Inbound Actually: A Marketing Love Story with Lisa Toner Hubspot

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hi, my name is Lisa Toner and I’m the content strategist at HubSpot EMEA. Today I’m going to talk about how you can create marketing that people fall in love with.Next slide: Questions and contact slide..
• #3: Since 15 minutes isn’t very much time, if you have any questions for me that I can’t get to, just tweet me at @lisatoner13 and I’ll respond over there after the session, or send an email to [email protected] slide – marketing is like marriage
• #4: I believe that marketing is a lot like marriage. Marketing should be about building a relationship with your customer. And every relationship requires a few essential ingredients in order to be successful. What do you think it takes to have a successful relationship? Let them answer…Next slide Attraction
• #5: As marketers, how do we pull leads into our website when they may not even know that they are looking for us yet?Next slide: Trust
• #6: How do we build trust so that visitors don’t think twice about giving us their personal information in exchange for what we’re offering.Next slide: Respect
• #7: How can we be respectful of their interests, and create a relevant and unique experience for every visitor to our website?Next slide: communication
• #8: How do we communicate in a personal way, that feels like a one on one conversation between two people?Successful marketing is about building relationships – so including these four elements to a happy relationship should ensure a happy bottom line for your business! Next slide: Dharmesh quote: “To really win in the modern age, we must solve for the human.”
• #9: This is one of my favourite quotes from one of HubSpot’s co-founders, Dharmesh Shah. He tells us that to really win in the modern age, we must solve for the humans…What we as marketers have forgotten, is that our audience is human. We are not robots and don’t respond well to generic, systematic messages. Marketers need to adjust the way we have been trying to communicate our messages in order to succeed – and change the perception of marketing.Next slide: Phasing out old marketing tactics.
• #10: One of the challenges of marketing to humans, is our intelligence. We have become too smart for traditional marketing to work on us anymore. Read the stats on screen. We call these interruptive marketing methods – Outbound marketing.Next slide: So the questions is.. ‘how do we create marketing people love’?
• #11: So the question is, how do you create marketing that makes people fall in love with you and your company? We all know that feeling of excitement we get when we receive a text message from someone we really want to hear from, a love interest, a family member or a friend. Today I want to show you how we can create that same experience for our prospects and customers when they hear from us. Next slide: The best approach… Build marketing assets
• #12: The best approach is to create content that solves your audiences problems throughout every step of the buying cycle. You need to create different forms of content that attracts them to your website, earns their trust, appeals to their specific interests, and communicate that content in a personal way to them.Next slide: European search stat
• #13: How many of you have gone online in the past few days to research something you wanted to buy? There has been a major shift in the purchasing funnel in recent years and the consumer is now in complete control. You need to make it easy for people to find you and see the value you bring when they are looking. Next slide: Example of a search our target market would do
• #14: For example, this is a common search that HubSpot’s buyer persona would be doing, and these are the results that they will get. Finding out the keywords people are using to search for answers is a great start to your content strategy. Once you know the main pain points of your audience, you should try to create lots of valuable content around solving those issues. And although HubSpot doesn’t sell Facebook services, or have any affiliation – we know this is a pain point for our target audience, so solving this problem for them, attracts them to our website to discover what it is we really do.Next slide – recap the elements of a successful marriage and why they are the same in marketing.
• #15: So far we have learned that in order to create marketing people love, we must build a relationship based on; Attraction, Trust, Respect and communication But how do we actually execute on these in our marketing?Next slide: Attraction
• #16: Attraction is the first step in any relationship. You need to draw someone in, and then woo them before they will commit to you. The first step should be to build a blog to attract people into your site. You should be writing about the problems you can solve for your visitors– never about what you sell.Next slide: HubSpot blog homepage – solving problems for your audience
• #17: This is the HubSpot blog. You can see that the articles are trying to solve for problems that marketers face. Do NOT just talk about yourself on the first date.. Or the products and services you sell.Next slide: Growth over time – put in the hard work and you will see results.
• #18: Every new blog post is a new website page on your site, and is a new opportunity to get found online. Websites tend to stay static over time, so a blog gives you a reason to be constantly adding fresh, new content, which Google loves and will vastly improve your SEO.Next slide: Blogging stats
• #19: HubSpot wouldn’t be where it is today, with more than 10,000 customers, if it wasn’t for our blog. Our blogging team adds 3-5 new posts to our blog every day, and in the past few years since 2006, we’ve gone from small blog with 2-3 people writing, to a blog that gets nearly a million visits each month. It takes time but with consistency and a good promotion plan in place, your blog will grow and it will bring you leads.Put in the hard work, and this WILL pay off if you give it time.
• #20: The stats show that blogging actually works. Companies that blog see a 55% increase in website traffic, 79% increase in twitter followers, and most importantly, 57% generate revenue from blogging. But you want people to do more than just read your blog. Which brings us to the next phase of the relationship… Trust.Next slide: Trust
• #21: As you start to push out more and more educational content to your audience, people will begin to trust the value that you provide. You want to get them to the point where they don’t think twice about providing you with their personal information in exchange for more of it. The content in this phase should be longer than a blog – for example an ebook, or a report.Once you get to this point,, you can also offer a free consultation, trial or demo to start moving them down the funnel towards becoming a customer.Next slide: Marketing library – ‘create content that makes life easier for your audience’
• #22: HubSpot has created hundreds of informational offers, including ebooks and webinars that are relevant to the software we sell and help our audience learn how to solve their marketing problems. This is how we generate 60 thousand leads a month, that we can give to our sales team.Our audience trusts us because we are over delivering on quality so they don’t think twice about giving us their contact and company information – we add value to their life.Next slide – treasure chest example
• #23: Once you create your offer, you need to put it behind a form on your site. What you’re looking at here is a landing page for an offer I recently created at HubSpot. It provides information about the offer, and includes a form so that people can give you their contact information in exchange for the offer. Once they fill out the form, you have a lead that you can follow up with by email or give to your sales team.This offer had over 20k views, and resulted in 450 new contacts that we didn’t have in our database before – as well as converting 5 new customers for HubSpot. We know how hard it is to come up with new ideas for content so we created this ‘Treasure Chest of Remarkable Ideas’ to help our audience out with that pain point. Next slide: Respect
• #24: Respect in marketing is about taking what your visitor has shown interest in - and providing them more relevant content based on that information. We call this ‘context marketing’.Next slide: Amazon – example of a company doing this well.
• #25: Amazon is one company that’s gotten context marketing right. If a teenage girl who enjoys fantasy novels goes to Amazon.com, she’ll see books on her homepage like harry potter or the hunger games – things Amazon knows she’s interested in based on her past purchases and pages she’s viewed. If you went to Amazon – your experience and suggestions would probably be different.. Probably…Next slide: Facebook example
• #26: Facebook is another company that does this well. Have a look at what kind of ads are displayed on your Facebook timeline. You may be surprised by how relevant they are to current events in your life. A colleague of mine recently got engaged in Paris and you can see how the ads on her news feed were altered to reflect that. Next slide – how do we provide context on our websites?
• #27: Yeah, easy for Amazon and Facebook to do that… right? Right, but its also easy for you to do it too! Next slide: To provide interest context, use relevant CTAs on each of your website pages and blog posts.
• #28: The easiest way to do this is to create several calls to action for offers you’ve created, and place them on the blog posts that are most relevant to the offers. For example, HubSpot’s blog posts about social media will have a social media offer advertised in the call to action. But a blog post about email marketing will show an email ebook offer instead.Next slide: HubSpot functionality allows smart CTAs..
• #29: We can also get really smart with this. Using the functionality in HubSpot, a first-time visitor that comes to our blog will see a call to action for anebook. Next slide, whereas if a lead we know is already interested based on previous activity comes…. IMA
• #30: However, if a lead we know is already interested, based on previous activity comes to that same blog post, they’ll see a call to action for something different, automatically. Instead, they’ll see an offer for a free marketing assessment, which would get him in touch with a sales person. That’s not something we would want to bombard a first-time visitor with, since we don’t even know what they’re interested in yet. This is smart marketing.Next slide: communication
• #31: No relationship will last without good communication. So how do we as marketers create a one-to-one conversation with our audience through our social and email channels?
• #32: This is HubSpot’s social inbox tool, which allows us to respond to social messages based on the data we already have on our contacts – which means we can have meaningful conversations, and provides context. Next slide: Email one-one, not one to many
• #33: Email used to look like this. Thankfully though, the days of sending one generic email blast to your whole database are over. People have learned to unsubscribe or filter messages that aren’t relevant to them.Next slide: segmentation instead
• #34: Instead, you should segment your database based on what your leads are interested in. You know what they’re interested in based on what they’ve downloaded from you. So at HubSpot, we’ll send people interested in blogging, emails about blogging, and people interested in Facebook will get emails about Facebook.
• #35: This is an example of a personalised email. You can see the dynamic content in green. This email will populate the lead’s first name, company name, and job title in the email. So this email is not only about something they’re interested in, but it’s specifically for them.Next slide: example of email based on context of buying cycle stage
• #36: In addition to sending people relevant content in your emails, you can also personalise your emails based on the information they’ve provided in the forms they’ve submitted. Personalised emails will improve CTR by 14%Next slide: personalised email example
• #37: And I think that’s my time up so to wrap up... Remember that you are marketing to humans who make emotional decisions. You need to attract new customers through blogging, build trust through over delivering on value in your content, respect their interests by providing context on your website, and communicate in a personalised, unobtrusive manner. Marketing is a lot like marriage – so include these four elements to a successful relationship – and you will spend a long and fruitful relationship with each of your customers.
• #38: Thank you very much for your time. I hope that has been helpful for you. If you have any questions, email me, tweet me, or add me on LinkedIn.