Your Companies Database Now Lives in Your Marketing Navigation

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Marketing starts with individual: no matter the nature of your company, you’re trying to convert real people into loyal customers and evangelists of your brand. That’s why your HubSpot Marketing tool is centered around an robust, integrated contact platform.

But if you’re B2B, your organization lives and breathes in the world of the companies those individuals work for. The data you collect about the companies you interact with — size, industry, location, and more — is just as important to your marketing efforts as any trait of the individual contacts.

With that in mind, did you know that your HubSpot Marketing portal comes fully equipped with a company database?

With today’s change, that companies database now lives under “Contacts” in the HubSpot Marketing navigation.

If your company uses HubSpot CRM, the companies database is old hat, and this change simply marks an old friend finding another home. If not, today’s update marks a brand new beginning in your HubSpot portal.

If you’re seeing companies in HubSpot for the very first time, here’s a quick guide:

The Basics

Your companies are associated with your contacts. Let’s say John Smith from HubSpot fills out a form on your website. John Smith will be created as a contact in your database. Then, if you’d like, you can create HubSpot as a company too. That way, you can collect information about HubSpot, separately from what you collect about John Smith. John Smith (and any other contacts from HubSpot) are associated with the HubSpot company record, and can be accessed directly from there.

A pro tip regarding contact and company creation: HubSpot can automatically create companies in your database and associate them with your contacts, to save you a whole bunch of manual data entry. Here’s how. As an added bonus, companies in HubSpot are automatically enriched with tons of useful information --- location, company size, industry, and more --- from a proprietary database of over 20 million companies.

A Quick Tour

Navigating to Contacts > Companies for the first time, here’s a quick tour: 

• Just like your contacts, your company database centers around a filterable table. In the table, you’ll see all the companies in your database. Click any company to get into the company’s record.
• Just like you can create custom properties for your contacts (e.g. age, gender, biggest challenge), you can create up to 1000 custom properties for your companies as well. Simply click Actions > Edit Properties.
• Reorder the columns in any way you choose (Actions > Edit Columns) to put the most important company properties front and center.
• Use the filters on the left to drill down to a specific set of companies (e.g. companies in Arizona with more than 200 employees).

What else can you do with companies in HubSpot?

The true power of your company database lies in the way it works with every other tool in your HubSpot portal. Here are just a few examples:

• Segment lists based on company properties.
• Example: Pull all the contacts associated with companies of a certain size.
• Create workflows based on company properties.
• Example: Send all contacts associated with companies marked as “target accounts” down a certain drip campaign.
• Score leads based on company properties.
• Example: Give your contacts higher scores if they’re associated with companies in certain territories.
• Smart content and CTAs
• Example: Show contacts from companies in the biotech industry a certain button in your blog sidebar.
  
  

Companies is now in the navigation for all HubSpot Marketing customers.