GfK Successful HubSpot integration

GfK has over 8,000 employees who provide companies and partners worldwide with far-reaching insights and recommendations on trends, markets and behavior. Here, data and insights are transformed into crucial knowledge that serves as a sustainable growth driver for the economy.

Before the introduction of HubSpot, the in-house marketing team spent a lot of time manually adapting a wide range of content. There was no content management system (CMS) to support them. The team was also unable to access all contact data from a central location or take care of personal contact with leads or potential customers. Individual customer and user support was therefore not possible.

In the past, the team used a cross-channel marketing platform for campaigns, but its user-friendliness left a lot to be desired. Patrick Grinoew, Head of Global Digital Marketing at GfK, looks back: "The user interface was not user-friendly and we were all unhappy with it." What this means is obvious: the platform was hardly used by the marketing team, but of course continued to cost money - a huge waste of company resources.

On top of this, another task awaited the marketing professionals: the relaunch of GfK's corporate website. But without a suitable content management system (CMS), the team could neither create new, personalized websites nor build on existing content.

The GfK team therefore urgently needed support in the form of powerful, scalable and intuitive marketing software to create target group-oriented content and launch campaigns, to set up effective workflows - and to increase their overall performance.

In the search for the right software, it quickly became clear that HubSpot offered by far the most convincing solution compared to the competition. This is how konzepthaus came into play as a HubSpot Solutions Partner and integration specialist.

Together, they considered the most effective approach. The question soon arose as to whether a combination of CMS Hub and Marketing Hub would not make sense in order to cover all marketing needs. "Our goal," says Patrick Grinoew, "was tointegrate CMS with Marketing Hub and Salesforce to provide even more personalization and lead management capabilities.HubSpot's CMS Hub seemed ideally suited to provide comprehensive insights and combined analytics."

To ensure that CMS Hub could also meet their requirements, the GfK team launched a test phase: With the help of a proof of concept (PoC), not only the user-friendliness but also the performance and flexibility of the tool were to be tested. The proof of concept is an important milestone in the decision-making process, as it proves whether a project is feasible from a technical and business perspective.

The marketing team therefore put the website through its paces for two weeks at various locations and analyzed the performance of the individual pages. After successfully passing the test phase, it quickly became clear that HubSpot's CMS really was the best choice. Grinoew: "Without the option of a proof of concept, I wouldn't have felt comfortable going ahead with this project."