Unlocking Rich Snippets : Elevating your Content In Search Results
5 Trends That Will Drive Marketing in 2015
1. There are only so many holiday shopping hours left.
We’re honored you’re spending one of them with us.
LET’S GET STARTED!
The webinar will start promptly at 2 pm.
2. Welcome to this afternoon’s webinar:
5 TRENDS THAT WILL DRIVE
MARKETING SUCCESS IN 2015
3. > Administrative
>> 30 mins of presentation
>> 15 mins for questions
>> Use chat pane for Q&A
>> Recording/slides tomorrow a.m.
> Agenda
>> Introductions
>> Looking back
>> Looking forward
>> Q&A
40. Diversified Content:
As content becomes more
prevalent as a marketing
strategy, marketers are turning
to a new range of voices and
formats to stand-out.
53. Stepping Stones to Smarketing
1.Agree on target personas and goals
2. Implement a Service Level Agreement
3. Set up closed-loop reporting
4. Add pizza and beer *
*arguably optional
55. BEGINNER SLA:
How many leads do you
need?
• $500K Revenue goal
• $10k Avg revenue / customer
(ASP)
• 2% Avg lead to customer
conversion
$ Revenue Goal / ASP =
# New customers needed
# New cust needed / close % =
# leads needed
($500,000 revenue goal)
÷
($10,000 avg revenue / customer)
= 50 new customers needed
(50 new customers)
÷
(0.02 lead to customer ratio)
= 2,500 new leads needed
56. BEGINNER SLA:
How many website visitors
do you need?
• 2,500 leads goal
• 3% visitor to lead conversion
rate
# Leads needed / conversion
% = # Web visitors needed
(2,500 leads goal)
÷
(0.03 visitor to lead ratio)
=
83,333 website visitors
needed
Audio/visual check
Can you hear and see us, if you can our webinars are vastly more interesting
5 minute warning
2 minute warning
Ok, go time!
Welcome to this afternoon’s HubSpot webinar, I am your host Patrick Shea, more about who I am and what I do in a minute...did you know that we are 21 calendar days away from 2015? (Have it in hours too).
Whats on the minds of marketers in the last month before a new year?
I love spending time with family and friends around the holidays as much as anyone, and we hubspotters are not the kinds of people to wish the rest of the month away, but yikes....budgets, planning, hiring, what conferences are we going to sponsor, what are the KPIs that are going to be the most important in 2015....those things might be keeping you up at night. They’re keeping us up! You know what else is on the minds
Well you are in luck. We think we have a pretty firm grasp on where marketing is going. And we’re excited to talk about what we see as being the most impactful.
We are pumped for the presentation, i have an awesome co-presenter, but before we get started...
My bio
Hubspotter for 5 years
Director of field and channel marketing
Work super close with sales teams, manage SLAs, go to sleep with the month to date sales number under my pillow and wake up ready to smarket, like i know a lot of you do.
My co host
Meghan was a product marketer at a marketing automation company called performable, which hubspot acquired in 2010. meghan (thankfully) stuck around and now is the director and manager of our product marketing team. Her manages all product launches, customer communcations around updates we make to our software and 99% of the product specific positioning you see on hubspot.com. Big job, big mind. Pumped to have her.
OK trends. The future. Crystal balls, etc etc. Not so fast. Let’s go backwards first.
OK trends. The future. Crystal balls, etc etc. Not so fast. Let’s go backwards first.
Line for the ages. And maybe a mission statement for marketers everywhere? But for today it is a message we’re hoping to share together, all of us on the phone, as we look forward to next year? What do we need to know, what is going to make an impact?
The amount of marketers buying into content and that inbound mix of tactics continues to grow
This is what we use
If there’s one theme of this generation of marketers is data. Not just the standard analytics and form fields, but big data, data that is continually growing and feeds automatically into adaptive databases.
Here’s a mind-blowing figure for you: 90% of the worlds data has been created in the last two years. That’s according to SINTEF, an independent research organization.
Databases have begun to evolve from static upload and manual entry focused entities to more adaptive living organisms that tap into the vast array of data that’s available across the web.
Why are adaptive databases so important?
For starters, Left static, databases will decay at a natural rate of about 22.5% every year, particularly with B2B databases. People change jobs, change emails, opt-out and your audience begins to dwindle. A static database that only updates when new data is uploaded into it is going to quickly grow stale.
We actually have a free too you can use, a simple calculator, to assess how many new visits and leads you should target to compensate for this natural decay. You’ll find it at hubspot.com/database-decay. It’s rudimentary, but it’s a good start for goal setting in 2015.
We use a similar tool at HubSpot. The way we stay on top of database decay In HubSpot, is through our list analytics tool. For our database or any subsection of our database (in this case our blog subscribers) we’re able to generate a report as to the overall health of that list. Is it growing or plateauing? How active is it? What are the characteristics of it’s most active participants? How do you doubledown on the tactics that keep it growing.
It’s not just pure contacts that we’re trying to grow, but also information about each contact. Every person on the internet today carries with them an array of data that can be tapped and leveraged by adaptive databases
This is a look at our own marketing database in HubSpot where we pull in every interaction we have with our contacts. This includes pages they viewed on our website and emails they’ve opened, but through integrations, it can also include things like the videos they’ve viewed and the times they’ve mentioned us, a competitor or a keyword we care about on twitter. T
This enables two things:
1. It gives sales reps a more complete picture of every given sales opportunity. So they can cut through the sales pitch and get to what matters to each lead. The end goal here is more relevant conversations and better opportunity to close rates.
The second thing it enables is significantly more tailored communications from our marketing team
So we can in moments create a list or segment of our contacts based on interests, demographics, psychographics, behavior, really any combination of the above.
Our marketing team uses this for advanced segmentation and personalization across our email campaigns and website.
We can for example separate the people who attended this webinar from the people who attended it, tweeted about it, viewed our pricing page and generally seemed more interested. And then craft tailored responses for each. If we wanted to get that segmented.
More likely though, as a marketer I’m using adaptive databases to adjust our messaging based on the evolving interests and behaviors of our leads. So here in our marketing automation tool (workflows), I’m changing the frequency and focus of my email sends based on how someone interacts with the first one I’ve sent. The result for leads and customers ideally is a more relevant experience. I can also use an adaptive database to personalize content beyond email. And that brings me to my next trend to watch.
That brings me to our next trend. Cross channel personalization.
We think about personalization a lot when it comes to email. And that makes sense, personalized emails get about a 20% higher conversions than blast emails. Here’s an example of how we personalize subject lines for better opens. We’ve found that the more personal an email feels the better it does. In fact, we’ve had great success with emails that have little to no formatting and read like a one to one experience.
But one of the things that has really changed in the last few years is the expectations customers have for their entire experience to be tailor made. Janrain found that [stat]
Sites like amazon and netflix have really trained the consumer to expect personalization everywhere. From the inbox to the website and beyond.
And companies that do so are starting to see results. A Monetate/econsultany study from last year found that
To personalize, you need two things. The technology to power it and the strategy to make it useful rather than trivial.
On the technology side, the ingredients are an adaptive database, a segmentation tool – like you see here. And a personalization engine that can plug the database into your content tools. I’ll show you that next.
Here’s a look at that personalization engine at work. There are two types of personalization happening here. 1) the insertion of relevant details from an individual contact’s profile into the webpage and 2) the complete swap of a block of content for a given segment.
Everytime someone comes to your website they are bringing with them traces of information. Even people coming for the very first time. First time visitors will come with information about their country, device and referral source. You can use this to make content more relevant even at the first meeting.
As I mentioned the technology you need to pull this off is straightforward and more commonly available now than it used to be.
the basic technological components for personalization in your marketing are the same:
content tools,
a contact database,
and some sort of personalization engine that marries the two.
To varying levels of sophistication, this is all any company uses to personalize. Three things. Working together.
So technology has made this easier to do.
It has not however made it easy to do well. For that you need strategy. You need to know your audience, its segments, and where the points of friction are on your website. Personalization needs to be useful. It’s not useful to just plop someone’s first name or favorite ice cream flavor on your homepage. It is useful to elevate industry-specific content or remove unwanted or irrelevant material.
Done poorly, personalization can leave a bad taste in a prospective customers mouth. This is an example of a website that got personalization wrong. Certainly there’s data problems here, but more acutely, they’re optimizing for the wrong thing. They showing off all they claim know about me. That doesn’t help me, the prospective customer. What helps me as a customer is getting rid of irrelevatn content and raising up content that matters to me.
Here’s an example of how Intuit Quickbase solved a moment of friction through personalization.
The problem was this. When visitors first came to their website Intuit showed the Call to Action you see here to get them to download an educational ebook and become a lead. This was great for a first conversion, but when people came back to the site they saw the same ebook offer again and having already read that book – they missed an opportunity for a second conversion.
Intuit quickbase
Intuit solved that by creating a smart list (one based on criteria that grows continually) of people who had downloaded the change management ebook. Now, henever anyone comes back to the site, they don’t see that repeat ebook offer anymore, they see a new offer that sets them up for a deeper conversion in the funnel.
So you can get it wrong, but let’s talk about how you get it right.
Marketing / Product/ Engineers
These are actual notes from a planning session with our content team. I want to draw your attention to a few things there. 1) there is a diversity of formats here. From templates to PDFs/ebooks to visual offers). 2) these aren’t all net new pieces, we’ve found that some of our best content is evergreen content that we refresh and update with new information. 3) finally, you’ll want to note that there’s a distinct promotion plan for each. Those campaigns involve social promotion, emails, website updates etc, and all of these have to be organized in a unified editorial calendar.
Here’s an example of the calendar we use. This is built into hubspot – though if HubSpot’s not for you you can create a basic version of it using google calendar. What I want to draw you’re attention to is that we’re delegating tasks, and scheduling posts from a single unified place. So we can get a birds eye view to make sure our content hasn’t grown stale and spot gaps in the schedule.
So we’re trying to get more efficient as a team, but we’re also trying to figure out what content is actually working best to drive business. This is a view of a regular report we run to see which piece of content (in this case blog posts) led to a conversion for us (in this case someone becoming a lead. ) We did this assist report earlier this year and found that the top converting blog posts actually contained infographics. That’s not an instruction to all go out and create infographics, but it does show you the unexpected results that can come from this kind of analysis
That brings me to out next trend. Growth Hacking
There has been growing and significant interest in growth hacking over the last year. This is a graph of the number of times it has been searched on google.
Growth Hacking is not such a foreign concept for marketers though. Essentially growth hacking is a view of marketing that takes a systematic approach to optimizing conversions. In software companies, growth hacking often incorporates efforts from marketers and engineers a like to build points of leverage into things like a free trial or the product itself.
But essentially, we’re talking about running ongoing and disciplined experiments to to increase conversion rates thoughout the funnel. And then scaling the experiments that work.
Funnels
Search
Content
A/B testing is one of the best tools in growth hacking. Create two versions of a conversion page and test a hypothesis. For example, would adding a video to the page increase or decrease the conversion rate? Is it an influencer or a distraction?
Growth hacking also takes historical data and applies it to future actions. In this example, we’re sending an email and our email software is telling us in the yellow boxes what send times have historically led to the optimal open rate. What’s interesting about this in HubSpot is that the software will start off with giving you benchmarks for how well sends do for most of our customers but then as you send email, that send time optimization will adapt to your specific email results showing you what time and days have historically been best for your company. It also checks for things like likelihood of being seen as spam and how a given email will resolve in different inbox clients and devices.
In email, where it’s such a numbers game, this kind of focus on optimization can radically change your results.
The final trend I want to discuss is what we call Smarketing. Or what happens when sales and marketing are combined.
And yet, they’re sharing the same funnel. The sales process starts long before a lead talks to sales. And the marketing process doesn’t end once a sales rep picks up the phone.
Smarketing is…
When we decided we wanted to become a smarketing organization here at hubspot, we knew we had to get a few things right.
Getting on the same page starts with a core understanding of who you’re selling to, what his or her needs are and where their common objections lay. This keeps sales from arguing that marketing doesn’t send quality leads. This is a look at one of our personas, Corporate Cathy. We have a common understanding of who Cathy is and at any given point we know how many quote unquote cathies there are in our funnel (as you can see in the list to the left)
Once we got on the same page around personas, we sat down to create a service level agreement.
The SLA is an agreement between sales and marketing about how many leads marketing will generate in a given month and how many of those leads sales will work and close. Here’s an example of how to build a basic one.
Well, you take the sales goal, and you do some simple math to back into what the leads goal needs to be using the conversion rates you have seen in the past.
Let’s say your revenue goal is $500k, and the average customer pays $10k. That means you need 50 new customers.
If your historical lead to customer conversion rate is 2%, that means you need 2,500 new leads.
You can take this same principle and go further up the funnel.
If you know your visitor to lead conversion rate is 3%, then you need over 80,000 visitors to your website.
We’ve taken our service level agreement and built it into everything we do. This is a look at a past monthly waterfall inside HubSpot. The goals in this are set by the SLA and we consistently watch it so we can adjust mid-month if we are behind.
Every marketer gets a regular email to keep them focused on it.
If we do find that we need to adjust, we look to the channels and content that are working so we can double down. Connecting HubSpot to our CRM means we can pull in revenue numbers for each effort so we can really close the loop.
This is a look at our integration with saleforce. You can see marketing data pulled right into the contact view here.
We believe in the improtance of closed-loop marketing so wholly that we built a free CRM for HubSpot customers who didn’t have one to plug their marketing into.
Here sales can see the history of interactions a lead has had with marketing and marketing can be sure that leads are being followed up with appropriately.
I should note, the CRM is free but it’s just for HubSpot customers right now.
Everyone however can download this template to help you through the math equation I laid out before and help you develop an agreement with your sales team. We posted it at this link.
It looks like this. Sit down with your sales team to look back at your history and get on the same page about goals. If you don’t have the historical data, you can start with the simple equation I covered earlier and estimate your conversion rates.
We’ve seen a positive corrolation between marketing budget and having an SLA so if there’s a trend to hop on after this webinar, it’s this one. And you don’t need any software to do it.
Inbound unlocks ROI,
Alright that concludes our trendwatch today – here are those trends we’re keeping an eye on again.
My co host
Meghan was a product marketer at a marketing automation company called performable, which hubspot acquired in 2010. meghan (thankfully) stuck around and now is the director and manager of our product marketing team. Her manages all product launches, customer communcations around updates we make to our software and 99% of the product specific positioning you see on hubspot.com. Big job, big mind. Pumped to have her.
My co host
Meghan was a product marketer at a marketing automation company called performable, which hubspot acquired in 2010. meghan (thankfully) stuck around and now is the director and manager of our product marketing team. Her manages all product launches, customer communcations around updates we make to our software and 99% of the product specific positioning you see on hubspot.com. Big job, big mind. Pumped to have her.