An Open Letter to Marketers: Make Love, Not Spam

describe the imageDear Marketing Professionals,

In much of the world, today is Valentine’s Day, a celebration of love. But this letter I am sending you is not a love letter. This is an open letter to the marketing community about one big way in which we’re not being lovable.

We, the marketing industry, have a problem with spam.

I don’t mean the messages sent by hackers in a basement from a third-world country about transferring millions of dollars from Nigeria, or how to buy Viagra without a prescription. I mean what many of us marketing folks do as part of our jobs at legitimate companies. Marketers send millions of emails to people without their permission every single day …

 

 

… Here’s what happens: We want to reach new people, but finding new people is hard. So, we buy lists of email addresses from hundreds of services like ZoomInfo, Data.com from Salesforce, Dun & Bradstreet/Hoovers, and InfoUSA. Or maybe we have an employee create our own mass email list by scouring the web for email addresses at target companies. We import these lists into our CRM, email, or marketing automation system. Next, we start “communicating” with these people via blast emails. Sure, we try to make the emails funny. We set it up so it looks like it was a personal message from a sales rep. We use every trick in the book to trick people (and maybe trick ourselves) into believing that this is okay. But it’s not lovable, and as a marketing community, we should work to up our game. (Note: The official policies of most of these systems do not allow you to do send type of email. But most marketing professionals will tell you confidentially that they do it all the time, and that the vendors look the other way.)

We can be better than this. Marketing is hard. Reaching new prospects is hard. But we believe that if we put our energy and resources toward making marketing people love, we can get more inbound leads and rely less on sending spammy emails. And when I say we all can be better than this, I’m including HubSpot.  

A few of the things we’re personally resolving to do include revisiting our own email practices and policies to see where we can improve. We’ll also continue to provide resources such as blog posts like “The Laws Marketers Need to Know” and ebooks like How to Make Love Not Spam to help marketers make sure they’re both complying with the laws related to spam and not implementing any other spammy marketing methods. Finally, we’re launching Make Love Not Spam to share inspiration and ideas for how to make marketing people love instead of sending spammy emails. 

In this open letter, I am urging you — marketing professionals worldwide — to join us in reducing spam. And I believe that by communicating with customers as people instead of seeing them as numbers on a list, we can make marketing a more lovable and more noble profession. We would also love to hear your ideas on how marketers can do a better job of not spamming. Please add your thoughts to the comments section, and we’ll send 50 of you “Make Love Not Spam” t-shirts for sharing your insight.

Call me crazy, but I think if we can do the right thing as an industry and remove some of the unwanted clutter from our customers’ inboxes, we might be giving them the best Valentine’s Day gift we have to offer.

For the love of marketing,

volpe signature

Mike Volpe
CMO @ HubSpot









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The 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About [Cheat Sheet]

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Gone are the days of the CMO who is not fluent in metrics, analytics and spreadsheets. The internet has made marketing far more measurable (and therefore more accountable to the CEO and CFO) than ever before. Yet I still frequently hear from my CMO peers that they are struggling to find the right metrics that will get them credibility with the CEO and CFO, and show the real contribution of marketing to the bottom line.

I think the best marketing metrics look at the total cost of marketing, including program spend, salaries of the team, and overhead, and relate that cost to the results you care about — revenue and customer acquisition. Other metrics like cost per lead, cost per follower, or cost per page view can be useful to look at within a marketing team, because they can help you make decisions about where to focus and what parts of your marketing process are broken; but most CEOs really just care about the cost and the net results, not the interim steps. This list of metrics is meant to focus on the most critical measures of marketing that your CEO will likely want to discuss with you.

Here are some metrics I’ve found useful over the past 5 years at HubSpot while growing our company, working with our CEO and CFO, and talking with our board members. I don’t have all the answers — so please add your favorite metrics and thoughts on these metrics in the comments.

The 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Wants to See

1) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This is your total Sales and Marketing cost — add up all the program or advertising spend, plus salaries, plus commissions and bonuses, plus overhead — in a time period, divided by the number of new customers in that time period. That time period, by the way, could be a month, a quarter, or a year. For instance, if you spent $300,000 on Sales and Marketing in a month and added 30 customers that month, then your CAC is $10,000.

2) Marketing % of Customer Acquisition Cost (M%-CAC)

I like to compute the marketing portion of CAC and call it M-CAC, and then compute that as a % of overall CAC. The M%-CAC is interesting to watch over time, and any change signals that something has changed in either your strategy, or your effectiveness.

For instance, an increase either means that 1) you are spending too much on marketing, 2) that sales costs are lower because they missed quota, or 3) that you are trying to raise sales productivity by spending more on marketing and providing more and higher quality leads to Sales.

For a company that does mostly outside sales with a long and complicated sales cycle, M%-CAC might be only 10-20%. For companies that have an inside sales team and a less complicated sales process, M%-CAC might be more like 20-50%. And for companies that have a low cost and simpler sales cycle where sales are somewhat humanless, the M%-CAC might be more like 60-90%.

3) Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC)

For companies that have a recurring revenue stream from their customers — or even any way for customers to make a repeat purchase — you need to estimate the current value of a customer and compare that to what you spent to acquire that new customer.

To compute the LTV, you need to take the revenue the customer pays you in a period, subtract out the gross margin, and then divide by the estimated churn % (cancellation rate) for that customer. So, for a type of customer who pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the LTV is $437,500.

Now, once you have the LTV and the CAC, you compute the ratio of the two. If it cost you $100,000 to acquire this customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1. For growing SaaS companies, most investors and board members want this ratio to be greater than 3X; a higher ratio means your Sales and Marketing have a higher ROI. Higher is not always better though; when the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition.

4) Time to Payback CAC

This is the number of months it takes you to earn back the CAC you spent to get a new customer. You take the CAC and divide by margin-adjusted revenue per month for the average new customer you just signed up, and the resulting number is the number of months to payback. In industries where customers pay one time upfront, this metric is less relevant because the upfront payment should be greater than the CAC, otherwise you are losing money on every customer. On the other hand, in industries where customers pay a monthly or annual fee, you usually want the Payback Time to be under 12 months, meaning that you become “profitable” on a new customer in under a year, and then after that you start making money.

5) Marketing Originated Customer %

This ratio shows what % of your new business is driven by Marketing. To compute it, take all of the new customers you signed up in a period, and look at what % of them started with a lead that Marketing generated. This is much, much easier to do when you have a closed-loop marketing analytics system, but you can do it manually — just know it will be time consuming. 

What I like about this metric is that it directly shows what portion of the overall customer acquisition originated in Marketing, and it is often higher than Sales would lead you to believe. In my experience, this % varies widely from company to company. For companies with an outside sales team supported by an inside sales team with cold callers, this percentage might be pretty small, perhaps 20-40%; for a company with an inside sales team that is supported by a lot of lead generation from Marketing, it might be 40-80%; and for a company with somewhat humanless sales, it might be 70-95%.

Note: You can also compute this percentage using revenue, not customers, depending on how you prefer to look at your business.

6) Marketing Influenced Customer %

This is really similar to the Marketing Originated Customer %, but it adds in all the new customers where Marketing touched and nurtured the lead at any point during the sales process, not only by originating the lead. For instance, if a salesperson found a lead but then the lead attended a marketing event and then later closed, that new customer was influenced by Marketing. This % is obviously higher than the “Originated” percentage, and for most companies I think this should be between 50% and 99%.

Your Marketing Metrics Cheat Sheet

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What metrics do you discuss with your executive board, CEO, and board of directors? Have I missed any key metrics? Do you have any comments on these metrics?

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7 Real Marketing Interview Questions From HubSpot’s CMO

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Pay attention, blog readers: I’m going to let you in on a few of my best kept secrets. In this article, I’ll reveal in detail the questions I use when interviewing candidates for inbound marketing positions. Now, I’ve held off from publishing these for a long time because I think great hiring is a key ingredient in my secret sauce, but the desire to do great inbound marketing by sharing tips with the community and demonstrating thought leadership has finally won out, so have at ‘em. All my best interview questions are here for the taking.

And if you want more background, you should also check out my post from yesterday, “How the HubSpot CMO Screens for Top Marketing Talent,” where I go into more detail about the attributes you should be looking for in an inbound marketing manager, and how to screen potential candidates before the interview stage.

My Interview Approach

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, during interviews I prefer asking “case-style” questions, which is a technique I first heard about in business school since all the consulting firms use this type of interview. This method of questioning got its name from how business schools use case studies as a teaching method. Case-style questions usually involve a hypothetical business situation where you give the candidate an opportunity to show how they think about and work on problems. I much prefer this to candidates reciting the same prepared stories about the bullet points on their resume that they use in every interview.

I don’t ask all of the following questions during an interview. In fact, one case-style question can evolve into a discussion lasting anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, so I often only have time to cover 2-3 questions. Prior to the interview, select the questions you want to use based on the role and background of the person. For an inbound marketing generalist, you could ask any or all of these questions. For someone with a more specific role on a larger inbound marketing team — a blogger, perhaps — you could focus only on the questions about blogging and content creation.

Question 1: Funnel Strategy

The Question: “Draw a funnel on the whiteboard showing 10,000 visitors, 500 leads, 50 opportunities, and 10 new customers (or any other numbers you think are interesting). Now pretend you’re the CMO for the company, and you have to decide what your marketing team should do to improve their marketing.”

The Follow-Up: Typically, the candidate will pick one part of the funnel to focus on. If they don’t, I like to push them to do just that. Once they pick one area, I question them on exactly what the team should do to improve that part of the funnel. And I don’t just want them to tell me to “improve the visitor to lead conversion rate” — they need to tell me how. What are all the different tactics they would try? Do they have any creative ideas? Are their ideas really ways to improve that part of the funnel, or are they just generic, high-level marketing concepts? Then tell them to pretend they’ve implemented their ideas and ask them to go back through the whole funnel and explain how they think each of those initial metrics have changed. If you have time, you can also dive into other parts of the funnel.

What to Look For: Here, you’re looking to see how the candidate thinks about the funnel, if they have an intuitive sense of what good and bad conversion rates are, and if they understand how the funnel steps are connected. You also want to see if they understand which different tactics you can use at each step to improve that particular step. (For instance, if they say the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is bad, the right answer is not to write more blog articles.) I also like to see if they understand that when you make changes to the funnel, conversion rates might change beyond the specific step you worked on. For instance, increasing the visitor-to-lead conversion rate might lower the conversion rate from lead to opportunity.

Question 2: Lead Scoring

The Question: “Assume you have an Excel spreadsheet with 10,000 leads from a few months back — long enough that those leads’ sales cycle has passed. The file contains information about each lead, such as their industry, title, company size, and what they did to become a lead (e.g. downloaded an ebook). Also in the file is whether they closed as a customer, and how much their order was for. Can you use this information to create a lead score? How would you do it?”

The Follow-Up: Most people will start to talk about “looking at the data” and “sorting the data.” Push them to tell you how they would do that in Excel, or in another program if they prefer something else. It’s not practical to just “look” at the data when you have 10,000 rows; you need to use statistical analysis. They also might zone in on one factor, perhaps industry, all alone. If they do that, you should ask them what they would say if the small companies in one industry are good leads, but the big companies in another industry are also good leads? Basically, just keep pushing them until they’re at a loss for what to do next.

What to Look For: The goal of this question is to see how far they can go and how sophisticated they can think about lead quality. Most people don’t get very far and are unwilling or unable to look at more than one variable at a time, or understand how to analyze a lot of data in a simple way. At a minimum, you want to find people who look at the leads who closed in one group and compare them to the leads who did not close, look at multiple variables at a time, and use statistical functions in Excel or another program to do that (summary tables, pivot tables, etc.). If you find someone who starts making a coherent argument about why you might want to use logistic regression, factor or cluster analysis, actuarial science, or stochastic modeling to figure this out … refer them to me, and I will buy you and a friend a really nice steak dinner if I hire them!

Note: I often start this question by simply asking, “How should you create a lead score?” This is how I sort out the people wrongly brainwashed by the marketing automation industry. Anyone who answers, “You make a lead score by talking to the sales team and then assigning 5 or 10 points to each of the things they say they want,” is wrong. That is not a data-driven approach to lead scoring, and it is way too simplistic to work effectively in most cases.

Question 3: Website Homepage

The Question: “We have two potential designs for the homepage of our website, but we don’t know which one to use. The CEO likes one, and the COO likes another. Half the company likes one, and the other half of the company like the other. Which one should we use?”

The Follow-Up: If they pick one and give you a reason, ask them what the goals are for the homepage. Then ask them how they would determine which homepage meets those goals best. Then tell them one of the homepages performed well based on one of the criteria, and the other one performed well in terms of another one of the criteria. Basically, push them and see how they make choices when it’s not possible to get data that is 100% clear and conclusive, and they have to choose between two imperfect variations.

What to Look For: This is kind of a trick, because the answer is neither or both. The best answers start with questions that get at what the goals of your homepage are and especially how the website’s customers and prospects view the two designs. Good answers will also bring up A/B testing, balancing the messaging and conversion, user testing, and customer interviews. I also like when people think you should constantly tweak and improve the homepage, rather than do a complete redesign every 9 or 18 months.

Additional Question Ideas

“We have a new product coming out in three months. What would you do to launch it?”

Look for the candidate to understand all the different tactics of inbound marketing and how to tie them together into a holistic plan. Also, are they creative? And can they come up with new and interesting ways to do marketing?

“Our CEO wants you to evaluate our blog. What would you tell her?”

Look for the candidate to ask about the metrics for the blog, how many leads and customers it generates, what the goals are for your blog, how much you are investing in it, etc. This is also a good test to see if they have actually prepared for the interview and read your blog at all.

“Between videos, ebooks, blog articles, photos, podcasts, webinars, SlideShare, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest … there is a lot of potential content we should produce for inbound marketing. How do we do it all?”

Look for candidates who tell you that you should not do it all — but that you should start with the content that is most important to your prospects and customers, and focus on that. They should also have a plan to talk to your customers and prospects in interviews or surveys to figure out which social networks they use and what type of content is best for them.

Let’s pretend we had very convincing data that showed none of our potential customers use social media. Should we still do it? Why?

Look for candidates who understand that being successful in social media is important even if your customers are not there today. Your customers will be there in the future, so you should get started now, the journalists and influencers for your industry are probably using social media, and social media success helps your content rank higher in search engines because you attract more links from socially connected audiences and because social media is starting to influence search rankings. They should understand why it’s important to have social media followers who won’t ever buy.

Next Steps

Unfortunately, because about a million people read this blog (literally), I might have spoiled these interview questions not only for me, but also for you! So, your next step is to use these case-style marketing interview questions as a basis to create your own, similar questions that are relevant to your industry and hiring needs. Good luck, and happy hiring!

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How the HubSpot CMO Screens for Top Marketing Talent

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One particularly great source of content ideas is talking to your sales team or getting involved in some sales meetings yourself so you can find out what types of questions your prospects are asking. Odds are, these prospects are typing those same questions into Google. And the smart inbound marketers will then write articles to answer those questions, which not only attracts more prospects to their website, but also gives their sales team a piece of thought leadership content to share with the people they talk to.

And now, let me get to my point. This article topic came directly from questions we get when talking to companies about using our software and adopting a more inbound approach to marketing. So if you’re curious about the qualities to look out for in an inbound marketing manager, and how to evaluate and interview your candidates, this post will give you my two cents as a CMO. Feel free to take some tips from my approach and adopt them for your own hiring process. And if you find yourself sitting on the other side of the inbound marketing interview table, read this article on how to get hired as an inbound marketer.

What I Look for in an Inbound Marketing Manager

The perfect inbound marketing manager has a variety of different skills. At HubSpot, we like to use the acronym “DARC,” which stands for digital, analytical, reach, and content:

  • Digital means they live their lives online and are familiar and comfortable with blogging, social media, and the web in general.
  • Analytical means they like to measure what they do, and they make decisions based on data.
  • Reach means they have a knack for growing their network by creating a gravitational attraction to what they do — and people want to follow their work.
  • Content means they are naturally a content creator, and they’re not afraid of it. (You’d be surprised how many people are scared of writing a blog article.)

You can learn more about these skills in our Hiring in the DARC Ages ebook, which is a free excerpt from the Inbound Marketing book.

Domain expertise can also be important. If you market to aerospace engineers, you want to hire an inbound marketer who can have something interesting to say to aerospace engineers. Don’t overlook this. It can be harder to learn a highly technical industry than it can be to learn the fundamentals of inbound marketing. Because of this, you might be better off hiring the best blogger for your industry, even if they claim not to know anything about marketing. Alternatively, you could hire an inbound marketer who will interview your domain experts (e.g. executives, evangelists, product managers) and then create and publish content based on that research. But even in that case, you still need to make sure the marketer can at least grasp the basic concepts of your industry and become fluent enough to be a solid interviewer and journalist for your industry.

In addition to these specific traits, I personally like to look for a balance of of both creative and quantitative tendencies in the people I hire for inbound marketing. Not only do you want to hire an inbound marketer who has the creativity to come up with new ideas for content and think of new ways to use tools to get results, but you also want someone who knows how to measure what they do and is motivated by moving the metrics. If they love creating content purely for the creativity of it, they are motivated for the wrong reason (if you want them to be a great marketer, that is). The key thing to consider here is that the truly great inbound marketer knows what goals and metrics you want to move, and then figures out how to combine available tools in new and interesting ways to drive the business results you want. Often, they are the first to try something new; always, they measure their results and see if what they did moved the metrics.

An example of this combination of skills at work would be publishing a press release composed entirely of tweets to announce an acquisition of a social media company. When we did that at HubSpot, we generated over 1,200 tweets of the hashtag included in that press release, as well as a whole lot of media coverage, even though the acquisition was small (fewer than 7 people) and not extremely newsworthy. Another example is someone adding social sharing links inside a PDF ebook when it had never been tried before, and then tracking the amount of sharing as a result … and then optimizing those links over time to help your ebooks spread more. Because one of our inbound marketers tested this out on our team, today we get thousands of downloads of our HubSpot ebooks just from social sharing alone.

How I Review an Application for an Inbound Marketing Manager

Before the interview, do some thorough “online stalking” of your candidate. Truthfully, I don’t look at potential job candidates’ resumes much except to grab that person’s name so I can type it into Google. As I’m searching for them, I look to see what their general web presence is like. How easy is it to find them? Do they have a blog? If they do, I will usually run it through Marketing Grader to see what their stats are. How often do they publish content? Is the content any good? I also take a look at their social profiles to see if they’re active on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, etc. They don’t need to be active in all of these places, but they should have a quality presence in at least one of them. If they’re not still in school, I will also check out their current company, run that website through Marketing Grader, and see if their current marketing is any good. You’d be surprised how many people claim to have a lot of inbound marketing success on their resume, but in reality, have horrible Marketing Grader stats.

When I’m doing these initial audits, some of my personal pet peeves I look our for are (1) people who have an email address with hotmail.com, aol.com, or an ISP like Verizon or Comcast, and (2) people who don’t have a personalized URL for their LinkedIn profile. While these things might not get a candidate eliminated for sure, they do indicate a lack of proficiency with inbound marketing. Similarly, I prefer when a candidate’s resume is in a PDF file (not a Word doc), when the candidate includes a link to his or her LinkedIn profile in the email text, and when the text of their cover letter is in the text of the email — not in an attachment. Those things indicate to me that the applicant is proficient in how people use the web and that they thought about making their credentials easily accessible to me. Finally, while a paper resume sent via snail mail to my office will get through the clutter (I do open non-junk mail), it’s not ideal because I can’t forward the piece of paper or share it with others easily.

How I Interview Inbound Marketing Managers

First off, I like to interview people in person — or, if geography does not allow for that, on Skype. I don’t do many phone screens. I personally feel like the phone screen is a holdover from the pre-internet days when its purpose was to get some additional detail beyond the information on a person’s one-page resume. Today, I can learn all that and more by doing some online snooping.

During the interview, I like to ask more “case-style” questions. I learned about this technique in business school, because it’s how all the consulting firms interview. This question type got its name from how business schools use case studies as a teaching method. Case-style questions give the candidate an opportunity to show how they think about and work on problems, rather than just telling me the same prepared stories about the bullet points on their resume.

An example of a case-style question would be to draw a marketing funnel on a whiteboard, adding in some numbers for visitors, leads, opportunities, and customers. Then, ask the candidate to pretend those are the real numbers for your business, and ask them what they would do if they were the CMO. I like this question, because it makes the candidate do some analysis out loud, and then you can quickly get into talking about both marketing strategy and tactics. Or, if you’re interviewing a potential blogger, you can show them the stats for your blog overall and for an average article, and ask them what they would do if they managed your blog. The key with these questions is to keep the overall questions broad, but then get into specific details by asking a number of follow-up questions …

“Okay, you say we should blog more often … how often? How do you know when it’s too often? How would you create that additional content? What would you measure to know if your strategy worked or not? Let’s say you doubled the blog’s publishing frequency. What would happen to the stats next month?” ( … and so on and so forth)

Using these case-style questions allows you to not only evaluate whether the candidate has the DARC attributes, but also if they’re a good balance of creative and quantitative in how they approach problems. Sure, you could ask them questions like, “Are you analytical? Can you give me an example?” but I personally feel like it is too easy to fake your way through questions like that. For more information about how to evaluate potential inbound marketing hires, check out our post about “How to Recruit and Evaluate Marketing Interns,” and stay tuned for an upcoming article where I’ll share some of my favorite marketing interview questions.

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Is the Marketing Campaign Dead?

grim reaperFor years, I’ve believed that the notion of a marketing ‘campaign’ is dead. And I’m not the only one who thinks it. In the words of Joseph Jaffe, “Marketing is not a campaign, it’s a commitment.” And Eric Wheeler wrote in the AdAge article “Ad Campaigns Are Dead,” “Power has shifted away from brands to consumers … Suddenly, it’s no longer about the campaign.”

Paul Dunay has written, “there is no campaign in social media,” while Joe Pulizzi said in a video interview that “content marketing is not a campaign, it is a promise to our customers.” Even Bill Lee, in his Harvard Business Review article, “Marketing Is Dead,” said, “Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing …” (which some of us might call ‘inbound marketing’ … wink wink) “… hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.”

Finally, three years ago, Brian Halligan wrote in his 2010 marketing wish list, “My blood curdles every time I hear someone talk about doing a ‘social media campaign’ or ‘blog campaign.’ Blogs and social media behave like compound interest, so if you treat them like ‘campaigns,’ you lose all the benefits. Marketers should be permanently creating, optimizing, promoting, converting, and analyzing.”

So, if the marketing campaign is dead, why is it dead, and what do we do now? Let’s start off with some of the reasons why it’s dead …

Campaigns are temporary, but today, the internet is forever.

Traditionally, ads would last as long as you paid for them to be aired on TV or printed in a newspaper or magazine. Now, people can read your blog posts from 2006 and watch your music videos from 2007. So what exactly does this mean? Well, it means that you might not want to use an animated lizard in a campaign for six months, and then use a spotted dog in some ads for the next three months … and then use a talking baby in some ads for the next four months. Consistency and commitment to your brand, message, and voice is increasingly important when all the content you’ve ever created is completely accessible to anyone at any time. If you’re all about the talking babies campaign now but what pops up for people in Google is lizard videos, are you really promoting the campaign you think you are?

Campaigns are about you, but today, (inbound) marketing is about the customer.

Marketing used to involve a company deciding what they wanted to brainwash their potential buyers with, and then programming that message into advertisements they would force feed to people because they had no choice. Now, the consumer is in control. Consumers have more and more technologies like DVRs, caller ID, and spam blockers that enable them to avoid unwanted advertising and messages. This means that, in order to get their attention, you have to earn their permission. As a result, your marketing needs to be about them, not you — at least until they trust you enough to want to know more about you and your products. If your campaigns are about what your company wants to tell people, then you’re doing inbound marketing backwards.

Campaigns are planned and slow, but today, conversation is dynamic and responsive.

In the old world of marketing, you could run a campaign of ads that promoted your product, and then you could turn off all of your marketing for a while. You could stop and start on a whim. Today, once you start engaging with people, they expect you to be there in the future. And when you do inbound marketing right, you become a publisher or a media company for your industry. Imagine if you started publishing a business blog, or engaging with potential customers on Facebook, and then one day you just stopped showing up? In today’s inbound world, that would be akin to a TV network going off the air one day just because they got lazy. Sure, you can do it — but it is not a great idea. People expect responses when they contact you on your website or blog or in social media, and when they subscribe to something you publish, they expect to get regular updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis — whatever you promised them. Joseph Jaffe is right. “Marketing is a commitment.”

What next? Where do I go from here?  

Start by making a commitment to inbound marketing. Stop the madness of coming up with an entirely new theme and creative concept every three months. Start having a long-term view of your brand, message, and voice — and what value your company can add to your industry. Stop blasting and interrupting people with advertisements about you. Start being helpful and interesting. Start listening. Start communicating. Start publishing. Stop advertising. Start marketing.

What do you think? Is the marketing campaign dead?

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How Not to Spend $35 Million on Marketing

orange white balloons skyToday, HubSpot raised a $35 million mezzanine round of financing, giving us more capital to invest in our product and team, to bring more value to our customers, and to continue to help transform the world’s marketing to become more inbound and, therefore, more lovable. When we closed our second round of financing over four years ago, I published a humorous list of 10 ways we wouldn’t be spending the money. So what better time to revisit some crazy ideas of how to waste marketing budget than now?

How HubSpot Will NOT Spend the $35 Million We Just Raised

1) Buy 30,000 hours of TV infomercials, send 50 million pieces of direct mail, or make 140 million cold calls. 

We could give up on making marketing that people love and just get in your face — and with $35 million, we could get in your face big time! This would ensure every business has heard of HubSpot. Unless of course they fast forwarded through our ads and ignored our calls. Plus those who did get interrupted by our advertising probably wouldn’t have a great opinion of us. Hmmm … maybe move on to some other ideas?

2) Purchase an island and rename it “Inbound Island.”

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle recently purchased the island of Lanai in Hawaii for about $500 million. We can’t afford that, but we could purchase a smaller island easily (my research is showing quite a few options in the $10-$35 million range), rename it “Inbound Island,” and elicit a series of updates to Wikipedia, Google Maps, and other services that would spread the concept of inbound marketing to even more people. Another benefit? We’d have a built in venue to host our INBOUND conference for years to come.

3) Wrap 20,000 cars in the HubSpot logo. 

You can wrap a car in your company colors and logo for about $1,800 (check out car wrap pricing from this HubSpot customer), and with this new infusion of cash, we could do that to 20,000 cars — more than enough to fill all the spots at your local sports stadium.

4) Send every HubSpot employee to outer space. 

On the new Spaceship X, you can buy a ticket for a short flight into space and experience weightlessness. With $35 million (and the hope of nailing a big discount for buying in bulk), we could send everyone on that trip as an employee incentive, helping us recruit to fill all the open jobs we have.

5) Buy 35 billion Twitter followers.

Never mind that there aren’t even that many users on Twitter — or even that many people alive today — we would immediately be the most popular account on Twitter. Many “black hat” online services will sell you Twitter followers as cheap at $5 for 5,000 of them, so we could rack up billions and still have money left over. Don’t rain on my parade and tell me they are fake accounts created by software — I want to be more popular! Read about Seth Stevenson’s purchasing of Twitter followers in this Slate article.

6) Send 35 million orange balloons into the sky. 

You can buy balloons and helium for about $1 each. What if we got 35 million orange balloons and released them all up into the sky at the same time? We would certainly set some sort of new world record, but we’d also probably block out the sun for a while, and the broken balloons would probably choke every single dolphin and sea turtle once they came back to the ground. Scratch that. I don’t want to be known as the company that killed all the dolphins and sea turtles.

7) Start a reality TV show. 

If people watch the Kardashians, why not a show about HubSpotters? At an estimated cost of $200,000 per episode, we could film 175 shows for about 15 seasons of material. Of course we wouldn’t sell any ads to run during the show, because that wouldn’t be inbound, right?

8) Shower major cities with 2 billion business cards. 

You can order basic business cards for about 1.5 cents each, and if you get 2 billion of them, you have plenty of money left over to rent airplanes. Then we could do an airdrop of the business cards over major cities, making it easy for people to just grab our contact information out of the air … literally.

9) Put HubSpot in the sky using skywriting. 

We could pick the 17 biggest cities and hire a skywriting company to write “HubSpot” in the sky above all these cities every day for an entire year. Imagine having the brand recognition of the sun or the moon? Powerful!

10) Give away 500,000 HubSpot tattoos

At an average cost of $70, we could give 500,000 lucky people a free tattoo of the HubSpot logo. Imagine the brand recognition that would come from having half a million people with HubSpot logo tattoos?

What do you think?  What are some other ways we could waste our $35 million? Leave your ideas in the comments!







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Free Advertising on Google

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It may surprise some, but many small businesses new to inbound marketing are unaware that you can get some free advertising on Google through Google Places. And because Google is always looking to increase the value of its local search results — as well as its Google Maps application — the search engine giant has a simple way for you to provide them with that valuable information about your business, which it infuses it into its search engine results.

The benefit? Basically, a way to advertise your business on Google for free. And honestly, who doesn’t love some free advertising? This not only helps your business get found through searches; it can also help you get more traffic, leads, and customers.

Consider this example: When you search for “hotels, Boston,” the Boston Harbor Hotel ranks #1 in the Google Places search results. And to the right of the result, you can see all the information that the Boston Harbor Hotel has placed in its Google Places listing. They’ve included reviews, hotel information, and pictures of the hotel and its surrounding area. Not too shabby a setup, is it?

 

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Are you ready to get some free advertising on Google? Let’s get started.

What You Need to Get Your Free Google Places Advertisement

In order to set up your Google Places listing, you’ll need the following information at hand:

  • A description of your business
  • Your phone number, address, and any other contact info you want to advertise
  • A logo or image that represents your business (for example, some people use a picture of their office, store, or restaurant)
  • A coupon or special offer you want to advertise (Google also lets you add a coupon for FREE if you want)

In your listing, you can include any information you think is relevant to your business and will attract people to your company. To set up a Google Place listing, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Set Up Your Account

Visit http://www.google.com/places/. To set up your business on Google Places, click the ‘Get Started Now’ button below the text, “Get your business found on Google.”

 

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Your Google Places account will be connected to your Google account. Here, you can enter the country and phone number. Keep in mind that you will need to connect this to a valid phone number, as it’s important to have your business’ number in your Google Places listing. When people search for you, you’ll want them to easily be able to call you, especially on mobile devices.

 

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Once you input your phone number and country, Google will search to see if your listing already exists. Keep in mind that you can edit a current listing at any time to display new information about your business. If you don’t yet have a listing, you can also create one from scratch.

Step 2: Fill in Your Information

If Google Places doesn’t identify any business information online for you, you can manually add it. After filling out your phone number, Google will prompt you to input more information. As you complete your information, Google will automatically generate what the Places advertisement will look like on the right, including the map image. Make sure you’re satisfied with the appearance of your listing. Keep the description short and to the point, capturing the main concept of your business and product or service. You can add anything you want, including a coupon link for your business to attract more customers to your website.

Making sure you include a phone number and email address enables people who are interested in learning more about you to contact. The volume of people who will see this listing can be large, so make sure your contact information is both up to date and checked regularly for people inquiring about your business.

 

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Step 3: Specify Where Your Services Are Provided

You can also set up whether or not your business provides services in a certain area or areas. This will allow your business to appear on map listings. When people search for a business similar to your listing, your business will appear on a map within a specified range.

 

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You can then select which location(s) your services cover(s). The map will show you what
area will be covered by choosing this option:

 

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If you choose option #1 (“Distance from one location”), the map will show a general area that will be covered by your services. You can then choose what location will be the central point:

 

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If you prefer to serve only certain cities or areas within a city, you can choose the second option and pick the areas you serve. This option can be helpful for companies that are only able to serve a certain area, such as a pizza delivery company, or in a very niche market, like a jet ski company on a beach.

Step 4: Indicate Your Hours of Operation

Another aspect of an effective Google Places advertisement is the hours your business operates. Often, when people are searching for your business, they’re looking to see when you’re open, and Google allows you to include this directly in your listing.

 

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Step 5: Specify Payment Options

If you sell products or services directly to your customers, either online or in-store, you have the option to let customers know ahead of time what forms of payment you accept. Specify which payment options apply in this step.

 

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Step 6: Include Engaging Visual Content

Do you have a video explaining what your business is all about? Maybe something people often associate with your brand name? Add it to your Google Place listing to make your offer even more eye-catching. People are much quicker to respond to visual content than text. In fact, according to 3M Corporation and Zabisco, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. With this in mind, marketers can benefit from visuals to attract more eyes to their listing and, thus, more traffic to their website. 

 

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Step 7: Input Additional Information

You can include other information that may be vitally important to potential customers at your place of business or at your online retail site at the end of the listing set-up process. This information can range from details about the location if it’s difficult to find, to information about the products and services your business provides. Use this as an opportunity to tell potential customers why your business is worth a second look. For example, if you’re a cell phone vendor, and you have a surplus of the latest version of the iPhone when all other local businesses are sold out, let people know! You might just get more business than you think. 

 

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Step 8: Validate Your Location

Finally, the first time you create a Google Places listing, you will need to validate your location. This helps Google avoid fake listings and advertisements. Google will send you a postcard with verification information and next steps on it. Although it may seem like a pain to wait 2-3 weeks before your listing can get verified and become live, it saves us all in the long run from a plethora of spam listings when we use Google Search to find places in the future. 

Google Places allows marketers to give customers a good user experience, by giving as much information as possible in the first place the majority of people look: Google Search. Good luck!




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The One Graph Marketers Should Update Daily: The Leads Waterfall

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Being able to provide the right number of quality leads to your sales team on a consistent basis is one of the essential responsibilities of a marketing team. But without the right tools in place, you can have wild variations in the number of leads you generate, and at the end of a month or quarter, you can end up way ahead or (more likely) way behind your goal.

Using a daily leads waterfall graph is a great way to ensure that you hit your leads goals and never fall far behind the pace you need to stay afloat. The video at the end of the article explains this whole process in 4 minutes. (Or … if you are a HubSpot customer, our marketing software makes this graph for you automatically. Just scroll down for a screenshot.)

How to Build a Daily Leads Waterfall Graph

Step 1: Decide what to measure. Start by working with your sales team to agree on a definition of what a true “lead” is, when a lead can be handed off from Marketing to Sales, and what leads “count” toward the goal. To help you get a handle on this, check out the following three posts on 1) sales and marketing alignment, 2) how to identify marketing qualified leads, and 3) how to prioritize and score leads for Sales.

Step 2: Set a goal for the total number of leads. It might be a month or a quarter, but start with your sales goals and your conversion rates. For instance, if 5% of your leads become customers and you need 7 new customers next month, then you need 140 leads next month to hit your goal.

Step 3: Set a daily leads goal. Starting with the total number of leads (in this case, 140), divide by the number of sales reps you have and the number of days in the month to identify a goal for the number of leads you need to provide each sales rep with each day. This is a great number to share with your sales reps so they have a clear and realistic idea of what to expect from marketing.

Step 4: Create the daily leads waterfall graph. You can use this handy Excel template I made, and then update the chart every day. Use this graph to plot your progress on a daily basis; don’t just measure yourself at the end of the month or quarter. In addition, share this with your marketing team on a regular basis so everyone is up-to-date on the team’s progress and how effectively they’re reaching their goals.

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Understanding what you see in the graph above: The x-axis (horizontal) is the day of the month, and the y-axis (vertical) is the percentage of the leads goal you have attained. The black line in the middle is the path you should aim to follow for a perfectly even flow of leads to the sales team. In this case, the actual lead flow is the orange line, and it is below the perfectly balanced flow. Read on to diagnose what being above or below the black line means.

How to Use the Daily Leads Waterfall Graph

If Your Lead Flow Is Below the Black Line: Unfortunately, this means you’re not on track to hit the leads goal, and you are at risk of letting the sales team down. What to do? It’s time to invest in some extra work. Try to come up with additional marketing offers, create more content on your blog, step up your social media engagement, and generally, increase the inbound marketing you do. To stay safe at all times, you may find it helpful to always have back-up content you can use in case of an emergency. In addition to pumping up the inbound marketing, you can also keep a reserve of cash around to give a boost to some of your pay-per-click campaigns or supplement your inbound marketing efforts with some emergency outbound marketing when you’re falling behind the leads goal.

If Your Lead Flow Is Above the Black Line:  Congratulations — you’re ahead of the game!  This gives you an opportunity to start planning more for the future. Maybe you can push some of your planned activity for this month off into next month. For example, maybe you hold off on publishing that blog article right away and instead schedule it to be published a few weeks in the future. This is the time when you should be preparing for the future when things might not be turning out so bright and you’ve fallen below the black line.

HubSpot Software Creates a Lead and Visitor Waterfall Automatically

For those of you who are customers using the HubSpot software, you’re in luck! Your HubSpot dashboard will create this graph for you automatically using either a custom goal that you can set, the last month, the month 12 months ago, or a 3-month average as the goal you track against.

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Do you track your lead flow daily? What techniques do you use to make sure you support the sales team properly?

Image Credit: Saad Faruque

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