Inbound marketing strategy (2018): Tips for a successful implementation (Training)

can everyone hear me okay yeah great good morning ladies and gentlemen it is absolutely my pleasure to be here this morning feeling very fortunate to get to fly into London on a lovely sunny day and come to this very cool venue I have to say kudos to clewd for picking such an amazing venue for this morning's event and as you can see on the speaker circuit at HubSpot there's a bit of competition to get to come to London to do this hug so I'm fortunate that I helped clear dice and he's done me a solid back by letting me speak to all you guys today I'm I'm gonna run through some tips that any business can employ to operate a successful invent strategy today so we're going to just walk through some inbound fundamentals I'm happy for this to be a very discursive session so if you want to stop and ask me questions as we go feel free I am a partner services manager at HubSpot it's moving for me apologies guys I am a partner services manager at HubSpot and essentially what that means is I work with the team of channel consultants that essentially assists our agency partners to resell HubSpot successfully and to make inbound marketing work for their own business so my team work with agencies like clewd who come in wanting to make inbound work for their business we teach them how to get it cranking and then when they're ready to resell and service other customers we support them in an ongoing journey what can I tell you about me I've been working at HubSpot for about a year and a half I'm very passionate about retention naturally in my job we're measured on retention metrics and the way that we focus on retention at HubSpot is to be absolutely obsessed with delivering customer success if we deliver customer success the renewal piece tends to take care of itself I'm with inbound essentially what we typically find is that businesses come to us whether they're an agency or a regular business and they tend to have a similar set of problems so some of them you'll see up on the board this morning and if I can have a show of hands if any of these start to resonate with you guys and sound familiar please just raise your hand so one of the most common issues not getting enough leads any hands fair enough not getting good traffic to the website any hands keep your hands up how about this one so we've lots of content where we're not producing actual leads so we're writing and writing and writing but nothing is really coming through any hands that sound familiar my leads aren't turning into sales and queries so these are the types of challenges that our customers have regardless of whether it's an agency that we're working with or it's an agency's customer that were helping them to service um it seems to me like these are pretty common challenges and some of the tips that I'm going to run through today essentially are addressing these challenges as you can see anybody that's facing any of these challenges you're pretty good company I'm every year HubSpot produces a state of inbound rapport and by our research team and time and time again these are the top issues that tend to come through in the research regardless of whether you're a HubSpot customer or not so the solution that we propose is to start to employee invent I'm strategy to both your sales and marketing and activities in your business it's important just to reiterate here for anyone that's not familiar with the concept of inbound marketing but with inbound what we're essentially doing is trying to focus on attracting good fit leads or opportunities to your business and we do that through producing meaningful content that can enable you to have meaningful interactions with potential customers so I suppose if you're to think about it in its crude its Cruiser crudest form it's about just having good social etiquette I'm it's not about interrupting people it's about actually being helpful being responsive and I'm being very human in the way that you you employ your marketing and your sales strategy again for anyone that's less familiar with inbound the inbound methodology essentially starts with the concept of attracting these leads or prospects to your business and that can be through any digital and any any point in your digital footprint and so it doesn't just have to be through your website it can be through your social profiles and it can be through really any channel whether it's an online forum that you participate in anything that gives your business your brand and the people within it visibility once we've attracted these people to the website we look to convert them so we need to make sure that the visits actually convert into leads and at that stage we try to nurture them and close them into customers and once they're customers again we focus on retention you might hear that word for me a lot things I'm pretty obsessed with it and we focused on Unruh tension by delighting customers in an ongoing basis throughout their life cycle so today I'm going to talk to you about the top three challenges that I hear from customers and some of the tactics that you can employ to work through these challenges the first is that we're not attracting enough traffic to the website or we're not attracting the right type of traffic to our website this focuses on the attract stage of the methodology so essentially there's a problem on what you're doing to attract leads and the right kinds of those leads as a channel consultant if you have this type of challenge typically the first thing that we'll investigate is well how well are you positioning your business in the online space and that's something that I'd ask every one of you today to have a think about um do you have any business owners marketing managers in the room today yeah can I ask when was the last time you did an audit of your digital footprint and what I mean by that is when is the last time you did a search for your business online and audited that or scored yourself in terms of for the top ten organic search listings that appear how would you rate your businesses profile online have a show of hands who's who has done that in the last year okay we have a few people doing it probably not enough this is something really that everybody needs to audit on a very regular ongoing basis because often that is the first touch point that a potential customer has with your business and you would be astounded how neglected that audit is so I come from a branding background originally and I focus on branding from both the traditional perspective but I also focus on branding from a digital perspective remember a brand is your promise and sometimes you can have the most beautiful graphic design work and the most beautifully presented website but you've completely neglected your brand positioning online and as a result you're doing a ninja injustice to your own business so I would literally grade a website as to how well do I as someone whose they're blind to your business interpret what you do and understand what are your USP s do I immediately get that from the search search listings and if I don't then I'm sorry but you're gonna get a bad grade for me the second thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to understand again from that search listing position who are you trying to attract and is that me can I imagine myself as your target prospect so these are the types of things that we initially explore and you'd be amazed at how often those things haven't been really well thought through positioning is important because you just can't be all things to all people and you can imagine if you have a business with 50 prospects so different types of prospects that you're trying to target imagine the amount of content you'd have to produce to target those prospects in a meaningful and customized way it's an enormous labor so you have to get very focused initially when you're trying to make inbound and digital work for your business we know that 72% of businesses are far more likely to buy from experts than you're kind of generalist so for example if somebody had a terrible heart murmur imagine yourself with a terrible heart murmur and you have an option of being treated by your GP who has maybe you know consulted someone once in the past 25 years with this condition or even opportunity to go to a specialists who deals with people who have these types of problems and on a daily basis who would you feel more confident in being treated by the GP or the specialist it's a no-brainer it's the specialist who would you expect to pay more for specialist do we have any qualms with that do we hi girl with a specialist no we we accept it he's a specialist so we're going to have to expect to pay more for it you can take that same perspective with your business if you are really pushing your unique selling point effectively online you will have more room to grow your profit margin unless quip from prospects over price which is ultimately where everybody wants to be so this is one thing that I would ask you guys to do today go away and do a reflection on how well you really feel you position your business online do you know what is unique about your business do you actually understand why somebody should choose you over similar competing alternatives and if you do really understand that are you effectively promoting that online in a tiny search listing position where you have a very very small window of opportunity to get your message across here's an example of a business that I believe does it quite well so kuno creative or a hope spot agency partner they've been around the block they're a partner about 12 10 or 12 years now so they've been up and down they didn't get it right first time believe you me but they do a pretty good job of positioning themselves online there's no ambiguity about what they do or who they are they're an inbound marketing agency we know that they unpack the concept of inbound because not everybody understands what it means so they use this meta copy space here to explain we're talking about content marketing demand generation lead nurturing they promote their USP highlighting that their hopes about partner and what their tier status is and then there they have these guys on highlight here so these are their key service areas of delivery if you take a look at a business that position them positions themselves well online you'll see that they have a consistency in that messaging across every digital profile and again that's something that as a business and it's your responsibility to look after the reason that this is so critical in the online space is because we know that somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of search engine users don't bother going past page 1 of Google search results I personally can't remember the last time I clicked into page 2 of Google search results instead of clicking through and looking for more options and alternatives users tend to actually change their search behavior so they'll sharpen their search and they'll extend their search typically through a longtail keyword search rather than clicking into page to Google search results so the hard truth is if you're not on page 1 for the keywords that you feel as a business are fundamental to rank 4 then unfortunately there's just no point in even putting effort into that activity so how do you understand what keywords you should search for and how do you even go about determining what you should start to research from a keyword perspective the best place to start really is to fall back in the personas the people that you're trying to attract to your business and the way that I like to frame it is again remember inbound is about being helpful and being human think about those prospects and the things that keep them awake at night so in their business the stuff that's stressing them out can you as a business solve their problems and if you can you need to start there imagine at the outset when they're having a problem what are the types of things that they're searching for online when they're looking for help this is definitely a useful starting point where most businesses go wrong is they start optimizing their website around the product through the services that they sell they're the most competitive keywords that you can try to compete for and it's going to be an enormous ly difficult an ongoing enduring battle to retain good search listing position for those keywords if we actually take the reverse approach and start with the press the prospect their pain points or their challenges their aspirations what they're trying to achieve and start all of our strategy from that perspective we can start to build a keyword strategy from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and that enables us to compete more effectively to drive more traffic higher volumes of traffic and to have a healthier top middle and bottom funnel of leads for nurturing once you've developed your keyword strategy and you can use there's lots of different keyword tools on the market is anybody in the room not using a keyword tool to help them analyze what what keywords they they should be competing for yeah okay so there's lots of keyword tools that you can use and some good tools include tools like keyword darío which will help you kind of stimulate keyword ideas and HubSpot offers a keyword tool that will essentially help you determine which of the keywords you're interested in are either difficult to compete for or more likely for you to be able to compete for and how many of those terms have a high versus low search volume obviously the bullseye targets of a keyword strategy are terms that aren't too difficult to compete for and have a really nice volume of monthly search traffic once we've determined what your target keywords are we can start to optimize the pages on your website and this can be a really quick win for any business because if you re optimize the pages on your website with keywords that you know you can compete for you can automatically see a real lift and the volume of traffic that you're driving to your website because we've oriented all of these keywords around the persona we know that we've a greater chance of driving the right type of leads to the website as well another tool that he that you can use if your hosts about customer is our content strategy tool anybody familiar with this tool yeah so we have a few hands in the room that's great this is a very new tool that he were that HubSpot have built and in my opinion it's probably one of the most groundbreaking tools that we've built and over the years the reason being that anyone that has done that exhaustive keyword research and spent hours trying to refine the keyword strategy going through reams and reams of data to identify those targets it's a pretty labor-intensive job it takes a bit of time does anybody in the room focus on that yeah so it's not it's not the most fun task I would say and setting out your inbound strategy this tool takes away an enormous amount of that pain so essentially what this tool enables you to do is you can decide on a topic area that's of interest it might be a service or product that you sell and this tool will help you identify what iterations of keyword keywords and you can use that are in and around that topic it will help you identify the keywords that you can realistically compete for and keywords that are worth targeting because we know there's a certain volume of monthly search traffic associated with them very quickly you can build out the framework of an entire campaign and you can use those keywords then to optimize all of say your blog content or your video content and that will enable you to then drive that traffic to your website the real beauty of this tool is that essentially you start to develop an authority around a subject matter and that's very important for anybody that's looking to improve their organic search listing positions or their website's domain Authority around a particular topic area that's how search engines work today they want to see that a certain business is owning a topic and the more we can see interaction from people coming through and to their website and engaging with that content search engines will start to believe that actually you are a master of that topic area and they'll add weight to your ranking score as a result so definitely worth checking eyes brand new tool if you're a HubSpot user and take a look at our Shore if you're not a HubSpot user feel free to do a demo there are probably other similar tools and might in the market that you can use all of this entire tool has been designed around the idea of pillar content and cluster content and essentially the best way to think about that is cluster content is typically things like blog content or video content anything that you're using on your website to attract traffic to your site so content that you can optimize or in good quality keyword targets and equally content that we know is is going to be of interest I'm going to be engaging once we have them on the website we need to convert them so we use pillar content or what I prefer to call conversion content and which is a higher value piece of content that we can gate with a form and that's what enables us to actually capture leads on the website when HubSpot started orientating around this methodology of building campaigns around topics to become an authority in a subject matter we actually increased our own and traffic to the website by 50 percent so no small improvement for an already high-performing website I'm just going to revert back to the concept of positioning in the online space again sometimes that people kind of fail to recognize is that when you're positioning online we need to make sure that you're giving people an opportunity to understand what you are as a business and and that you're touching all of the am I suppose metrics or all of the the checklists that are important to cross off in order to optimize your site successfully so we can see in a in a well up to my site that's positioned very well that they're using very defined keywords in the URL structures on their website and the titles of pages and all throughout the content they don't intend to tell you as a customer or as a persona but depending on what's of interest to you you can take a certain journey through our website and at this point then they can start to personalize that journey so it might be because that customers from a specific sector or perhaps it's because you have a specific product or service area that you're interested in I suppose the key message here and I honestly feel like anytime I give a presentation or anytime I speak at any kind of meeting I'm banging on about personas personas are the most neglected piece of a successful marketing strategy today not just an inbound strategy but any marketing strategy it has to start and stop with the people that you're trying to attract and the customers that you're trying to retain if at any stage you don't have your personas on the wall and you're literally looking at them and having a conversation with them as you're talking to through your strategy there's a good chance that you're going to go wrong in your strategy so to own search listing space online it's becoming increasingly important to start to develop campaigns around subject matters to make sure that you have an ecosystem of content that's going to reassure search engines that you are actually a master in this topic area and that there's a lot of activity ongoing around this subject matter so what would one of those campaigns look like well in this example we can see that we've a business that's looking to become an authority in the area of workout routine so maybe they own a stream of gems or maybe it's a team of personal trainers something to that effect if they try to compete for workout routines in the online space and they're a new business what do you think their chances are ranking for a term like that straight out of the gate pretty bad yeah not a good idea but they can develop a series of longer tail keywords and using a tool any kind of keyword analysis tool they'll be able to identify whether or not realistically they have any opportunity to compete for those terms and once they found those target terms they can start to build out all of their content strategy around them and they'll see results relatively quickly if this is done well you'll start to see results really within one to two weeks so in summary what am I trying to say ensure you're conveying your positioning consistently not just on your website but across all of your digital footprint ensure your content is developed with your persona at the forefront always probably the most common mistake we see is that a business will have the SEO guys and they live over here and some kind of secret far off land and they don't talk to anybody nobody talks to them they just shoot across some information or tweak some stuff on a website and and it's really siloed activity if they haven't actually performed the keyword research and strategy with a true understanding of the personas and in mind then your content strategy is really at a disadvantage and don't just focus on keywords remember that you need to think about a court Opik a course subject math matter that you ultimately want to own if you start to develop an ecosystem of content around a subject matter it won't take you long to see your rankings for that difficult highly competitive keyword to really start to rise up through the ranks I'm a jumper time dude yeah so the next common problem my website isn't actually converting traffic into leads we have loads and loads of traffic no leads sound familiar yep we're in the convert stage of the methodology here where essentially we're trying to convert visitors into leads typically what we're trying to do is lead capture and through forms on the website we also need some calls to action in place and we typically use landing pages to highlight that high-value piece of content and so that we can really do a thorough promotion of it the trick with conversion is guess content and not just any old content really really good content and I would encourage every business every marketing manager to spend less time on pumping content out and more time on creating really good quality content and it's not a volume play it really is a quality play but you've probably heard tons of presenters come to you and say write better content make better content and the truth is actually creating content feels a little bit like this you want to tear your hair out sometimes you write an absolute masterpiece 20 page ebook or the white paper and literally you feel like you've earned a degree by the end of it I'm and then you get four views and no conversion and it is literally soul destroying the truth is that we need to actually change with the times people don't have time to read when was the last time anyone in this room if I can have a show of hands who here in the room read an e-book that was 25 20 pages plus thereabouts or a white paper anything to that effect in the last three months if you're in college and it was homework that doesn't count okay so we're we're dwindling audience time Bree I don't believe it [Laughter] well then it was if it was the state of inbound then it was worth worth read and no content is is very hard to create it's also very hard to consume and remember that the nature of how people are consuming content now is very different to what it was in the past how do i consume content now typically on my commute on the train in the morning that's when I have an opportunity to scroll through LinkedIn and read stuff and if it's a 30-second video am I gonna view it yep if it's a 20 page ebook am I gonna read it you know I'm like I might bookmark the website page with the intention of coming back to it and giving myself that master's degree and whatever the subject matter is but I'm with that with the best intent in the world I just don't have the time to do that so we're going to talk about how you can actually create different forms of content different formats of content so that it becomes irresistible to click ok so I would challenge everybody in the room today to again do an audit of your content is your content unskipable what do you think yeah okay so you're next up to give us a presentation on your content definitely curious you have to be really really honest with yourself to see you know is this content literally irresistible to click if it's not if it's me to meteor content then you need to limit your expectations it has to be in line with the quality of your output so you need to think outside the box how can you do that anybody familiar with the skyscraper technique yeah well that's cheating she's also cheating so clear is going to talk a little bit more I believe about this I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go too deep into it because clewd is going to talk about this and in a few moments time the skyscraper technique is actually a really clever technique essentially what you do is you use sites like bazoom Oh Raph's Google News open site Explorer to do a search for the best performing pieces of content around that subject matter that topic area that you want to own these sites will essentially produce reports back to you and tell you what currently is a top-ranking piece of content on that subject matter and really this is a very fun game because you run through all of these topic areas that you're interested in having ownership off in the online space and challenge yourself to see can we beat that can we be what is currently the top performing piece of content in that space and any good marketer that likes a bit of a fight will absolutely find something that they believe they can beat because maybe that content was time banned maybe it's about to go out of date or maybe you could do a better design maybe it was too long maybe you could produce it in shorter sound bites or maybe in a video format and or perhaps it was just mission missing critical pieces of information if you believe you can beat a piece of content then you have a bull's-eye target of what you need to produce you can produce that content and then funding enough you can go and connect with all of the site administrators that are currently promoting that piece of content and invite them to link to your piece of content now so it's a pretty straightforward strategy I'm under employed and can produce really nice dividends in terms of high quality backlinks to your website that's going to have a monumental impact in your website's search listing position performance some other content ideas interactive content and I'm a big fan of this again it's probably because I have about a two-minute attention span and so on that train on that commute if I get to do a survey and that makes my day if I get to play a four-minute game that makes my day and there's loads of tools that you can use like snap app or quiz or calm that will enable you to very quickly produce surveys or interactive games I mean who in this room wouldn't take the Taylor Swift quiz honestly we all know she has multiple personalities and it's just human nature that you want to know the other thing that people love are free things free stuff we all love free stuff and one of hope spots best-performing conversion pieces of content today isn't an e-book lo and behold it's actually our blog topic generator tool and probably because we know our persona you know the marketing manager in a business who has to write nine million blog posts a year it's a bit of a painful experience coming up with the actual topic ideas is rather painful so we just created a tool that would kind of solve for that and help marketing managers come up with topic ideas now if you actually use this tool you'll realize that most of those topic ideas that come back are futile but it'll stimulate your creativity and help you actually arrive at a good subject matter videos I know that everybody talks about producing video content and the truth is the video content just seems hard to produce is that right yeah it's just hard isn't it yeah wrong it's not hard it's not hard that's just in your mind I have a partner that I work with who produces video content almost every day here's his trick he's a an extrovert personality in fairness he just comes up with this arresting statement he'll throw it up on LinkedIn he'll say 90% of marketers today of absolutely no idea what they're doing and don't employ a marketer you need to work with something like me and lo and behold and his extensive network okay quite a lot of pushback to those statements and before you know it there's this argument and really interesting discussion happening on his LinkedIn thread what he does is he lets that unfold for a little while then he sets up his video camera and when he's ready to go he presses record and he makes that statement again and he has a conversation off the back of those comments in that length in thread so he'll make a statement and he'll say John doesn't agree with me well John here's what I have to say to your comment and he'll literally have a discussion with these people who are participating kind of involuntarily but it's still an interesting happens and they actually nervous it takes him about 30 minutes he does a quick edit Chuck's it up puts it on his website it's an incredible tool to attract people and then just promotes a high value piece of content off the back of it and it's it's an incredible trick for converting leads his problem is he has so many leads that he doesn't have the manpower to follow up with them wouldn't that be a nice position to be in 30 minute videos it takes him no effort there is zero preparation involved and he just puts himself out there admittedly not for everyone don't do it myself but a very good tactic I think thinking that video is hard is a mindset the reality is we consume video all the time snapchat in stories and video doesn't have to be perfect it has to be human and it has to be engaging this is whiteboard Fridays and anybody familiar with this yeah a few so again I think credit to these guys and they just say we have lots of knowledge we want to create some content we're just going to whiteboard it and have a conversation about it not a very high quality production but very very interesting a be testing crucial a be testing of your emails is crucial who here likes spam no no spam fans good one oh that's shocking and no spam is the enemy if you're not a be testing your emails please please start to a/b test your emails and if you're not testing them admittedly you do need to have a decent database to test your emails on but it's again it's a missed opportunity remember that you shouldn't produce emails because you as a market or a marketing of man and eight to get these emails out you need to produce the content because your personas will actually care about it and actually get some value from it and if you're not producing content in that manner then you deserve a really terrible open race and you deserve a black listing I'm joking bit harsh um some other cool tips on the sale side is to equip your sales reps with sales enablement content and then track how that content performs in HubSpot we have a tool called documents which essentially just provides us with the analytics behind how that sales enablement content works so while our marketing team are off creating case studies and we've absolutely no idea if they're of any value you can now actually have all sales reps attach these to their templated emails that you as a marketing manager have crafted so you know the Spelling's are correct and hey presto you can see that the case study that you spent hours writing and beautifully designing and plumb massing your customer to give you the the go-ahead to produce is actually performing it's actually providing sales reps or insights that give an indication around intent to buy so a tool like documents will give you an idea of whether or not these documents have been opened how much time a prospect spent reading the document if they reopened it if they shared it etc etc any sales reps in the room does that sound like some nice insight yeah I don't know any sales rep you wouldn't want to have those insights to hand what else have I got for you so in summary create content that people love employ tactics like the skyscraper technique go out and find a way to produce some interactive content even if it's just quizzes or competitions or polls polls are great just pull your customers and then run a commentary piece on the results that come back very easy to do it's a mindset more than an actual reality and in terms of the effort it takes to produce that content and use data continuous to continuously optimize your content so that you have the insights to understand what is working and if it's not working stop and change your tactic very quickly any questions on anything so far yeah okay so essentially that's the the spam product that they're using and it's all about optimizing and trying to re-engage a customer it is tricky and I would say that in the first half of this year a lot of customers had some pretty tricky problems and with email deliverability and I'm not sure if we've time for me to go into this two minutes so you might remember you might know of Black Friday in America happens in November where businesses give discount codes and all you need to do to get your discount code is provide an email address low and behold that doesn't have to be an actual real email address you can just give them any old email address and who wouldn't want free discount code without getting spammed by a company afterwards bingo unfortunately for email service providers this was hugely problematic because all of a sudden December January banks rates from email sends were horrific because there were so many fake email addresses in the lists that we were sending emails to it produced no end of problems and off the back of that we very quickly saw that spam product providers email clients started to raise the threshold of what emails they would let and threw to customers so they've kind of sharpened their focus this is something that's external from HubSpot it's not something that we can control or any submit a mail service provider can control and I would if I'm honest you're probably going to not like this response go back to your persona and have a look at your email subject lines and the content within that email and ask are we doing a good enough job to actually truly engage this customer and if the hook isn't really strong for that persona if it sounds like it's promotional in nature you're probably going to have at that yeah okay did you try to adjust the spam filter settings yeah yeah so unfortunately with spam traps the way they work is that if you commit a first offense they're gonna suspect all of the rest of the content that comes through so you're gonna have to work with that spam and product or your email client and to try to kind of work through that problem yeah okay yeah it's it's definitely a tricky problem I would say work very closely with your account manager and the email deliverability team um if it's a problem on the server we can work with multiple of providers to work on kind of whitelisting delisting etc clean is the man to speak with okay so earlier when you were talking about search behavior and how users will start with broad search and then move to a more long tail search not always yeah not always so in the case of I've got a client right now that they're very commoditized market so what happens is they start broad search and they typically tend to just filter straight into aggregators so like portals that are then providing that sort of secondary search so we found that all of the long tail search words just have extremely low volume because yeah people just aren't going that deep into it so I was curious if you had any strategies around that sort of scenario because obviously trying to get high search rankings those people would be very difficult yeah sir yeah I'm I don't I don't think I need this so I mean it is tricky by nature and so just to explain longtail keywords for people you might start with a short tail keyword search for and read runners and over time you start to realize that that's going to produce just all sorts of results in Google so you extend your search and you say read like Ronnie runners for women for track racing and that's what we would call a longtail keyword phrase and by nature as you get longer in the keyword phrase the search volume decreases we're becoming more and more concise about exactly what it is you want and the truth is as you get longer tail nature the search volumes decline and so I would kind of refocus the keyword strategy and bring it back to a shorter tail and keyword phrase it's I wouldn't be able to kind of solve it if I can have a go at that one as well I think the industry that you're specifically talking about is real estate yeah and there are other industries which are similar and you've had a number of very large players come into that space you know Zoopla Ranaut and all of the others and and they have very large marketing budgets yeah so you're competing with some very big gorillas in the space yeah and in the end of the day there are only ten places on the first place of Google and you can't guarantee getting those results so there's good and bad around that you can there's two keyword strategies one is to go longtail and the other is to become more specialized and you can become specialized in geography or in subject so in the real estate space you can say right I want to be I want to take over London Bridge right so you do all of your efforts around London Bridge and you were very likely to be able to outrank the major players in that space by just focusing on that on that geography or secondly you might have a specialist subject within that area so you might be providing you know office space for tech companies you know within London Bridge so suddenly you've again you've got low search search volumes but they're very very targeted and those leads are much more likely to convert yeah so there's no easy answer you're always going to be competing somewhere along the line against some big players but you've got to fight choose your battles the search volume drops off like dramatically like people search you know London property or maybe East End shortest property or something like that and they won't go any further because usually what they do this will jump onto property portal yeah and then they'll do all the drill down there yeah and so you know we found that you know because we're not competing against the other agents but we're competing against is the search portals so you know that's kind of left me wondering should we just you know kind of leave the Google search ranking to the side and focus more on other means of traffic aggregation maybe a mix of offline and so forth or are there strategies we can use on Google still that might be there's definitely strategies and we can probably that's they're kind of required drill now but to use a horrible marketing term it's an omni-channel approach right yeah so so hit it across everything that you can a be split test find out what's working for you and your particular niche in your particular business and concentrate on that you just close the question yeah sorry the question it's coming back to this idea of search volumes falling off very rapidly being driven by portals which are essentially mopping up all of all of the searches and therefore there's not much that's a that is a test signed I'm saying they'll attack ball happening so you've gotta choose your battles very carefully in that find out where you might have an advantage but a lot of effort onto that and then maybe look at other routes Facebook or doing some very interesting things on advertising at the moment maybe Twitter look at multiple channels test test test out of curiosity have you done your keyword and I suppose generation from the persona perspective so identified your persona targets how they would describe themselves and then develop a keyword strategy around so if it's family you know I don't know working yes the answer is yes we've we've looked at the older personas and and whatnot and you know I've done a lot of sort of digging around search behavior to try and work out okay each persona and what are they searching for and you know every single scenario I found that they tend to search just quite broadly and because like you say there's those giants there that are mopping up the traffic they're just immediately onto there and they're very good at sucking them in and keeping in there and so that's that's been a bit of a sticky point for us and so we've we've opted for more of an omni-channel approach and I'm more interested now I think in maybe combining some PPC to try and push ourselves and punch-out in certain key areas where you know it's still SEO competitive but we feel like you know we've got a strong value proposition yes we do we do we've got as far as brand positioning is concerned we're we're very strong very unique we have tremendous feedback from clients so there's a lot of positive around the brand and we've really worked on articulating that sort of difference and so usually we have those conversations with the customers they're very engaged yeah so but it's there's a lot of noise out there to punch through so hopefully clearly can help put it straight on that no doubt I mean just to close that off you can beat the big players in this marketplace and if you use skyscraper which I'm going to go through in a little more detail I'll give you a couple of examples of exactly that and it's very very competitive I can emphasize I used to work for a company that sold booking engine technology and as you can imagine they're competing against the likes of booking.com and tripadvisor so you're up against some pretty hefty Giants in that space and focusing on domain Authority is is fundamentally important and having a real killer content hook that you can use to essentially shake and QLS out of an existing database or any existing channels and it's kind of key to to what was successful and for us and then that scenario great cool so moving on to closing leads typically a business at this stage is in a position where they have the traffic they have conversion rates but no customers we don't have enough time for me to go through a really comprehensive strategy and to close customers but here's a couple of ideas that you can start to implement and straightaway one of the I suppose Eureka moments that hopes what's marketing and sales teams had recently was the realization that we had sales reps spending too much time trying to nurture leads which just isn't their strength so the marketing team have worked harder to help reps free up more time to just focus on what they do and best what we're using as tools like email template so the marketing team can actually build out the templates and then every sales rep can go in and just pick out the template and issue it off this will come already pre-packed with sales enablement content fully spell-checked consistent in brand messaging a marketers dream sequences is essentially workflows but for the sales side of the organization so again marketing can work with sales to set up a sequence of emails that a rep can send out if for example somebody requests a call back so it might look like something something along the lines of thanks for your inquiry here's a link to my calendar please book I need your time that suits I follow on email if they don't book and then a breakup email and following on from - so it takes the dependency on the rap actually remembering to follow up with that prospect out of the equation it makes it a much more reliable follow up process undocumented sturly er where you can essentially track the performance of your sales enablement content meeting customers on their own terms again you'd be surprised how many businesses don't make it easy for a customer to choose who they want to speak to and when they want to communicate and with them I had the horrific experience this week of trying to get some money from the bank and I can't tell you how difficult they made it for me to actually purchase one of their loan products and it was awful I couldn't do it within outside of the hours of 10:00 to 5:00 I'm you know I had to communicate via mail which was shocking and it was just absolutely so enormous ly difficult for me to actually find the time to fit into their schedule to buy their products and it's quite incredible some of the things that you can use are a messenger service on your website or a calendar app functionality where a prospect can just go in access any of the open slots in your calendar and book time directly with you then and finally equipping your sales team with knowledge if you actually give your sales reps really really meaningful insights around when someone is opened so a prompt to say your prospect has opened your email and your prospect has read your collateral and here's a contact record giving you an indication of every interaction they've had with your website or any of your social channels these are super powerful insights that the sales reps can take to know who they should prioritize from a lead follow-up perspective and what kind of conversation they should have to close that lead out the email notifications tool is something that I assume a lot of people are familiar with essentially this just is a little spying device that tells us when someone has open and their email and great from a sales perspective horrible from an account management perspective I'm safe to follow up read really quickly um Charlie up anybody in the room familiar with the Charlie app yeah so the charlie up essentially it touches itself to your calendar and for every upcoming meeting that you have it will do a scan across search engines to see what is the latest news for that contact tact it does that by essentially taking the email domain and running a search across a search engines for any relevant content that it believed believes would be useful for you to have in advance of that meeting so prior to your sales conversation you can know who the latest person promoted in the company was and what awards they've won recently etc etc it'll also give you a nice summary at the start of your day and to remind you what meetings you have coming up so again on that commute into work in the morning it's a nice little reminder to help you start getting organized so in summary give your reps more time to focus on this on their strengths use technology to remove a lot of the manual tasks and the human error from the sales processes things like email templates sales sequences automation of any form meet your prospects on their terms make sure that you make it really easy for those prospects to meet with you no harm and doing an audit of what that journey looks like at the moment and then finally equip your sales team with all those useful insights and then you should look a little bit like this baby here huh right hand side who is absolutely ecstatic because you really made their lives and all for not easier so without further ado that's everything for me today I hope you've got some useful actionable things that you can take away and any happy to take any questions that you might have I've got a question because one of the things that I'm always asked by marketers is content creation right you've talked about Authority content and that's something I'm gonna yeah talk a little bit about later on well an ideas generator is fine mm-hmm but what is what is the the key thing that people can use to generate new content ideas I mean how do you actually make yourself stand out from all the noise because that's what it is at the moment very easy to set up companies these days yeah it's very very difficult to get heard how do you rise above the tide so again I think the probably the market ears that do it really well have a really tough at understanding of their personas it really all boils back down to personas and how much time they have to consume content and what their day-to-day looks like what topics are of interest and where you get really powerful content being produced is where everything starts to align in an environment of keyword research you've gone through that process you've identified those keyword targets and anytime I've gone through that process with a customer from a marketeers perspective the ideas just start to fall out of your head you have a really clear bull's eye and ultimately because you're orienting orienting all of that that keyword research are in a Content topic that you want to own which typically relates back to the services or the products that you sell you know that ultimately all of this content is going to be aligned so just keeping your persona at the center of that will make it much easier to come up with content ideas then you need to think about format and really people want faster to consume content nowadays and so I would say it's it's a bit more of an there's a bit of science and there's a lot of art and there's a lot of really deep thorough understanding of your persona and that's required to make a good quality car one of the things actually that we found quite effective because people and we're going to talk a little bit about video later on talking about skyscraper techniques is just sometimes the sheer volume that you have to create as a marketer yeah for the cup for company right you've got a year content calendar to produce just one idea I mean look around right we're all together in this room we've got presentations we've got video we've got several different speakers people in their own companies can pull on events like this doesn't have to be a national event doesn't have to have headline speakers but you can run seminars you can run workshops you can have authority within your own industry come and talk at those things you can hire a great video guy film the thing you can transcribe it how long did it take you to create that piece of content with Dan and David you personally well me it took me maybe 30 seconds 30 seconds that's not bad because that was an email I've worked with those guys as you know in Dublin and I just begged right so I said look we've got this this hug coming up I need it to stand out I need to make a bit of a splash I need actually the American team to stand up and wave and say look hello to London because London is a key market for HubSpot so I wanted them to actually say hello they were doing some filming anyway they were they were doing that they did training all the time right yeah so they just tagged that's convenient if they have a marketing team who can they tag that in fact that that clip all I asked them for was 60 seconds I actually asked them for a 60 seconds hallo phone filmed on their smartphone so I didn't ask for production I didn't ask for anything did you give them a script I said introduce the group yes say hi and give me a couple of tips that you would suggest to the group and I really got I'm gonna play another one later on right there with David's tips and that's all I really asked for they tagged it onto a professional shoot that they were doing anyway and they put the top and tail so things suddenly I've got it I've got a video and to that end I touch on think about the repurposing then that you can do with that piece of content so for the next upcoming event you have a brilliant piece of content and you might even be able to use that to get real buy-in from those guys to come over and speak at an event and if the feedback is really good and so I think it's really just about being creative thinking outside of the box and keeping it super relevant to your audience and just bearing in mind that format is becoming increasingly because people no longer consume content the way an awful lot of marketers and creator but remember you can repurpose content you know this might be a video it can then be transcribed yeah it can be turned into a blog post it could be turned into an e-book yeah it could be turned into a million tweets yeah suddenly you've got probably six months content from just a half a half day session so think about that think about how you can actually add valuable content for your for service yeah okay so thank you Karen [Applause]

Channel: Whitehat SEO

Views: 51,001

Keywords: inbound marketing tips, inbound marketing strategy, Hubspot User Group, HUG, London HUG, inbound marketing strategy template, inbound marketing strategy examples, marketing strategy, marketing, SEO, SEM, Competative Analysis, Competitor analysis, internet marketing, #LondonHUG, Karen Rafferty, Whitehat, HubSpot

Id: O2g4oWzRzV0

Length: 59min 1sec (3541 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018