HubSpot has become the first Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to integrate with ChatGPT Ads, in a move it argues will give Australian advertisers a new way to reach consumers while tying advertising activity back to customer and revenue data.
The channel is designed to let businesses reach people while they are using ChatGPT to research products and make purchase decisions, with resulting leads flowing into HubSpot for follow-up and attribution.
Sitting down with B&T at HubSpot Unbound in Boston, where the announcement was made, HubSpot’s VP of product Angela De Franco said the integration is ultimately about giving marketers more clarity over who they are reaching on the emerging channel — and what those people ultimately become.
“For Australian advertisers and media buyers, I think the biggest benefit is clarity on your segmentation,” De Franco said.
Because HubSpot’s audience lists are informed by CRM data, marketers can bring customer context into their advertising rather than relying solely on the targeting signals available within an advertising platform.
“That’s a really big step up from a targeting perspective,” she said.
The integration also aims to close the loop between advertising and what happens further down the funnel.
Rather than simply knowing that a marketer spent $1,000 targeting a particular keyword or audience, De Franco said marketers can start to understand who the buyer actually was, what they were looking for, whether they fitted the business’s target customer and what happened after the initial interaction.
HubSpot has already added advertising integrations with Reddit Ads and Microsoft Bing, but De Franco said ChatGPT was a natural addition as customers were already experimenting with the platform.
“Customers are asking on ChatGPT. They live in LLMs,” she said.
And while ChatGPT Ads is still a relatively new channel, De Franco said HubSpot customers were already testing it — making the integration an opportunity to help marketers understand how the channel fits into a broader advertising strategy.
For Australian SMBs in particular, she said the question will not simply be whether ChatGPT Ads exists, but whether their customers are actually using LLMs to discover and research products.
“If consumers are increasingly going to be on LLMs, including ChatGPT, it only stands to reason that it’s going to become a really, really important channel for marketers to be on, specifically SMBs and Australian SMBs as well,” De Franco said.
That does not mean marketers should immediately divert budgets away from search, social or other established channels, however.
De Franco said the businesses seeing the most value from ChatGPT Ads so far are treating it as a pilot rather than assuming the channel will work before they have tested it.
“Very few successful companies are saying, ‘We need to use ChatGPT Ads right now’,” she said.
Instead, the approach is to start with an outcome, run a pilot and scale the channel if the results justify doing so.
That test-and-learn approach is particularly relevant for SMBs, De Franco said, where advertising can still feel like a “black box”.
The CRM connection is intended to reduce some of that uncertainty by giving marketers greater visibility into what happens after an ad interaction.
Has the middle of the marketing funnel gone dark?
De Franco also sees the rise of ChatGPT Ads as part of a much broader shift in the way consumers move through the marketing funnel.
She said the traditional funnel is increasingly becoming an “hourglass”, with the middle of the funnel getting harder to track while the bottom becomes wider and more concentrated with high-intent buyers.
“The middle of the funnel has gone dark, while the bottom of the funnel is wider and high intent,” she said.
That shift is happening alongside a proliferation of channels. De Franco said the average number of channels marketers are active across has doubled from eight to 16 over the past decade, making it increasingly difficult — and inefficient — for brands to try to maintain a presence everywhere.
“You can’t go everywhere. It’s inefficient,” she said.
At the same time, she said the bottom of the funnel is becoming more valuable. While marketers may see fewer easily trackable website visits, those interactions can carry much stronger intent — with a higher proportion ultimately turning into leads and sales.
That is where De Franco sees emerging channels such as ChatGPT becoming particularly interesting.
Rather than simply adding another platform to an already crowded media plan, she said marketers need to understand where their buyers are actually spending their time and then test those environments accordingly.
“The new playbook is yet to be written,” De Franco said.
For Australian advertisers, that means ChatGPT Ads is unlikely to be a case of abandoning established search and social channels overnight. Instead, De Franco said marketers should start with the outcome they want, test the channel and use the data to determine whether it deserves a bigger role in the mix.
And as that new playbook takes shape, De Franco added the quality of the data behind marketers’ AI tools “will only become increasingly important”.
B&T travelled to Boston as a guest of HubSpot.
