Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Mon, 28 Apr 2025
In today’s competitive market, many entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business leaders, and marketers struggle to cut through the noise and scale their businesses. Kipp Bodnar’s rise from employee to Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot in just five years demonstrates how the right mindset and focus drive success. By blending entrepreneurship, inbound marketing, and leadership, he achieved remarkable growth. In this episode, Kipp shares the most effective marketing strategies, reveals how to spot opportunities, and the key to scaling your business through content marketing, customer relationships, and AI. In this episode, Hala and Kipp will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:24) Key Strategies for Career and Business Growth (10:32) The Entrepreneurial Mindset in Leadership (12:10) HubSpot’s Secret to Global Marketing Success (15:10) Inbound vs Outbound Marketing (17:23) Effective Content Marketing Strategies (22:00) Three Ways to Stand Out as a Content Creator (24:16) The Value of Email and Online Marketing (30:42) Leveraging AI in Sales and Marketing (35:52) The Power of Customer Service in Retention (39:09) How to Market a Startup with Limited Funds (40:53) Marketing Strategies for Busy Entrepreneurs Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a leading global marketing and sales platform. His expertise in social media, SEO, and email marketing helped him advance to CMO in just five years. With a background in entrepreneurship and marketing, Kipp also hosts the Marketing Against the Grain podcast, where he shares insights on AI, marketing trends, and growth hacks. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Bilt - Start paying rent through Bilt and take advantage of your Neighborhood Benefits™ by going to joinbilt.com/PROFITING. Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting Resources Mentioned: Kipp’s Podcast, Marketing Against The Grain: bit.ly/MarketingAgainstTheGrain Kipp’s Book, The B2B Social Media Book: bit.ly/B2BBook Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, E-commerce, LinkedIn, Instagram, Digital Marketing, Storytelling, Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Communication, Video Marketing, Social Proof, Influencers, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Tips, Digital Trends, Marketing Podcast.
Chapter 1: What are the key strategies for business growth?
I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. Marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is.
So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. So in 2025, what inbound strategies are working?
A few things. The number one thing is...
Yeah, Bam, what if I told you that you don't need a massive marketing budget to build a powerful brand? Today, we're sitting down with Kip Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot, to crack the code on digital marketing for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up your marketing game, this episode is packed with practical tips, smart strategies, and real-world advice straight from one of the biggest names in digital marketing. Kip, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Hey, Hala. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
I am excited for this conversation. I love to talk about marketing. And I was so impressed with your journey. When I was researching your story, I found out that you rose to CMO at HubSpot in just five years, which is absolutely incredible. So my first question to you is, what do you think set you apart from other employees at HubSpot and accelerated your career growth at the company?
I think accelerating a business career growth, it's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are gonna give you the high magnitude of return? I think so often people get caught up in operational details or let everybody else push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, you have to look at the situation and say,
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Chapter 2: How does the entrepreneurial mindset influence leadership?
What are the three to five things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation? And that sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most.
Before you were joining HubSpot and you started there, you were actually an entrepreneur. So what were the advantages or disadvantages that you faced joining corporate, already having entrepreneurship experience?
Chapter 3: What is HubSpot's secret to global marketing success?
I think the first entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to Sam's Club and Walmart and find clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school. And so I was always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage. How do you buy low and sell high? And where are the inefficiencies of a market? And... One of the great things about marketing is that marketing is a game of arbitrage.
The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
And so what happens when you go and then work at a startup at the time, I think HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined, you go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people. And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is, I have limited scale, just me.
Chapter 4: What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I got to bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand. They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to being on a bigger team is that
How do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Because when you're a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go.
Chapter 5: How can content marketing strategies help you stand out?
100%.
It's exactly what it is. Whether you're trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper. Those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it.
So in your career, like I said, you rose up the ranks very quickly. Were there any pivotal moments that really shaped your trajectory or relationships? Or what do you think it was that you were able to go from employee to CMO and in the C-suite?
I think there's lots of moments that make that happen. My very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the equivalent of what you do now and what a lot of creators and amazing media companies do now, I did a long time ago because I'm old. And I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when we had a blog that had about 200,000 readers a month.
And by the end of the year, we were at about 1.5 million monthlies. And so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was... maniacally focused on that for better and for worse. There are challenges with being too overtly focused and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing.
And so I look at everything as like a sprint. whether it be a week, a year, two years, it's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now do on a daily basis. But in 2010 was kind of new and people were trying to figure it out at the time.
And so I think that was one. And then the other is when you go from being somebody who is contributing as an individual to like leading a team. So I went from running that blog to running all of our content and how we were, our blog, our social, our SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition because it's like, can I get people to follow me? Do I have a clear story?
Do I have a clear strategy? And the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something from you.
And so even though they may be specialists, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was for somebody else on my team and I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, oh, you understand my work. You understand the craft that we're working on together here.
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Chapter 6: What are effective ways to leverage AI in marketing?
Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Because then you're like, oh, wow, we have somebody who's able to overexceed what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them. Clearly, they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation to do more.
I teach a LinkedIn masterclass and it's people that wanna grow their personal brands. And one of the most common objections I get from these folks is that I'm really scared to start growing my personal brand while I'm working corporate. I'm scared to do my own thing. And I noticed that you launched a book while you were working at HubSpot, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So talk to us about that experience. What's your advice to people who want to become a thought leader in their space, but they do work in corporate? How should they approach it without stepping on toes or making sure that their company is aligned with what they're doing?
Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limiter to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You're scared largely of what other people think.
versus what's actually true and what's actually true if you look at the market what happens is that a company no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it they need experts and they need people who their customers look to as trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view on their market and You know how you get there?
You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast, you write a book, you have an email newsletter. There's tons of different ways, depending on your skills, your interests to get there, but you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog and they liked my blog.
And then I ran the blog and I host the Marketing Against the Grain podcast. Now, the thing that you know and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make something every day and every week, you learn so much faster and you get so much better at your craft if you have to teach a lot of other people
the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be good at in your job. And I have always found on my team that the people who are out there actively creating are some of the best people in their current roles in addition to what they may be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever.
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Chapter 7: How can startups market with limited funds?
I totally agree with you. A lot of the times it is an excuse. People are saying, oh, I think my company is going to get mad. My boss is going to get mad. But in reality, what may happen, especially if you like let them know you're going to do this and it's not competitive to what you're doing at work, you'll get more respected at work.
I remember when I started growing my brand and podcast, I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being asked to teach the C-suite how to use LinkedIn and getting flown to conferences and whatever it was when I was working at Hewlett Packard. Right now, Do you feel like you have an entrepreneurial itch or is being in C-suite enough for you to feel like you're building something?
Just because a lot of people think in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to start your own company, but I don't think that's necessarily true.
I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems. Inherently, the best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. And normally do so in a way that generates a lot of wealth for them and other people, right? And that's awesome.
You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're a startup founder, whether you are a leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company. It doesn't matter. I look at it as, am I in a situation to solve interesting problems? And the reason I don't go start a company right now is because I'm in a great position to go start and solve really interesting problems.
And I have a lot of access to capital and smart people to go and do that and make much faster progress than if I was just me trying to do something. I look at it as every situation you have an unfair advantage. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that when you work at a great company, you have the two things that matter most.
You have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want, but you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which a lot of entrepreneurs do not have. And so when you have both of those at the same time, regardless of the situation you're in, you should take advantage of it.
Okay, so let's move on to some marketing best practices. HubSpot has become a household name. So what do you think has been some of the major factors in becoming a global brand?
I think it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm not out of central casting. I am from a small town in West Virginia where my goal was to like do interesting stuff and see the world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently.
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Chapter 8: What content creation strategies work best in 2025?
So can you help us understand for those who are new to marketing, what's the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? And how was marketing different before HubSpot really came onto the scene?
The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt into any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right?
You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was very outbound, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing.
You can do it in an inbound way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in. And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet works, but 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. So we created a new category.
And sometimes if you're in marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, The best thing you can do is, there's a great quote out there, better is a debate, different is a choice. When you force somebody to make a choice and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, hey, do you wanna do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great?
Or do you wanna do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? We tell that story and people are like, oh, I wanna do the new cool thing that people like. I don't wanna do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we had just said, oh, like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better. Who cares? Well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better?
I don't know what you're talking about, right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do, but anybody can do it.
And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of to actually be differentiated in the market.
I know that you've been talking a lot about arbitrage, unfair advantages. So in 2025, what inbound strategies are working? Like, are blogs still working? How do you think about SEO, podcasts, and all that stuff?
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