Monthly Archives: July 2011

By Lee CowanRachel Beckwith had a simple wish for her ninth birthday. No presents. Instead, she wanted people to donate to a charity that provides clean, safe driving water for kids in far away lands. Her goal: $300. She almost made it. Continue reading →

Interns might be the most under-utilized marketing tool out there. As an Inbound Marketing Consultant here at HubSpot, I rarely spoke with a customer who was accustomed to hiring interns. Only recently did it occur to me that this could be a pretty significant omission in anyone’s marketing plan.

Here at Hubspot, we typically have several interns working on different projects and in different departments. They rotate in and out (typically by season) and are pretty spread out around the office so they can tend to fly under the radar, so to speak.

Last week, however, our interns came together and caused quite scene at our 5th anniversary celebration. That’s what got my attention and that’s when I took notice of a couple of things. First, I hadn’t realized how many interns we had working with us. Though the majority of them work on the marketing team, we will leverage interns anywhere in the company that has a need. The second thing that struck me was the energy and talent they brought to the team. These folks are interns in title only. Though they are here to learn, they also contribute their own thoughts and ideas that often lead to great results for the team.

That’s when I found myself asking the question, why don’t more companies have this built into their marketing plan? Maybe it’s just an honest oversight and lots of readers are nodding their heads as they read this post. Or, perhaps, the value of interns has just quietly increased and lots of folks just haven’t noticed.

To that point, here are some thoughts on how marketers can leverage the power of interns.

1. Interns Can Provide a Ton of Value….If You Let Them

I think there remains a misconception about internships and what they mean to the individuals who partake of them. Internships today are a critical element of learning and career development. It’s not like it was 20 or even 10 years ago when simply landing an internship at a cool company could be seen as a resume builder. Interns today are looking for meaningful work experience that can help them as they launch and build their careers. Whether they are a college student preparing for graduation or a seasoned professional considering a career change, the experience individuals gain during an internship can be a game changer for them. Give them the credit they are due and real, relevant work to do and you’ll see the impact they can make. If you are in need of someone to make copies or run errands, hire a service.  Interns are best utilized when addressing real business needs so you can reach those ambitious goals you’ve set.

Here are a few great ways in which interns can contribute: 

• Writing blog posts, whitepapers or ebooks
• Managing social media accounts
• Testing landing pages and Offers
• Designing targeted campaigns

2. Expect Temporary, But Hire for Full-Time

If hiring an intern is part of your plan, then the next very important thing you need to consider is the cultural fit. Even though this is likely a temporary position, you are going to want to be certain your interns are of the same ilk as your full-time employees. The plan is to get them right in the mix and contributing to your team, so interview as if you were indeed hiring a full-time employee. You never know. At HubSpot, we have no fewer than 3 full-time employees who started here as interns.

3. Set Them Up for Success

You want to give interns “real” work to do, but remember they are there to learn, so make sure you place them with an individual or group who understands that and can act as a reference and or support system so that everyone wins.

So whether you are in need of marketing help (blogging, running targeted campaigns or doing research) or need help meeting other business goals, consider hiring an intern. It’s a win, win, win. You get the help you need. They get the experience they need and you have one more driven, smart individual educated about your company. Perhaps they will be back as a full-time employee.

Do you currently hire interns? What’s your advice?

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This is a guest post by Marissa Lowman.

Headlines are the lifeblood of web and landing pages. Ever since the <h1> tag was invented, they’ve been the most important copy on a page…making or breaking the story or idea being communicated. If there is one consistent finding in landing page testing, it’s that headlines play one of the most crucial parts in conversion. A good headline pulls readers in to learn more while a bad headline fails to resonate and loses readers instantly.

But writing great headlines is easier said than done. Unless you’re a professional copywriter, writing headlines is hard. It can be difficult to say exactly what you want while staying interesting at the same time.

To help make writing your next web page headline easier, we’ve rounded up a bunch of powerful headlines and categorized them  for you so that you can start to see the inherent patterns in them. Sometimes all it takes is to find out which pattern works for you, and then writing becomes (ever so slightly) easier. Think of these headline categories in terms of personalities.

7 Types of Headlines

1. The Know-it-All – These headlines offer practical advice or tips.

• Where to Sell Your iPhone 3G: Gazelle vs. NextWorth
• Social Media Use Cases: Arcade Fire
• How the Old Spice Videos are Being Made

2. The Teacher – These headlines teach you something you didn’t already know.

• Why Too Much Money is Worse Than Too Little
• The Responsibility Revolution for Companies
• Seven Leadership Traits that the Gurus Don’t Tell You

3. The Gossip – These types of headlines stir up controversy, pique your interest, and often have you asking “and then what happened?”

• And the Winner for Best Film About Design Is…
• Apple Hater Seeks Roommate in the Big Apple Via Craig’s List
• Seven Puppies Die Following American Airlines Flight

4. The Instigator – These headlines make bold statements, which may or may not be true, but they make you want to click to find out.

• How Porn Will Keep Me in Business
• Google Wave is Dead
• Are Most VCs Dinosaurs Who Need to Hurry Up and Die?

5. The Nay-Sayer – These headlines convince you that what you don’t know will hurt you.

• Do you Pass the Leadership Test?
• 15% Changes Everything
• Do You Know What’s in Your Mutual Funds?

6. The Campaigner – These headlines provoke people who have similar problems or issues to click on the articles and connect with other like-minded people.

• Dear Car Dealerships: Stop Sucking
• Who Wants to Be the Mayor of Pizza Hut
• 3 Ways to Dress Like a Millennial Woman

7. The Connector – These articles show the connection between two seemingly unrelated things.

• Social Media Marketing Lessons from Justin Bieber
• What Hugo Chavez Teaches Us About Twitter
• Dan Pickett: Find Your Founder: Five Romantic Tips from a New Technical Cofounder

Have you come across any effective headlines lately? What category were they in? Why did you click on them?

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I recently spoke at Demandcon in San Francisco (I’ll tweet the slides later today via @jlopin, so follow me there if you want to take a look). I wanted to give three awesome pieces of advice that would really help people succeed with inbound marketing. The trouble was, what should the 3 things be?

Leading up to the event, I struggled to articulate the essence of inbound marketing in three concise, actionable statements. I couldn’t sleep, and I was stressed.

And then I finally remembered that I work with 200 of the most brilliant marketers in the world, and I could just ask them to tell me the answer.

So I fired off an email with the following simple question (and then I went to sleep): “If you could only give three pieces of advice to marketers before you die, what would you say?”

The responses I got from my colleagues were awesome: passionate, pragmatic, and characteristically MITish:

1. Stop thinking like an advertiser. Stop renting your audience. Build your own. Start thinking like a publisher. 

2. Marketing is not about arts & crafts. You need to understand (based on data) what’s working and what’s not. Then, you need to stop doing the stuff that isn’t working (or fix it), and do more of the stuff that is working.

3. You need to get good at converting your traffic into leads & customers.

The best part of this process was the emails I got back from my colleagues. I’ve included the highlights below. Click the little light bulb guy and the quote shows up below the table.

	Stop thinking like an advertiser; start thinking like a publisher	Marketing isn’t about arts & crafts; get good at analytics	Convert. Convert. Convert.
Brian Whalley
Mark Kilens
Mike Redbord
Emily Haahr
Diana Freedman
Jeanne Hopkins
Kyle James
Arjun Moorthy
Dharmesh Shah
Lucy Orloski
Mike Volpe
Dan Dunn

Note: You can click the names in the table to read their blog articles or subscribe to them by RSS (which is, by the way, an awesome feature of the HubSpot blogging engine).

In addition to the advice above, I feel compelled to end this post with two great quotes that just didn’t fit into the table: 

“Even if you think you’re doing inbound marketing, you’re likely not being aggressive enough. You have 10% of your portfolio in a stock that is the best investment ever, and it should be 70%.”

– Mike Volpe

“Stop worrying about it and do it, stop worrying about it and do it, stop worrying about it and do it.”

– Mike Redbord

Now, let me put the question to you: If you could only give a marketer 3 pieces of advice, what would you say?

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There was an interesting stat out of Harvard Business Review on the importance of timely responses when it comes to following up with online leads.  The data originally came from a study of  2,241 U.S. firms led by a researcher at South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University. According to the report:

“Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour.”

It’s incredible.  That’s how fast customers move.  How fleeting the attention span is. So how do you make sure that you’re getting back to customers within that rapidly closing window?

Get Your Sales Team an Espresso Machine

The best point of contact is a personal one.  Whenever possible someone from your team should be on top of providing that first welcome to your company or product.  How you handle that interaction is also critically important.   Reaching out to customers when the subject is most relevant is key, but you don’t want to rush or pressure anyone.  Make sure that that introductory touch point is a positive and informed one.  (Incidentally, there was an interesting discussion in the comments section of the HBR article about this).

Set Up Alerts Tied to Given Customer Actions

Part of responding to leads quickly is having the right tools to do so.  There are two things here that are important.  Speed and Relevancy. Some activities are the equivalent of a customer hand-raise. When that “hand-raise” happens you need to be at the ready to respond. Do you know when a potential customer has viewed your pricing page?   How quickly does your team find out about customer inquiries?

Speed is critical, but a rapid call-back without context can be a harsh experience for customers.   The best way to make that first conversation a positive one for the customer is to make it relevant. Make sure you have the analytics set up to show you what pages a customer viewed before requesting a quote.  In addition, your understanding of that customer experience prior to inquiring should span beyond the boundaries of your website.  Did they receive a targeted email from you? Have they ever requested assistance from your help desk?  What led them to this point?

Automate Tailored Responses

An auto-responder can be a good back-up when an immediate personal response isn’t possible, but only if it’s not a canned response.  Make sure your auto-responders are personalized and reflective of the experience your customer has had up to this point. You could segment customers by the information they provide in the inquiry form or by their past purchase behavior.  With HubSpot’s new behavior-driven communications tool, you can also take it further by triggering tailored emails and notifications based on the pages customers have visited on your site or specific actions they have taken across channels, including social media, email, mobile etc.

I’m curious to hear about your perspectives on the Sungkyunkwan study.  When do you think is the best time to call a lead after he or she has expressed an interest in your company?  What information is important to know prior to making that call?

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I spent close to 14 hours on Capitol Hill yesterday — and everyone on our team was there longer than I was.  Our cameras and producers witnessed (and recorded) things never seen on camera before. Continue reading →

Twitter announced today that users can expect to start seeing advertisements in their main stream of tweets from Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising platform. Most Twitter users knew it was only a matter of time before ads came to their main stream of tweets. Twitter has already been testing these ads with third-party clients like Hootsuite.

However, an ad will only appear to a user if he or she is already following the account that purchased the ad.  These Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of a user’s feed on Twitter.com, but as the user gets new tweets, it will be pushed down the page, just like other tweets.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Twitter’s Head of Global Revenue Adam Bain shared a couple of interesting insights about Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.

Bain said, “We’ve found that 20 to 40 percent of users follow one or more brands on Twitter,” he explains, noting that this is extremely important. (The stat is based on third-party research and is so wide because the definition of “brand” varies.) He continues, “Users want to be updated when brands have updates or exclusive content. The one problem we’ve heard from users is that when there is exclusive content or deals, there’s a chance they might miss them.”

Bain goes on to explain that, while traditional online display ads only get a click-through rate of around .05 percent, Promoted Tweets are seeing engagement in the double digit percentages. The program is launching with companies like Dell, HBO, Red Bull, and Sephora.

Twitter has stated previously that it plans to launch a self-service version of its Promoted Tweets platform to small businesses by the end of the year.

Marketing Takeaway

Social networks are growing up. Advertising is clearly only going to expand on social media services. As a marketer, it is critical to test emgering advertising opportunities to understand how they work to help accomplish your specific business goal. Keep an eye out for Twitter’s release of its self-service platform later this year. Only time will tell how users will embrace this new type of advertising on Twitter.

What is your opinion on advertisements coming to your main Twitter stream?

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One of the most common challenges with inbound marketing is time.  There are only 24 hours in the day, and most of us have our waking hours filled with other tasks already: getting new customers, supporting existing ones, building our product (my favorite!), meetings, interviews, and more.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an army of marketers willing to work for you, ideally on-demand and at a reasonable rate?  Well, you’re in luck!  The modern web brings that power to your fingertips.

Marketplaces, the Ancient Solution

Thankfully, the world is full of talented people, and the web lets you hire them more easily than ever before.  You don’t have to walk downtown to some market and check out vendor stalls, fun as that may be, in order to find a qualified vendor to help with one or more marketing needs.

As a marketplace consumer, it’s good to make sure you can track the performance of your vendors or providers.  For example, if you’re buying a blog article from a guest or shadow author, do you have the tools in place to know how many page views, leads, and customers that article generated?  If not, considering putting such a tracking / analytics system in place, if only so that you can properly evaluate vendors.

There are many online options for marketplaces.  Take a look at eLance and oDesk for fairly broad coverage, with professionals in many different areas, or more specialized providers like Wistia’s “50 Grove” for specific needs like video production, or InteractMedia’s “Zerys” for marketing content.

At HubSpot, we want to make these marketplaces even easier for our customers to access and leverage, so we’ve brought them into our own ecosystem and product.  We have a Service Marketplace which lists registered providers in various areas, as well as an Apps Marketplace (under the Community tab in the HubSpot product) listing assorted marketing-related apps from around the web.

We are working with these providers all the time to make the user experience integrated, to make it feel like one application, and to ease issues like user registration, payment, and transaction auditing.

Referral Programs: Word-of-Mouth Wins!

Another approach in building your army of 100 marketers is to encourage existing (and past) customers to refer new ones.  This used to involve a lot of manual labor, including (most likely) hiring a full-time program administrator and figuring out a bunch of legal documents.  But no more!

These days, there are a few software packages you can use to easily setup and configure referral programs.  They tend to feature built-in tracking and easy social sharing options for your affiliates or customers.

Each customer (or affiliate) typically gets a unique URL for each event or thing you want shared.  For example, if you’re conducting a webinar, and you want your attendees to refer others, you can give each attendee a unique link.  Then you can track in one place who referred whom, and maybe reward the best sources however you see fit. 

Many popular web sites now feature this functionality, such as Eventbrite for webinars and other events, LaunchRock for generic “coming soon” web sites (very useful for micro-sites or campaign-specific web sites), and more.  There are even vendors of completely generic, stand-alone referral program management tools, such as Legwork.

Of course, it’s still up to you to make sure your customers are excited enough and positive enough about your product to spread that word of mouth.  That’s beyond the scope of this article, but at least in most of these systems, you can only get positive effects from additional referrals.  The worst case is that you get zero referrals, and in that case, you likely have other problems to fix first.

But again, make sure you can track the results of your referral (or affiliate) program.  How many leads or customers did you get from this effort?  Otherwise, you won’t know if it was worth the money, or when and whether to do it again.

Maximize the Number of People Invested In Your Success

One of the beautiful effects of social media is that it gives your customers a voice.  On this blog and all over the internet, people talk about social media all the time.  We all know it’s great when your customers rave about your product (or service) online, and most of us have felt the sting or pain when the customers are unhappy.

With marketplaces, referral / affiliate programs, and similar online methods, you can put both professional vendors and your customers at your service.  You can reward them, if you so choose, with money or other fun items. 

But best of all, you can maximize the number of people invested in your success.  You can do it in a measurable, analytical way, which lends itself to repeated experiments and tests.  It’s usually pretty easy, so if you’re in a pinch for time, consider these options.

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