In this week’s Five on Friday, Forbes and Sumo offer marketing lessons learned from Hubspot’s success, ZDNet explains the differences between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, EA plans to expand its EA access-style subscription program to other platforms, Digiday shares the state of news subscriptions, and PYMTS highlights industries that are getting subscription payments right (and wrong). 

2 Marketing Lessons from HubSpot

In a recent article for Forbes, Joe Escobedo shared five marketing tips gleaned from HubSpot by the Sumo Group. We’re sharing two of the five here. In case you aren’t familiar with HubSpot’s massive success, the CRM, sales and inbound marketing company is ranked #5 in traffic worldwide in online marketing tech, and they have millions of social media followers. How do they do it? Here are two tips shared by Sumo:

1. Use content upgrades (e.g., bonus videos) in blog posts to improve engagement and provide additional information to readers. Pair your content upgrade with an email marketing tool to capture leads for future marketing opportunities.
2. Take social media cross promotion to the next level. Sumo said HubSpot is an expert at leveraging its social media tools for cross promotion and lead generation. HubSpot posts videos to Facebook, generating thousands of views and shares. In the comments, they use free tools related to the videos to generate additional leads. They make themselves not only intriguing to readers, but invaluable, creating an unmatched stickiness to their content.

Read all 5 HubSpot tips, highlighted by Sumo, here: ‘5 Marketing Tips From HubSpot’s 25M Monthly Website Traffic.’

Do You Know the Differences between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS? 

ZDNet does, and they shared the differences in a recent article. Here are the basic differences between the three services:

SaaS (software as a service): Think of SaaS as scalable software rental. Rather than buying a license to use a product like Adobe Acrobat, In Design, Office 365, or a CRM like Salesforce, individual users and organizations ‘rent’ software, accessing it via the cloud. The provider maintains the software on their platform and is responsible for updates and upgrades.

PaaS (platform as a service): Geared toward developers and operators, a platform is a cloud-based ‘location’ where apps and services such as databases can be built. ZDNet offered Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift as examples. PaaS is often used as a place to build proprietary software.

IaaS (infrastructure as a service): According to ZDNet, IaaS is the basis for cloud computing. It is the foundation of the cloud, because it provides the storage, networking and resources businesses need to run their operations. The benefit to using IaaS is lower costs and more flexibility for computing infrastructure.

ZDNet points out that, while these are three different layers to the cloud, and they each offer distinct features and benefits, the lines between what each of these items is blurring. To learn more about that, read ‘Saas, Paas, and Iaas: Understand the Differences’ by Conner Forrest on ZDNet here.  

EA to Duplicate Its Success with Subscription Model on Other Platforms

Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA), known for Madden NFL, FIFA18, Battlefield, The Sims and other popular video games, reported its quarterly financials on Halloween for its fiscal second quarter 2018. While the company reported a net loss of $22 million, the company has shown a big increase in engagement with players and a noticeable shift in digital revenue versus packages goods and other revenue.

For the three months ended September 30, 2017, digital revenue was 71.8 percent of total revenue, compared to 63.0 percent for the same period last year, illustrating the companies move toward digital subscription products.

‘The impact of the digital transformation is accelerating across the interactive entertainment industry. Players today are looking for more choice, more content, and more fun in experiences that continually evolve with the way they want to play,’ said EA CEO Andrew Wilson on the earnings call. ‘Capturing these opportunities is at the core of EA’s strategy: creating extraordinary new games, content and experiences, wrapped in services, accessed through more platforms and more business models, and powered by innovative technologies. These are the key growth drivers that uniquely position EA to lead this industry.’

To that end, Wilson explained that the company’s subscription gaming services EA Access for Xbox One and Origin Access for PC games are bringing more players to their games, and the company expects to leverage the success of the subscription model on other platforms.

‘Looking further ahead, our growth priorities continue to be: the expansion of our live services, including integration with our esports businesses; the addition of new genres, such as action; new business models like our subscription business; and to continue to deliver profitable growth in our mobile business,’ Wilson added. ‘Our subscription services will continue to expand and remove friction in a crowded, digital world.’

Read the EA earnings press release here and EA’s prepared remarks for the October 31, 2017 earnings call here.

Digiday: The State of Digital News Subscriptions 

According to Digiday, the market for paid digital news content is growing. In a recent article, they showed five charts that depict how the market is shifting, based on data gathered from a Reuters Institute study and The Media Insights Project. Here are some key factors shared by Digiday in ‘The State of News Subscriptions in 5 Charts‘ by Max Willens:

• 16 percent of the U.S. population, or about 52 million Americans, paid for digital news last year, about half paying via recurring subscription
• The ‘Trump Bump’ is real, meaning more people who now subscribe to digital news are newer subscribers. The Media Insights Project reports that 31 percent of digital news subscribers had subscribed for three months or less, compared to only 7 percent for print news subscribers.
• The age groups most likely to pay for digital news were in the 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 age groups.
• Digital news subscribers are willing to pay for news when a new source does a good job of covering a particular topic of issue. Other factors that influence the buying is decision are friends or family trust the news source or they received a discount or promotion.

See the five charts and read the full story on Digiday here. 

PYMTS: The industries getting subscriptions right 

In collaboration with Recurly, the PYMTS Subscription Commerce Conversion Index looks at subscription services and the merchants who provide them to make an evaluation of customer experiences. Using the index, PYMTS assigns the merchants a score between 1 and a 100 showing the quality of those experiences. Based on the results, PYMTS evaluated various industries to see who’s getting it right:

• SaaS is still the top industry in terms of user experience with a score of 65.9.
• With a score of 53.2, business services had the lowest score, and the score is dropping.
• Video-on-demand inched up to 64.8 from 63.9, closing the game with SaaS as the top industry.
• Consumer goods are about the same at 61.8.

Learn more about the index and find a link to download the full report, done in partnership with Recurly, here.