potential for bias: Some use cases for AI have a higher potential for being prejudiced and harmful to specific communities. In this case, people can take the time to assess the likelihood of their AI producing biased results, like banking institutions using historically prejudiced data.
Investing in AI ethics: One of the most important ways to reduce AI bias is for there to be continued investment into AI research and AI ethics, so people can devise concrete strategies to reduce it.
Diversifying AI: Having diverse perspectives in AI helps create unbiased practices as people bring their own lived experiences. A diverse and representative field brings more opportunities for people to recognize the potential for bias and deal with it before harm is caused.
Acknowledge human bias: All humans have the potential for bias, whether from a difference in lived experience or confirmation bias during research. People using AI can acknowledge their biases to ensure their AI isn’t biased, like researchers making sure their sample sizes are representative.
Being transparent: Transparency is always important, especially with new technologies. People can build trust and understanding with AI by simply making it known when they use AI, like adding a note below an AI-generated news article.

It’s very possible to use AI responsibly. 

AI and interest in AI are only growing, so the best way to stay on top of the potential for harm is to stay informed on how it can perpetuate harmful biases and take action to ensure your use of AI doesn’t add more fuel to the fire. 

Want to learn more about artificial intelligence? Check out this learning path.

Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team. 

If you’ve spent time on TikTok in the past year, you’ve likely heard the name Alix Earle. 

In 2022, Earle rose to TikTok stardom by posting “get ready with me” videos and chronicling her experiences as a student at the University of Miami. With over 5.3 million followers on the platform, Earle is one of TikTok’s top creators earning up to $70,000 per sponsored post. 

Earle recently went on a trip to Europe with a group of 11 friends, some of whom were content creators themselves. Upon arriving in Italy, the group learned the house they reserved through Booking.com didn’t actually exist, leaving them stranded with nowhere to stay.

Naturally, the group took to TikTok to post about the situation. 

How Airbnb Earned Millions of Impressions Through Social Listening

Earle’s video about the group getting stranded racked up over 3.9 million views, and caught the attention of the social media team at Airbnb who quickly sprung into action. 

Within 24 hours, Airbnb arranged for the group to stay in a villa nearby, seemingly saving the day. Again, Earle went on TikTok to share how Airbnb reached out to help and posted a tour of the villa the group moved to for the duration of their stay in Italy. This video has over 3.8 million views, painting Airbnb in a positive light.

 While the details of the exchange are unclear (Did Airbnb comp the group’s stay at the Villa? How much was the group’s stay worth?) Airbnb has earned nearly 4 million impressions from Earle’s post likely for less than her typical $70,000 fee. 

After the group moved to the Airbnb, Booking.com commented on Earle’s initial post about being stranded days later, telling the group to reach out on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to resolve the issue. 

While the comment appears to be standard procedure, it came too late to help the group’s initial problem (being stranded) and was a missed opportunity for good press after the botched booking. Due to the slow and lackluster response, Booking.com appeared unreliable and out of touch.

Airbnb was clearly ready to pick up the ball after Booking.com fumbled and jumped on the opportunity to be featured. 

The difference in the two company’s responses demonstrates the significance of social listening and keeping a pulse on conversations that are happening in your brand’s niche. 

In this instance, Airbnb demonstrated social listening. The brand’s social team was keeping a close eye on a popular creator’s travel experience and was ready to act when the opportunity presented itself. Booking.com demonstrated social monitoring, providing a response instead of a solution. 

Ultimately, both social listening and social monitoring are important for any brand but knowing when to respond versus when to act can make all the difference in how a company is perceived.

Elsewhere in Marketing

The latest marketing news and strategy insights.

Marketing on a budget: 73% of CMOs say they don’t have enough budget to execute their 2023 marketing budgets. 

More ads on the ‘gram: Instagram rolls out advertising in search results.

YouTube announced plans to sunset its stories feature to drive more attention to YouTube Shorts.  

TikTok is testing an AI chatbot called Tako that can recommend videos to users. 

New York City is testing programmatic ads in its Subway system.

AI in email marketing: discover new research on how marketers use AI for email marketing and high-quality tools you can use to do the same.

Building and optimizing your tech stack with the best B2B marketing integrations improves the customer experience and streamlines operations.

Marketing teams are doing more with less, and they have fuller plates than ever. Companies are implementing AI tools in every element of business operations, and scrambling to make sure internal teams are taking advantage of AI to grow faster, work efficiently, and stay ahead of the competition.

And at the same time, budgets are lean, leading marketing teams to take a hard look at their tech spend and see where there are inefficiencies or redundancies. Recent HubSpot research found that the more point solutions, the higher cost of ownership.

“We’re seeing the tension between short-term growth and long-term brand investment. With the current economic pressures, many teams will invest heavily in CRO. Invest in brand marketing while optimizing your tech stack,” says Kipp Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot.

How Marketing Leaders are Shifting to Meet Customer Expectations

Growing economic challenges have led marketing teams to refocus their plans. Marketing leaders want to invest in predictable channels and win more business from contacts who already believe in their product.

And consumer expectations are higher than ever.

Retaining existing customers and leveraging upselling and cross-selling are keeping companies growing — and marketing leaders are focused on reducing inefficiencies to support these goals.

How the Crisis of Disconnection is Impacting Digital Marketing

Today, companies are using an average of 200+ apps — and many of these apps don’t speak to each other.

This yields a pile of effectively unusable data, located in various siloed departments of the company, telling no helpful stories and providing no useful solutions. All while using up valuable budget.

When customer-facing teams are siloed, it impacts the customer experience — which makes customer retention harder to achieve.

“What customers experience is a telltale sign of the function or dysfunction that exists internally. Realign around the customer journey,” says Ljubica Radoicic, Director of APAC Marketing and Customer Success at Autodesk shared in the recent State of Technology and the customer experience report.

She continues, “Find the disconnected points, look at NPS numbers, and talk to customers. Then, re-engineer the customer engagement model,”

All customer-facing teams need to be able to understand the customer journey, with access to shared data and communication. That means being able to follow individual customers and trends across all users.

If apps are disconnected from one another and the CRM, companies lose valuable customer information.

Marketing Hub’s robust ecosystem of B2B marketing integrations connects customer-facing tools to provide GTM organizations with a single source of truth while maintaining flexibility.

The Importance of a Marketing Tech Stack

With siloed data sitting in many different martech platforms, it takes a dedicated business insights professional (or a whole team of them) to make the data actionable. Their time is always in high demand, which slows down GTM campaigns.

But when apps and tools can effectively sync and talk to one another, flowing into one centralized platform like HubSpot Marketing Hub, any team member can easily dig in and create a data-backed strategy for every month, quarter, or year.

HubSpot’s App Marketplace has 1,250+ integrations that support memorable customer experiences and business growth.

As the martech app landscape continues to expand, there’s a B2B integration for virtually every marketing tactic you want to use to reach your audience.

And since so many platforms integrate with HubSpot, marketers can connect disparate systems and gather deep, actionable insights about the whole customer experience.

Here are 17 marketing integrations that you can use with HubSpot to improve the customer experience and grow with connected data.

1. Amplitude

Amplitude is a data tool for digital products that helps users dig in deep with analytics.

Marketing and customer success teams can track in-product events with Amplitude and add them to contact profiles in HubSpot, developing a better understanding of how customers use their products.

Another way to use Amplitude with your CRM is for smarter segmentation — use Amplitude cohort data to build HubSpot contact lists based on similar behavioral events, like users who enable push notifications during onboarding.

“The main benefit is getting our marketing email data from HubSpot into Amplitude for viewing, cohort analysis, debugging and user journey visualization,” said Austin Hay, Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp.

“At first, we used the integration to get alerts when pieces of the funnel were broken,” he continues. “Now, people use the data to visualize user journeys, create ad hoc analyses, debug campaigns and more.” 

Hay continues, “[The integration] has made us more efficient. We needed the ability to give low-code operators tools to visualize our marketing email data. Amplitude has done this for us with the integration. It’s made us faster and more efficient in our work.”

2. ChatSpot

Marketers can leverage AI with the new ChatSpot app, which combines the power of ChatGPT and HubSpot CRM, helping make sense of your HubSpot data and turning insights into action items that will move the lever.

To make the most of ChatSpot, ask questions and provide instructions in natural language through the chat interface to help improve marketing and elevate the customer experience.

For example, rather than searching through your HubSpot account for data by hand, you can ask ChatSpot, “Give me a summary of customer support tickets from the past quarter that mention our product,” or “Create a report of companies added last quarter summarized by country.”

“[ChatSpot is a] massive game changer for frontline sales professionals! HubSpot was already the leader in CRM technology and utilized AI before ChatGPT. The fact that [ChatSpot is] so far along so quickly is a testament to [the HubSpot] team. Looking forward to leveraging this technology!” William McNeil, Founder of WeeklySuccess shared.

Sales and marketing teams can automate complex growth workflows with account engagement analysis, performance measurement, segmentation based on niche criteria, and multi-channel ABM automation.

3. Demandbase

Platforms like Demandbase help to align customer-facing teams and support data-driven knowledge-sharing to improve results and cut down on duplicate work.

“Demandbase works well for our business, it helps marketing, sales and business development align on target accounts. We use this integration for sales insights, merging sources for MAP, sales enablement and anonymous activity, and display-based advertising,” said Tess Baldwin, Sr. ABM Manager at Pattern.

4. Hightouch

Having the right data is one thing, and using that data to impact your business’s bottom line is another thing entirely.

Hightouch keeps customer data fresh and synced at all times, from all sources — so you can easily track each customer’s journey and provide a more personalized buying experience.

Hightouch supports customer success teams in understanding the customer journey and the data behind every conversion point, and HubSpot helps make it usable for growth.

Use Hightouch with HubSpot to:

Set up proactive alerts based on customer behavior
Boost ROAS and MQLs with smarter lead scoring
Access churn and LTV intelligence to increase sales

James Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder at Veriglif wrote, “Amazing — saved so much dev time. Would recommend to anyone trying to sync data between PostgreSQL and HubSpot.”

5. Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange takes user journeys through a website and turns them into data-driven dashboards that shine a light on growth opportunities across your brand’s digital presence.

Use integrations like Lucky Orange with HubSpot to create heatmaps and track all web engagement events. Then, set up workflows and alerts in HubSpot that keep customers engaged and give your sales team opportunities to strike when the iron is hot.

“Lucky Orange is my favorite app for HubSpot — we use it for CRO and sales enablement. The heatmap features and form analytics give us great insights and the integration with HubSpot makes it possible to view how different segments use our site based on properties in HubSpot,” said Jeppe Nyrup, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Avidly.

Nyrup continues, “The recording feature is key for sales reps to monitor which contacts were interested in our pages.”

6. Microsoft Dynamics

Having your CRM set up correctly and accessible to all GTM teams is key to customer-centric business growth. The CRM should direct all business decisions and fuel marketing, sales, and support dashboards.

With HubSpot, you can bring your own CRM, like Microsoft Dynamics, connect it to your Marketing Hub, and reap the benefits of a unified source of truth between marketing and sales.

In order to see the most impact from your CRM, make sure your CRM data is synced at all times.

Maximize the power of the CRM for your sales team by helping them:

Prioritize the right contacts
Build relationships by reaching out at the right time
Turn prospects into customers using data

“We want our BD team that are working in HubSpot to know if a lead has already been created from our inbound channel that the sales team is already working on or was working on at some point,” shared Høgni á Reynatrøð, Head of Digital Marketing, Queue-it.

“With the integration, we’re certain of not overlapping and collaborating even if we’re using two CRMs. The integration helps us avoid business development outreach at the same time as our sales team is working the account.”

7. NetSuite

Clear prioritization helps sales teams close more deals. With NetSuite and HubSpot, sales teams can contact leads with a high intent to purchase. They have the data and tools to act as a consultant in the prospect’s journey.

Using even more customer activity data from marketing, sales can build a fuller picture and address customer pain points.

The NetSuite and HubSpot integration also cuts out manual data entry, allowing sales teams to spend time building relationships with prospects.

“We use this integration to sync MQL contact details from HubSpot to NetSuite and share the same lifecycle and lead status between the two apps. Overall it was a very smooth transition,” Dinithi Abeysiri, Digital Engagement Manager at Hot Spring Spas said.

8. ON24

ON24 is a webinar and virtual event platform that enables seamless digital experiences. The ON24 webinar integration supports smarter webinar hosting and promotional efforts by syncing ON24 data with HubSpot, and vice versa.

When event marketing teams integrate ON24 with HubSpot, they can host more dynamic webinars, send engaged leads directly into the sales pipeline, and convert more attendees into qualified leads.

Leverage the bidirectional sync between ON24 and HubSpot to:

Share registration information between strategic partners
Create a HubSpot landing page that automatically registers attendees with ON24
Merge duplicate or existing contacts generated by webinar registrations
Find new segments in HubSpot to target post-webinar based on actions during the event

“The primary benefits are ease of use and bi-directional sync. This allows us the flexibility to use the default ON24 registration page as needed, and push registrants into HubSpot, or to build and utilize a HubSpot landing page and registration page for a webinar while easily pushing those registrants into ON24,” said Aaron Burke, Executive Director of Marketing and Sales for Precision Medicine Group.

“Without this integration, we were only able to effectively push registrant leads from ON24 into HubSpot. The integration provides us with much more flexibility in how we are able to capture registrants to ON24 webinar events.”

9. OneSignal

Use OneSignal and HubSpot to create and facilitate personalized mobile and web push notifications within HubSpot workflows — and meet your customers wherever they are ready to buy.

Segmenting your audiences by engagement behavior, demographic information, or other custom criteria can lead to 21% higher click-through rates (CTRs).

And with HubSpot, you can now try AI tools like ChatSpot to find engaged segments to test.

Use the integration to:

Send messages throughout the user journey and across channels
Trigger in-app messages on mobile devices to educate and delight users
Build custom notifications using HubSpot CRM data and add personalization tokens like first name, company name, or location
Analyze push notifications in a contact’s activity timeline in HubSpot

“The integration allows you to use push communications through HubSpot. We run several revenue campaigns every month, so having the push app communication integrated within a flow makes the storytelling of that campaign synergistic,” shared Ligia Assef, Marketing Analyst at Suno.

“You can segment the customer base or leads according to your business, being even more direct and assertive in communication. As an extra benefit, automation frees up the team’s time to analyze results and make improvements to maximize the conversion rate.”

10. RollWorks

Integrating ABM tools like RollWorks with HubSpot make it possible to sync, segment, score, and prioritize the leads that need to be worked ASAP.

Plus, marketers can use ABM targeting to create dynamic digital ad campaigns, then track the performance in HubSpot.

ABM platforms help marketing teams uncover target audiences within your existing CRM or marketing suite.

And integrations like RollWorks and HubSpot can automatically surface the most qualified segments using machine learning and a proprietary prioritization algorithm.

“RollWorks [with HubSpot] has been highly successful for our business. We’ve been able to reach nearly half of our target accounts and progressively move them along in the buyer’s journey,” added Katie McCauley, Senior Marketing Manager at SnapFulfil.

“We use RollWorks to reach key buyers at target accounts that we may not be able to reach otherwise,” 

11. Salesforce

For mid-sized businesses up to enterprise organizations, joining sales and marketing data can be a beast.

But with smart integrations like the Salesforce and HubSpot integration, marketing and sales ops teams can automatically send HubSpot contact info into Salesforce, and Salesforce info back to HubSpot.

Use this integration to set up automated sales team alerts when a lead is ready to go — and help sales reps tailor their outreach using lead intelligence and optimization tools for a better success rate.

“The Salesforce + HubSpot integration lets us automate lead management, avoid mistakes, and get a whole view of marketing and sales activity,” shared Javier Peinado Ramirez, Digital Marketing Specialist at Wolters Kluwer España.

He continues, “We’ve improved efficiency in lead management and can access high-value information for sales and marketing.”

12. Segment

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Segment collect events from web and mobile apps, then translate the data into actionable insights.

Using HubSpot and Segment together, marketing teams can define what data maps where, and how each source is tagged — with no code required.

Use Segment with HubSpot to:

Centralize customer data from all sources and teams
Automatically keep customer data up to date and sync changes across systems in real time
Capture user activity and map behavioral events to contact profiles in HubSpot
Add Segment events to HubSpot reports and workflows
Save time and eliminate manual list uploading and management

“HubSpot’s Segment integration has allowed us to extend our ability to leverage customer website activity data into our HubSpot automation strategy,” Kaitlynn Sirotkin, Marketing Automation Manager at Enervee Corporation said.

“Using this data, we’ve been able to implement e-commerce strategies tailored to each specific buyer that otherwise would not have been possible without extensive custom development work.”

13. Sendoso

Delight prospects and customers by setting up HubSpot workflows that trigger Sendoso eGifts and physical gifts.

Marketing teams can use gifts and experiences to thank brand ambassadors and superusers, sales teams can follow-up demo calls with tailored thank-yous, and customer support can automate gift workflows whenever the occasion calls for an extra surprise and delight moment.

Use the Sendoso integration with HubSpot to:

Automate direct mail gifting based on HubSpot criteria
Measure ROI on direct mail or experience-based campaigns
Set up email alerts for sales and marketing to keep teams aligned
Trigger gifts based on activities in HubSpot, like attending a product demo
Shorten the sales cycle with unique, personalized gifts

Jake Reni, SVP of Sales at AudioEye has found success with the integration.

“Easy to implement, launch, and drive adoption across my sales team. The product catalog has plenty of options for any type of campaign,” he said. “I’m loving that I can see when my team uses a Sendoso touch in their HubSpot contact activity feed. A must-have for anyone selling into enterprise!”

14. Supermetrics

For analysis of your business metrics, Supermetrics lets you automatically (and securely) move HubSpot data from all portals into spreadsheets, Google Data Studio, data warehouses, and any other databases.

Use this integration to discover insights across data sources, like which marketing campaigns have led to the most recurring revenue, or which customer support issues have led to the highest churn rates. Create data visualizations to track team performance and find places for improvement.

“[The HubSpot and Supermetrics integration] has helped us take reporting and data analysis to the next level. As the main Google Data Studio connector for client reporting for all digital marketing campaigns, we can integrate various data sources to correlate and get insights.

We also use it to get more metrics and visualizations on sales team performance. It has all the data sources any agency needs,” Maricarmen Vargas, Digital Marketing Customer Experience at Red Ventures said.

15. Tableau

Tableau is an intelligent data visualization tool that can turn data from HubSpot, along with other sources, into complex, but usable reports.

Use data platforms and business intelligence tools to create visualizations and dashboards that make trends and ideas more obvious, and tell stories with clear, actionable takeaways.

Use the Tableau integration for HubSpot to:

Cross-reference marketing and sales data
Optimize campaigns by segment
Discover new audiences with a high opportunity to convert
Benchmark funnel performance and identify problem areas
Build dashboards to benchmark marketing performance

16. WhatsApp

Let your sales teams connect with customers with 1:1 messaging within HubSpot, delivered to prospects and customers on one of the most popular messaging apps globally: WhatsApp.

Keep track of each conversation within HubSpot, and set WhatsApp messages as workflow triggers.

Use WhatsApp with HubSpot to streamline communication:

Send WhatsApp messages within HubSpot workflows
Automate abandoned cart texts
Receive notifications for new messages via HubSpot
Add new leads from WhatsApp automatically
Track sales conversations in a centralized location, not a sales rep’s personal device
Allow customers and prospects to send documents or reach out for support via WhatsApp
Pool incoming leads in a shared inbox and route conversations to sales reps
Increase visibility into lead requests from SMS

“This integration allows us to record communications between our marketing and sales teams and prospects and clients, and make these conversations accessible to relevant members of our team. We’ve been able to improve our sales and client communications,” shared Kristeen Romero, RevOps Solutions Lead at Oxygen.

17. Zoom

Using the Zoom integration with HubSpot, you can automatically add video meeting links to marketing emails and sales invitations.

Plus, marketing teams can facilitate and promote Zoom webinar registration and follow-ups with HubSpot in a more streamlined workflow.

By automating appointment-booking, sales teams can book more calls and marketing teams can reduce friction in handing off warm leads.

Qaunain Meghjee, Senior Product Manager at The Economist uses the Zoom integration with HubSpot, and shared the following. 

“[The integration] perfectly adds video meeting links into auto-generated calendar invites that are created via the live chatbot and the meeting bookings page. Now, meeting invite and reminder emails automatically have a Zoom link.”

Meghjee continues, “I like that the integration is cost-free, automatic, and works seamlessly with Outlook and Google Calendar integrations.”

Building a Strategic, Integrated Tech Stack: More Approachable Than Ever

With tools for everything from lead scoring to email marketing to social listening and more, it’s understandable that marketing teams want to eliminate inefficiencies and generate more revenue by bringing on new tools.

But if these tools can’t effectively talk to one another, it becomes a barrier to growth, not an advantage.

HubSpot’s App Marketplace has ready-to-use B2B integrations for every aspect of marketing growth. Marketing teams across industries can get insights from every tool and finally access that elusive single source of truth.

Clear data means clear insights — and the power to create a memorable customer experience that drives business.