Monthly Archives: August 2012

You know what’s insanely difficult?

Being succinct.

Seriously … it’s ridiculously hard. If you don’t believe be, just grab your favorite copywriter and ask.

But do you know what’s even more difficult? Expressing an complex emotional concept in just a couple of words. In other words, coming up with a tagline. Yeah, it’s a head-scratcher.

But that’s why we have a lot of respect for these brands that did it right. They figured out how to convey their value proposition to their buyer persona in just one short sentence. And a quippy one at that! Not too shabby, at all. So if you’re looking to get a little tagline inspiration of your own, take a look at some of our favorite company taglines — from past and present!

1) Just Do It

Nike was founded in 1978. While it was clear that Nike was a brand focused on footwear and sportswear, no one knew exactly what it stood for until 10 years later when the “Just Do It” campaign debuted.

Instantly, the message began to resonate. It was no longer about just a shoe or a pair of shorts; it was about a state of mind. You don’t have to be an athlete to be in shape or tackle an obstacle. If you want to do it, just do it. That’s all it takes.

But there’s no way Kennedy+Weiden, the agency that established this tagline, could possibly have guessed that that is the direction Nike was headed when the company first debuted. This tagline’s proof positive that a brand needs to give itself time for a tagline to marinate before anyone can truly understand what it means to its audience.

2) Think Different

Ah, the infamous Apple tagline. Unlike Nike, it only took Apple one year before the “Think Different” tagline debuted. But that’s because this isn’t just any brand — this is the iconic Apple! The company everyone looks to for brand brilliance, advertising astonishment, and thinking different!

It only took moments before this tagline was plastered everywhere and people began to realize that with an Apple computer, they weren’t just using a computer … they were unique. They were innovative. They were tech-savvy. They were everything they always wanted to be, because they had this simple machine to guide them. And even today, despite the tagline being retired, Apple users feel a sense of elitism and creativity for being among those who think different.

3) I’m Lovin’ It

I bet the tune is popping into your head now … ba da ba ba ba … I’m lovin’ It! McDonald’s, the trophy child of all things fast food, was founded in 1940. How long did it take this widely-known brand to understand that when people indulge in their food they are, quite literally, loving it? A little over 60.

That’s right, the “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign didn’t launch until 2003, but still stands tall in 2012. Despite how poor their food may be for one’s health, when people eat McDonald’s, they can’t help but love it. The McDonald’s tagline doesn’t promise you that you’ll actually get any benefits from eating their food. It doesn’t tell you that they care about your health or your favorite flavors. It simply claims that when you eat their food, you’ll love their food. There’s not much more to it. 

4) Can You Hear Me Now? Good.

Here’s another brand that took its time coming up with something that truly resonated with its audience. While Verizon was founded in 1983, they continued to battle against various phone companies — AT&T and T-Mobile stand out as two of its strongest competitors. But what makes Verizon different among these other companies? Oh! No matter where you are, you have service. You may not have the greatest texting options, or the best cellphone options, but you will always have service. And boy does this promise stand true. Just move a little to your left or right, and someone will be able to hear you. This tagline appeared in 2002, under the umbrella of “we never stop working for you.”

5) Because You’re Worth It

Yeah, I am worth it. Who doesn’t want to feel that? L’Oreal realized that when women wear makeup, they want to be beautiful. They want to feel desirable, wanted, worth it. And by supplying the makeup that isn’t out of the reach of most women’s pocketbooks, L’Oreal was showing women that anyone can be “worth it.”

With this tagline, it was no longer about the product, but about the image — the image the product could get you. But by focusing on the latter, L’Oreal was able to push it’s brand further, and give the entire concept of makeup a much more powerful message. Because hey … you’re worth it.

6) Got Milk?

While everyone knows the infamous Got Milk? campaign, not everyone remembers that it was launched by the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) the same year the campaign launched. What’s interesting about this campaign is that it initially launched to combat the rapid increase in fast food and soft beverages. The CMPB wanted people to revert to milk as their drink of choice in order to sustain a healthier life. And what better way to catch people’s attention than by suscepting them to the desire to make a milk mustache? The simple words “Got Milk?” scribbled above celebrities, animals, and children with milk mustaches became one of the longest lasting campaigns ever. The CMPB wasn’t determined to make their brand known with this one … they were determined to infiltrate the idea of drinking milk across the nation. And these two simple words sure as heck did!

7) Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands

Nobody likes sticky, chocolatey fingers. And in the summer, it’s nearly impossible to hold chocolate in your hands outside without it melting away in seconds. M&M’s, however, have a conveniently covered hard shell that keep this very situation from occuring. And that is the brilliance behind their tagline, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”

This is one brand tagline that didn’t need much time before realizing its core value proposition. At the end of the day, chocolate is chocolate. How can one piece of chocolate truly stand out from another? By bringing in the convenience factor, of course! This particular example highlights the importance of finding something that makes your brand different from the others; in this case, the hard shell that keeps chocolate from melting all over you.

Betcha Can’t Just Eat One

Seriously, who has ever had just one chip?! And while this tagline stands true for other snack companies, Lay’s was clever enough to pick up on it straight away and use it to their advantage. Because when it comes time to indulge in Lays, you have to munch away until the bag is empty. It’s truly uncontrollable.

Lay’s tapped into our truly human incapability to ignore crispy, salty goodness when it’s staring us in the face. Carbs, what a tangled web you weave.

But seriously, notice how the emphasis isn’t on the taste of the product. Because at the end of the day, there will be other brands who taste good. What Lay’s was able to bring forth with their tagline is that totally human, uncontrollable nature of snacking til the cows come home on some salty goodness. Oh man, who wants a bag of Lay’s right now?

9) Tastes So Good, Cats Ask for It by Name

Meow meow meow meow … who remembers the catchy tune to which cats meowed in commercials for Meow Mix? Meow Mix released a simple but telling tagline, “Tastes So Good, Cats Ask For It By Name.” It plays off the fact that every time a cat meows, he/she is actually asking for Meow Mix! The tagline was clever and successfully planted Meow Mix as a standout brand in a cluttered market.

10) All the News That’s Fit to Print

This is personal my favorite. The tagline came into existence in the late 1890s as a movement of opposition against other news publications printing lurid journalism. The New York Times didn’t stand for sensationalism, but rather important facts and stories that would educate their audience. They literally deemed their content all the real news fit to print. This helped the paper become more than just a news outlet, but a company that paved the way for creditable news. The New York Times quickly became a thought leader in the journalism world, and continues to be one today. The company didn’t force a tagline upon people when it first was founded, but rather created one in a time where it was needed most.

HubSpot’s new tagline is “For the Love of Marketing.” Do you have your own tagline? What other brands’ taglines do you love?

Image credit: JD Hancock

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The navigation of your website is a key component that directly impacts you from a business and marketing perspective. After all, a navigation is often what stands between the user and the user’s goal. And as a marketer, you should want to make that distance as short as possible.

That’s why you need to ensure your website navigation offers a positive experience from a usability perspective. In other words, designing your navigation in a way that makes sense to website users. Don’t make your visitors do a lot of work to reach their goal — if the user’s goal is to locate your pricing page, for instance, help them get to it fast.

What Should a Website Navigation Do?

Navigation of information, as discussed in Alan Cooper’s book, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, can be accomplished by three key methods: scrolling (panning), linking (jumping), and zooming. In order to develop a solid navigation system, designers need to enable the user to move smoothly from one place to another place, and promote flow.

Specifically, the navigation should:

• Enable users to choose from a small selection of pages to visit.
• Provide clear labels for the pages where navigation tabs take you.
• Adapt your website to match user needs.
• Tell people where they currently are and how to get back.
• Provide a search function.

Components of a Navigational System

In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, a well-designed navigational system should include three main components:

• Current Locator: This is also known as a site ID and is a way for users to know where on the website they currently are. For instance, when you select a given tab in the website navigation, does the appearance of that tab change to reflect that it has been selected? Check out a screenshot from Apple’s website: when a user selects a tab (in this case, the iPod tab), it becomes darker than the rest of the navigation. 

• Navigation Method: For visitors, this is a way to find out where on a website you can go — and how to get there. It gives you access to the primary content sections and utilities, then places you can get to that aren’t part of the primary content hierarchy. For instance, when you visit the Apple website and click on the iPod tab, you will see that the information is organized in a hierarchical order: you can choose between iPod products or apps related to the iPod.

• Trace Route: This is a way for you to find where on the website you’ve been. This is also known as a home link and answers the question, “How can I get back to where I started?” In the case of the Apple website, you can simply click on the Apple icon to go back to the home page.

• Search: This is the search functionality visitors have access to. It’s a way to quickly find specific information they might be looking for, and is often illustrated by the magnifying glass icon.

As you incorporate these components into your website navigation, ensure that you keep their look and feel consistent. Providing consistent navigation throughout your website allows users to feel confident that they know where they are and that they can find what they’re looking for.

Types of Navigation Systems

Now that we’ve covered the role of the website navigation and its components, let’s explore what options for navigation systems you have. There are three main types of navigation systems.

• Global Navigation: Global navigation is a site-wide navigation that allows access to key areas or functions. It usually appears on every page and can contain multiple levels of hierarchy. The Apple screenshots above are good representations of a global navigation.
• Local Navigation: Local navigation enables the user to explore the immediate area or a subset of the site. If you visit Amazon.com, for instance, you will see a left-hand navigation that allows you to explore the specific section of the website you are currently in.

• Contextual Navigation: Contextual navigation provides navigation in line with content (e.g. hyperlinks). Gerry McGovern, the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, explains, “The primary purpose of web navigation is to help people to move forward. It is not to tell them where they have been, or where they could have gone.”

Navigation Patterns

Depending on context, you might take several different approaches to organizing your website or application:

• Task-Based: Your navigation can be task-based. It’s sometimes useful to provide one or more task-based points of entry to your site.

• Content-Based: Navigation options appear consistently across all pages. It may represent flat or hierarchical structure.
• Menu-Driven: A main menu provides access to isolated sub-modules. Navigation across screens is not permitted. This is used mostly for device interfaces.
• Transactional: Provides feedback about where you are in a sequential process, and provides the option to back up to a prior step. Your design should start with thinking about how the user will move between pages or screens.

An Example of a Great Website Navigation

In this blog post, we intentionally chose to feature screenshots of Apple’s website navigation, since Apple does a great job of directing its users to different places of its website through its navigation. Spend some time studying Apple’s navigation, and see if you can adopt some of the lessons you spot.

What other great examples of website navigation have you noticed? Share them with us in the comments below.

Photo Credit: olgaberrios

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Do you know your best customer? Seriously — do you really, really understand your best customer? For example, do they live in the big city or the suburbs? Watch Jeopardy or Modern Family? Use their iPhone nonstop, or get nervous about new technology? If you don’t know the answer, it’s time to do some research. Asking these types of questions will help you paint a clearer picture of your target customer — what marketers like to call their “buyer persona” — which will help you make smarter marketing decisions that always cater to the needs of your target customer.

The key to successful marketing is making marketing people love. And the first step to making marketing people love is understanding *what* your best customer loves. Once you understand your buyers’ loves, needs, and interests, you can use this information to guide all of your marketing moving forward. Not only will you be successful, you’ll make your buyers happy! So here are 11 ways for you to start using those buyer personas you created to make smarter marketing decisions that make your target audience love you a whole lot more.

11 Ways to Use Personas to Be a Better Marketer

1) Write blog content that reads like their favorite how-to magazine.

Have you ever read an article that was so relevant to your life — right at that moment — that you thought it must have been written just for you? That should be the goal of ALL your content for your potential buyers, particularly your blog content. By knowing what your buyers want to read and then writing it in educational and how-to blog posts, you’ll generate avid, loyal readers and subscribers.

2) Post social updates that speak their language.

HEYYY! we bet u wouldnt follow @HubSpot 4long if we twtd like this ALL TH3 TIME!!!!! Alternatively, choosing superfluous and ostentatious terminology for your social interactions may alienate your network … ahem. Be relatable to your buyer persona by using the language your buyer persona uses. That way your network will be able to relate to your brand, and your marketing will flourish!

3) Hang out where your buyer persona hangs out.

Does your network live for LinkedIn, but hate Twitter? Is there a specific niche social website that your persona can’t live without? That’s where your business should be most active! Hint: Look for trends in your web traffic from social networks. The channel that has the highest visit-to-lead conversion rate will most likely be the network that works best for you. 

4) Customize your SEO strategy to target the phrasing your persona uses.

This can get interesting! Say you sell electronics and you’re optimizing your website for the term “tv remotes.” But wait … what if your target audience actually calls those gadgets clickers? That’s a major difference! Be sure to optimize your website content based on the way your buyer persona speaks, and by extension, the way they search.

5) Use humor that your buyer persona finds funny.

Injecting humor into your marketing content is a great way to humanize your brand, but you have to make sure it’s actually funny to your target audience. Even more important, you have to make sure it’s not insulting to your target audience. The tastes of a 21-year-old man might be a bit different than a gentleman in his 50s, after all. Truly know what your buyer persona finds entertaining. It’d be a shame to accidentally upset one of your prospects when you were just trying to make your brand a little more relatable, and your content a little more engaging.

6) Create an offer that solves your persona’s problems.

What does your buyer persona want help with? Is there often a problem that most of your best customers have? Or had when they were your leads, at least? If you can create a document that helps your target audience solve that problem — and put it behind a form to help with your lead generation, of course — you’ll have a true win-win on your hands. Your target audience gets the help they need, and you generate some seriously high-quality leads!

7) Optimize your landing pages for your buyer persona.

Don’t talk about why you think your offer is important. Describe your offer in terms of what it will do for your prospective customer. That type of content is appealing and compelling, and you should see a higher conversion rate after optimization. Not sure what words will resonate best? A/B test your landing page copy to see what resonates best with your target audience!

Use technology that caters to their technical level.

Don’t ask your customer base to use a technology type that they aren’t comfortable using to interact with your website or content. For example, forcing your customer to download a mobile app when they don’t have a smartphone might not be the best call. Make sure you understand what type of technology your buyer persona knows, has, and is comfortable using so your marketing content is easily accessibly.

9) Collaborate with partners that excite your persona.

Co-marketing is an amazing way to make your marketing soar — after all, two heads (and resource sets) are better than one! When choosing your co-marketing partners, try to think of companies that your buyer idolizes, whether they’re small or big, and consider if a partnership might be beneficial. You could do anything from launching co-marketing webinars to simply making a donation to a non-profit your persona cares a lot about. You’ll develop your brand’s authority and thought leadership position, and earn some major likability points with your target audience.

10) Align your campaign timing with your persona’s lifestyle.

Does your buyer persona go on vacation every August? Stop work at noon? Live in a different time zone? Read emails from her iPhone when waking up at five in the morning? Cater your campaign launches around these lifestyle nuances. So if your target audience is, say, a night owl, you’ll probably want to schedule the majority of your social content around 9:00 to 11:00pm in your target’s timezone. Right? Right.

11) Mold your sales process to your persona’s decision making process.

This might be the most important tip. Different people need different types of information to make key buying decisions … and at different stages in the buying cycle, to boot. Make sure you understand what type of details and information your buyer will require before they sign on the line that is dotted, and when the best time is to divulge that information.

What else do you use your buyer persona for in your marketing? How has developing a buyer persona helped you?

Image credit: viZZZual.com

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This blog post is an excerpt from “The Step-by-Step Guide to Lovable Marketing Campaigns.” Download your free copy today to read more about how to make your marketing lovable.

In order for a marketing campaign to be powerful, it needs a good offer — you know, the thing that gets people excited enough to click! The creative coupon. The helpful ebook. The customized consultation. But your offer also needs one other element to make it a big-hit success …

It needs to be lovable.

Are you creating offers your prospects will love? If not, (or if you’re not sure), let’s look at the characteristics of creating marketing content — particularly offer content — that people love.

Create Content For Your Persona

It’s easy enough to say you’re going to create a helpful, educational offer … but … how? To handle the demands of content creation, marketers have been told again and again to “think like a publisher.” It’s great advice, but what exactly does that mean? Just how do you think like a publisher? Publishers have a detailed picture of who their reader is that drives every content creation decision they made; inbound marketers should be no different.

Generate a detailed picture of your target audience (what we call a buyer persona in the marketing biz) so you can create the type of content they’ll love to read — from the right topic, to the right tone, to the right format in which it’s presented (more on that later).

So if you haven’t already, ask yourself … who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them — on search engines, social media, or blogs — and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas. And if you need more help creating your buyer persona, download this PowerPoint template that helps you lay the whole thing out, step by step!

Focus on the Right Stage

Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of these goals depends on where your lead is in the sales cycle. How would you appreciate someone sending you buyer guides when you’ve only just downloaded a checklist? Here’s a sketch of the buying cycle that should help you align the right content with the right stage of the buying cycle so your leads keep on loving the offers you send their way:

• Awareness: The prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service.

• Research/Education: The prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product/service.

• Comparison/Validation: The prospect examines the options and begins narrowing down the list of vendors.

• Purchase: The prospect decides from whom to buy.

Use Data to Create Lovable Content — in Topic and Format

Content comes in all shapes and sizes — whitepapers, videos, webinars, ebooks, templates, kits — you name it. While you can host an internal brainstorm session and come up with creative ideas for different content formats that you can produce, it’s important that this new content matches the needs and preferences of your target persona.

But how do you know? Well, you can certainly ask them — an ideal time is when you’re creating your buyer personas and performing interviews of your target audience, anyway. But we also like to use analytics to make that decision! At HubSpot, for instance, we’re using our landing page analytics to explore how successful different types of content are in converting visitors to leads. If the conversion rate is lower than average, the marketing offer isn’t appealing enough to our audience. If you have a sense of what that format is for your business, use it to build your marketing campaign around it.

But your job doesn’t end in determining the right format in which to present your offer. You also need to figure out what on earth you’re going to write about. And the answer isn’t, “Whatever strikes my fancy.” Not if you want your leads to love your offer.

In order to find what content topics capture the attention of your target audience, you should look at past data that you have access to. For instance, what are the most popular blog articles you’ve published? What are some of the most viewed pages on your website? Your historical performance should dictate your future direction for all new marketing content — particularly your lead generation content. If you don’t have access to marketing analytics that give you this type of intelligence, look in the public domain (places like Google News, Google Trends, and Twitter Trending Topics) for popular and newsworthy industry stories. You can then piggyback on these popular topics by adding a personal spin that reflects your expertise and resonates with your audience.

Recruit a Team of Content Creators

You don’t have to be the only one creating your company’s offer content. You can (and should!) use different voices from inside your organization. Technical folks, customer service people, C-level executives, product managers, and others in your organization have a unique take on important aspects of your business, as well as different areas of expertise you can tap into. Get your coworkers to contribute by:

• Asking them to co-write a whitepaper or an ebook
• Interviewing them and posting short videos that share their expertise
• Inviting them to give presentations or answer questions in webinars

You can also look outside your own company for help creating content. New online content marketplaces are springing up to connect marketers with legions of freelance writers and editors who will take on blog posts, ebooks, and other writing jobs for you. You can specify the topic, your desired style and tone, and your intended audience. And depending on the marketplace you work with, you typically don’t have to pay unless you accept the finished article.

Repurporse Content

Almost every piece of content you create can be adapted, reused, modified, and republished in another format. Make a habit of finding multiple ways to package and distribute the same information in different formats. Here are a few ideas:

• Combine text from an old whitepaper with new videos to create a multimedia ebook

• Turn videos or webinars into blog posts and ebooks — or vice versa.

• Use commonly asked questions and comments from webinars to create a new ebook. These topics will directly address your prospects’ pain points.

• Share all company presentations in multiple formats. Post the slides on SlideShare, upload the video on YouTube, and create a series of blog posts that dive into specific points of the presentation.

Do you have any more tips for lovable content that can help build strong marketing offers? Share it in the comments below!

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We started this company because we saw an opportunity to help businesses break away from the traditional marketing playbook and attract better quality leads through inbound marketing. In the first five years of HubSpot, we did just that. Our software has helped 7,000+ businesses generate more than 12 million leads for their companies. We helped them do it in a way that didn’t cost them a fortune. We helped them do it in a way that added valuable content to the space. And we couldn’t be prouder of the results they’ve achieved. 

In that time, the world of online marketing has grown increasingly complex. When we started HubSpot, there were four or five tools that most companies used to manage their online marketing. Even then, we thought that was a lot. Today, we talk to some companies who are using twice that amount — just to communicate with their prospects and customers. And the truth is, they aren’t getting any closer to the kind of relevant and personalized communication leads and customers need.

So now, there is another opportunity: a chance to help marketers in companies of every size and industry reduce the noise that has made marketing increasingly more fragmented, and get back to the strategy and art that makes marketing people can truly love.

Today, I am really happy to introduce you to HubSpot 3. 

An End to Isolated Tools and Fragmented Marketing

Marketers have grown far too accustomed to CSV files. We spend way too much time importing, exporting, and patching together isolated sets of data just to get a clear view of our marketing. HubSpot 3 was built to be the antidote to all of those extra steps and the fragmented customer experience they create.

It all starts with the single, centralized marketing database, your most important marketing asset. The database, which we call Contacts, gives you a complete history of every interaction you’ve had with your leads and customers across channels. Every single HubSpot tool is unified and made more powerful by Contacts. Your emails become smarter, your landing pages more dynamic, and your social media shares more integrated into the rest of your marketing strategy. Contacts is your all-in-one marketing control center.

Learn all about the new:

• Contacts and the Contact Timeline: The central brain of your marketing, Contacts keeps track of what matters to your leads and customers and how engaged they’ve been with your company.
• Smart Lists and Segmentation: Smart Lists are contact lists based on a set of criteria; they automatically grow and update over time.

The Right Content to the Right Person at the Right Time

At the end of the day, inbound marketing is about relevancy. You earn new leads because you publish quality content that is relevant enough for someone to download and read. But what happens after they convert? For a lot of marketers, inbound methods stop here — and they shouldn’t. The way to keep leads engaged and turn them into happy customers is to extend that relevant experience throughout their decision-making process.

Here’s how it works in HubSpot 3: A website visitor converts into a lead because they found a piece of content useful. From that moment forward, HubSpot Contacts starts building an understanding of what interests the lead has based on each interaction he or she has with your company. Each one of those interactions informs and shapes all future communications to that specific lead. What’s more, because Contacts stores the lead’s history with your company, it can approximate where the lead is in their decision-making process to help you tailor content that fits that stage of consideration. Because all of your communication tools are in HubSpot, everything from emails to CTAs, forms, and images on your site take on the ability to adapt to be more relevant to each individual contact.

Learn all about the new:

• Smart CTAs: Powered by data from Contacts, Smart CTAs enable you to create images and calls-to-action for your website or emails that dynamically adapt to reflect the viewer’s interests, industry, lifecycle stage, or other areas of segmentation.
• Smart Fields: Smart fields are a long-awaited answer to anyone who is sick and tired of filling out yet another website form with the same information. As you collect more information about your leads, Smart Forms remove any field that has been completed in the past, creating shorter and shorter forms for your leads without sacrificing valuable information.
• Email: Target specific segments, and personalize your sender, subject, and message body content with any field or custom field from your contact profile.
• Workflows: Workflows enable you to trigger targeted communications based on a lead’s behavior. A divergence from traditional marketing automation, however, Workflows also allow you to update details in a lead’s profile based on activity across channels, including social media.

An Uncompromised View Into Your Entire Strategy

HubSpot has always believed in analytics that run across channels and give you a complete view of your marketing. In HubSpot 3, not only are lead and customer data shared across all of your tools, but we’ve also actually physically tied views from each of the tools into the others, so you can see how each channel is influencing others.

Learn all about the new:

• Social Contacts: See which of your leads clicked on something you shared in social media, and quickly add them to a list to nurture. In the Contact profile, see how active each lead has been in social media and how recently they’ve engaged with you.
• Landing Pages: Run an entire campaign from one view. Create, test and promote landing pages, then see which channels (email, social, search, etc.) are bringing leads to it.

A Marketing Platform and Community That Makes 1+1=3

We’re in this for more than just software. We’re in it for the love of marketing. It’s that love that’s behind all of the free tools and ongoing training we provide, which we’ve consolidated and re-launched as HubSpot Academy. And it’s the shared passion for good marketing that unites our ever-expanding marketplace of more than 60 add-on apps and 100+ top-notch service providers. The combination of the marketplace and world-class coaching adds volumes to HubSpot 3. 

Oh, and did I mention? A way to take this all on the road.

To make HubSpot 3 portable, HubSpot is releasing its first-ever mobile app. The iPhone app — which can be found in Apple’s App Store — gives you instant access to your marketing analytics, the award-winning Marketing Grader app, and every lead and customer’s contact record with your company. You can even get push notifications when new leads come in, which helps you follow up immediately.

Learn more about the mobile app, or download it for free from the App Store.

This morning at Inbound 2012, I announced HubSpot 3 for the first time. I am incredibly proud of the work that went into it, and I’m excited for what it will open up for marketers everywhere. I firmly believe that the methodology and platform fueling HubSpot enables our users to create marketing that people will truly love — an end goal that makes all of us HubSpotters smile.

If you’re a customer of ours, you can learn more about migrating to HubSpot 3 within your individual accounts. New customers can purchase the newly released platform at current HubSpot prices until September 1, when prices are slated to increase.

An explanation of the full release can also be found at www.hubspot.com/3.

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The season of events is upon us! I know that at HubSpot, we’re currently busy hosting our INBOUND 2012 conference (seriously — it’s happening RIGHT NOW). Are you working on your next industry event yet? If you are, have you thought about your social media strategy? After you secure your event date(s), the next step is to plan your social media strategy to give your attendees and audience the best experience possible. We’ll help you out with a few tips to rock your next event.

Tip #1: Create a hashtag.

A lot of people will undoubtedly be tweeting about your event. They may be sharing with their followers that they’ll be attending your event, asking questions about your event, or tweeting about the content during the event. No matter what they’re saying, it’s important for you to engage with these people and respond to their questions and comments.

Creating a hashtag is the easiest way to keep track of the conversations people are having about your event. Having one will not only be beneficial during the days and months leading up to the event, but also while it’s taking place and even after it’s over, so you can track what people thought about individual sessions and the event as a whole. Establishing a hashtag can help you create buzz for your event, as well as gather feedback that can be beneficial in planning future events. When creating a hashtag, choose something short and memorable (check out this helpful guide to creating awesome hashtags), and be sure to promote it during the planning process and during the event itself so people know what to use while they’re tweeting.

Tip #2: Promote regular updates about your event.

As you’re planning your event, use your social presence to announce news and updates about what attendees should look forward to. For example, when you secure a new speaker, share the news via your social media accounts. When registration opens, announce it using your social presence. When you confirm your sponsors, share that, too! Prospective attendees are looking for reasons why they should come to your event, and these types of announcements have the potential to sway people who are on the fence about coming. You just might make some additional ticket sales because of your social promotion.

Tip #3: Leverage ALL of your social media channels (and tailor your messaging to each).

Keep in mind that not all of your prospective attendees participate in every social channel. Certain people may only follow you on Twitter. Others may prefer LinkedIn. Therefore, promoting your event across all social media channels your prospective attendees populate should be an integral part of your event’s social media marketing strategy. Sure, different channels will require different tones and messaging, but utilizing more than one social network will increase the reach of your event messaging, so take the time to adapt your event’s social updates to cater to each network. For instance, you may not be targeting the same types of people in your LinkedIn group as you are on your Facebook page, but both types of people may be interested in attending your event, and it’s worth the effort to craft different messages to appeal to each group’s needs and interests.

Tip #4: Make sure your event’s promotional content is remarkable.

It’s easy to post updates about your upcoming event and encourage people to register, but what will make your event truly stand out from all the rest is the strength of your event’s promotional content. Just like all the other inbound marketing content you create, your event content needs to be remarkable. Run social media contests to get people excited about your event, and reward winners with prizes like free tickets. Create and share graphics or videos to give people a sneak peak into what will happen at your event. Write articles for your business blog that help your attendees plan and prepare for your event, and of course, share them in social media!

Tip #5: Create LinkedIn and Google+ event pages.

If you’re planning an industry event, LinkedIn should be the focus of a lot of your efforts. When people think of promoting an event in social media, they typically jump right to Facebook, but creating a LinkedIn event can be the perfect tool for targeting your industry. It will also give you a centralized page on which to post nothing but event updates, instead of cluttering up your main company page. Another venue you should consider using is oft-neglected Google+. Creating a Google+ event offers a few main benefits: automatic email invitations, and day-before-the-event reminders — as well as adding your event to the Google calendars of people who have indicated they’re attending. For smaller events — or even larger events with busy people — Google+ can be a great tool.

Tip #6: Allow attendees to ask your keynote speakers questions via Twitter.

During your event, many of your attendees will likely want some time to chat with your speakers and ask them questions. But as any event planner knows, that’s not always feasible. As an alternative, encourage attendees to tweet their comments and questions to speakers using the event hashtag. Make sure your speakers are aware of this initiative, since they may even want to answer some of the audience’s questions at the end of their presentations. Not only will this make your event more interactive, but it will also make attendees feel more connected to your speakers. It’s a simple tactic that is relatively easy to execute, but it will also really make your attendees feel like you value their thirst for knowledge. It will also show that you’ve taken the extra step to connect them with the thought leaders who can best help cater to their needs.

Tip #7: Be responsive in social media, even during the event.

The social media event updates shouldn’t stop when your event starts. Remember — there may be people asking questions about your event even when they’re on-site. Assign someone at your company with the sole task of monitoring the conversation around your hashtag and responding frequently throughout the event. No matter what attendees are saying, it’s important to make sure someone can answer their questions as quickly as possible. Doing so will reflect positively on your company and on your attendees’ overall experience at your event. Furthermore, encouraging engagement on Twitter could end up causing your hashtag to trend, or at the very least, expand the read of your event — and your company!

What other social media strategies can make for a more successful event?

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Have you ever had someone stare at you blankly when you say you’re an inbound marketer?

If you’ve had trouble explaining the concept to friends, family, colleagues, or bosses, you’re not alone. Inbound marketing concepts can be complicated for people to grasp if they’re new to things like SEO, social media, blogging, marketing automation — any kind of digital marketing, frankly.

So whenever we speak to people who aren’t very well-versed in inbound marketing tactics, we like to break it down into more relatable terms. In fact, over the years, we like to think we’ve perfected some pretty apt analogies that liken inbound marketing to everyday things that everyone can understand. So we’re using this blog post to share those inbound marketing analogies with you — because we love inbound marketing, and we want to help more people understand it! Take a look at some of our favorite analogies we’ve used to explain inbound marketing concepts, and share your own in the comments.

Inbound marketing is like dating …

You don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date. People get kind of freaked out when you do that. You get to know each other first, then introduce the friends, then the family, and then, once you know the whole package looks good, you put a ring on it.

But if you’re doing something like slapping ‘Contact Us’ as the only call-to-action on every page of your site, that’s essentially what you’re doing — asking your leads to get too serious, too soon. Why would they commit to someone they just met? Play it cool, man. Let them get to know you first. Maybe through ohhh, I don’t know … an ebook? If they like the looks of you from your ebook, then they have a reason to actually want to get to know you better. That’s when you can step it up a notch and offer them something a little more committed, like anything in that little blue circle in the diagram below. If it goes well — you’ve been vouched for by some case studies, they have that warm, fuzzy feeling from your custom demo — then ask them to put a ring on it. Or email an invoice … you know what I mean

Blogging is like jogging …

You’re going to see better results if you do it 30 minutes every other day than if you run like a total maniac just once a month.

We often hear people say they’ve tried blogging, but “it doesn’t work.” When we dig a little deeper, however, we find that they blogged three days in a row last January and then gave up when their site traffic didn’t jump. Big shock. Business blogging requires consistent, long-term effort, not short sprints of intense activity. You’ll see much better results blogging every other day for a year than blogging twice a day for two weeks, stopping, then starting again four months later. At that frequency, neither readers nor crawlers know when on earth to visit your site.

Keyword strategy is like applying to college …

You’re going to apply to reach, target, and safety schools. You might get into your reach school, your safety schools are a sure thing, and everything in between is what you’re gunning for … and with hard work, you’ll probably get in, too.

Approach your keyword selection the same way. There are some really desirable keywords out there that you’d like to rank for, but they’re also typically quite competitive — think head terms like, say, “internet marketing.” You should put some effort into ranking for these “ivy league” terms, sure, but you’re going to see much quicker returns if you target some “community college” terms, or long-tail keywords. They still provide you great business results, but they’re much easier to rank for.

And while you make quick work of ranking for those long-tail phrases, you can invest more effort into those “target school” keywords that fall somewhere in between long tail and head terms — the ones that will be a boon for your business if you rank for them, take some serious work, but are still within the realm of possibility based on their search volume and competitiveness.

You can actually apply the college application metaphor to SEO as a discipline. If you study hard and do your best work consistently while you’re in school, you’ll get into a great college, too. If you consistently create excellent content, your hard work will be similarly rewarded with excellent rankings in the SERPs — for keywords of all difficulty levels.

The internet is like a popularity contest …

The more people that vote for you, the more likely it is you’ll make prom queen. Or class president. Or chess club secretary.

This analogy helps people understand how inbound links work. When content is really good, people want to link to it. That’s how the “internet” knows your content is good — lots of people have linked to, or “voted for” it. And since Google only wants to return the best results in the SERPs to make their searchers happy, the more times people have voted that your content is great via their inbound links, the more likely it is you’ll show up in the top search results for a related term.

The conversion path is like a Discovery Channel documentary …

Wait, what? Stay with me, this one’s awesome. The conversion path is like a Discovery Channel documentary. You lure an animal in, capture it, tag it, then release it back into the wild.

The conversion path refers to the process that turns site visitors into leads and customers — the call-to-action, landing page, form submission, and thank-you page. Here’s how this Discovery Channel analogy breaks down:

• Call-to-Action (The Bait): Lure them in with a compelling offer, promoted with some enticing messaging and an eye-catching design.
• Landing Page (The Capture): You’ve got them in your grips! You just need to make sure they don’t escape — remove your navigation, write clear copy, make sure your landing page is well optimized — before you’re able to get the information you need. Which leads us to …
• Form (The Tag): They fill out their information so you know who they are. That way, when they leave your site to go back into that internet wild, you’ll still be able to identify them among all the other visitors when they come back to your site.
• Thank-You Page (The Release): Once you’ve captured your lead intelligence, you can release them to explore other elements of your site, or even off-site elements like your social media accounts.

Marketing automation is like air travel …

You could get take three days to drive there in a car. Or you could hop on a plane and get there in 5 hours.

That’s the value of automating your marketing — where you can, at least. Let’s consider email automation, for example. You could spend time crafting a personalized email message for everyone on your email list — like, every one of the hundreds of thousands of people on your email list — and then take the time to individually email every single one of those people with your message. One. by. one. Oh, and then you can do the follow-up for all of them, too!

Or, you might realize after writing your tenth email that you’re saying basically the same thing in every email, with maybe just a few exceptions — because they’ve all been properly segmented, so they all have one specific thing in common. So instead of spending days or weeks sending out those emails manually, you could simply segment out that list of people in your marketing automation tool, insert some dynamic fields in the content to personalize it, and then nurture them further down the road based on their response to that email … all of which is documented in your CRM. Documented and followed-up with automatically, not manually.

Doesn’t that seem like a better use of time? I think so.

What other analogies do you use to explain inbound marketing (or aspects of it) to newbies?

Image credit: busyPrinting

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