Inbound Marketing - Transcript

Inbound Marketing Certification Lesson Transcript
Inbound Marketing Fundamentals

VIDEO 1: WHY INBOUND MARKETING?

In all great stories, the concept of the hero’s journey is simple. Essentially, the beloved hero goes
on a quest, faces untold difficulty, but rises victorious and returns home transformed. They have
help on the way, of course. Often taking the form of a sage or wizard, there’s usually someone who
aids the hero on their adventure, providing guidance and advice so that the hero can grow into
their fullest potential and achieve what they set out to do.
When it comes to inbound marketing, the role of the sage advisor falls to you. Every prospect and
customer is on a quest to accomplish a set of goals. They might not know where their journey with
you will lead them, but as a marketer, it’s your job to act as a constant guide, when your visitors
need you as a resource, and an expert ready for their questions when they need answers most.
Why? It’s your job to act as this constant advisor because your educational guidance builds trust
and long-term growth for both you and your prospect or customer.
Content acts as your voice. It enables you to speak one-on-one with the tens, hundreds, and
potentially thousands of these heroes who are looking for answers and insights on a regular basis.
While in the past this could only be done through blog posts and site pages, advancement in
technology has led to the rise of conversational tools like chatbots, live chat, and social media, so
it’s easier than ever to engage in conversation. It’s as if your company is actually by their side,
speaking directly to them as a person. This is how online content will enable you to begin
developing meaningful one-to-one relationships, and do it at scale.
The rules of content, however, are constantly changing. In the past, writing 350-word pieces of
content with the correct balance of links and keywords was sufficient to rank well and get in front of
your ideal audience. As more companies began to create more content, search engines needed a
new way to surface the most relevant information. Today, search engines have dramatically
improved in their ability to determine user intent and select the correct websites, articles, and
answers accordingly.
When the goal of your inbound marketing efforts is to create one-to-one relationships, the power
of context is on your side. When you know your audience, you have insight into their motivations,
goals, roadblocks, and behavior. This helps you create content that’s timely, aligned, and
personalized to fit their needs. You have the goal of providing the right information to the right
person at the right time via the right channel, every single time.
Rather than forcing people to engage with you, you can focus your time and effort on sustainably
attracting the right visitors and encouraging interactions with the most potential impact.

By creating content that educates and informs your prospects and customers with context, clarity,
and creativity, you can start to build trust and establish yourself as a thought leader in your
industry.
With inbound marketing, your content becomes part of a cross-channel holistic experience
comprised of compelling conversion opportunities and exciting offers. With this content, you’re
able to build a relationship with your visitors, to gather information, and learn more about each
individual.
By taking this relationship-focused approach to marketing, you’re not just solving for your
prospects’ immediate needs, but also enabling their long-term growth. The value and insight your
content provides enables your visitors to critically examine their problems so that they eventually
arrive at the most natural solution.
Helping your visitors reach this conclusion positions you as a resource, one they can return to and
recommend to others. The hero returning from their journey will always tell their stories and
spread the word of their adventures. In this case, you’re playing the part of an advisor who can
help a new set of heroes.
So what does inbound marketing really mean? Inbound marketing is about creating one-to-one
relationships that have a lasting impact on your visitors and your brand. How do you do this? You
attract prospects and customers to your site through helpful content. You engage with them using
conversational tools like email and chat and by providing value once they land there. And finally,
you delight by continue to act as an empathetic advisor and expert. These steps form a single
methodology: attract, engage, delight, and repeat. This cycle or “flywheel” of developing
meaningful relationships will power your company’s growth by creating more opportunity to sell
and service down the line.
In marketing, it’s important to remember that while the customer may be the hero, you have the
opportunity to help educate and inspire them along the way. Ultimately, this relationship with your
customers should span to all your teams—marketing, sales, and services—and create the
opportunity so that everyone can grow better together.

VIDEO 2: HOW DOES THE INBOUND METHODOLOGY

APPLY TO MARKETING?
So how do you do inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a cycle of attracting, engaging, and
delighting people. Let’s consider, as a marketer, what tools, information, and resources you need
to accomplish this for your company. You and your team will act as the main touch-point between
prospects and your brand.
Your prospects are on a journey that will take them through stages of awareness, consideration,
and decision-making. Make sure you’re aligning with this journey as you apply the inbound
methodology and the cycle of attract, engage, and delight.
Before you can initiate any relationship, you need to understand who you’re trying to connect with.
You want to develop content that’s relevant to your audience and relates to the context of their
current situation. You also want to start building awareness of your business in places where your
prospects already are and where they’ll be most ready to be exposed to your content. After all,
many people are exposed to a brand before they ever visit that business’s website.
Your visitors will have different levels of understanding on the best ways to overcome their
challenges and accomplish their goals. You’ll need to understand what their progression through
the buyer’s journey looks like, from awareness of the problem to consideration of the potential
solutions and to decision-making. From there, you can create content that aligns with the needs of
every visitor, no matter where they are in identifying their roadblocks and determining their
solutions.
Creating buyer personas is also important because it helps you develop a trait that’s at the heart of
inbound: empathy. Building buyer personas helps you step into the shoes of your audience,
gaining deeper insight into who they are as a person and what their goals are personally and
professionally.
From there, you start to gain their trust by creating the content that best aligns with them as
people. You showcase your value as an advisor by helping your visitors accomplish their goals and
help them solve their exact problems.
To do so, you’ll also need to know where your ideal audience is currently finding and engaging
with new concepts and ideas. This will tell you where you’ll need to put the contextualized content.
Are they active on social media?

Consider how you’re leveraging ads, engagement, and business pages on platforms like Linkedin,
Facebook, and Twitter. Are your buyer personas turning to search engines for research? Consider
your content strategy and how you’re breaking into snippets or ranking with content like pillar
pages, blogs posts, or video content. Understand the problems they face—even if they haven’t
been able to define those problems themselves—and how to best remove any roadblocks that
stand in the way of their goals.
For example, using social media advertising, you can build demographic audiences based on your
buyer personas -- targeting your ads at these audiences allows you to ensure your content on
social platforms is reaching the people most likely to find your guidance helpful and engaging.
Use search advertising to reinforce your presence in those searches for which you offer the best
guidance to your buyer at this stage in their journey. Search advertising allows you to ensure you
appear for the specific keywords or phrases your buyer might be using. Avoid interruptive
advertising aimed at distracting or tricking your buyers -- instead use advertising to be targeted,
relevant and helpful.
That’s your starting point. Creating awareness and aligning content so that it speaks directly to
your audience. This is how you’ll attract visitors.
Once a visitor begins to engage with content you’ve created, you enter the engage phase. You’ve
already started to build trust. Now it’s time to dive a little deeper with your buyer personas so that
you can answer two very important questions:
1. What is the underlying problem that produced the initial roadblock, that caused them to
seek you out?
2. How can you help them continue to solve for that problem?
This is where having helpful and human website design becomes paramount. You want to deliver
an experience that caters to your leads’ preferences from the moment they engage with your
content. If they prefer to engage with your brand more directly, create a 1:1 conversational
experience to guide a visitor through your website content without creating extra work for your
team. If they aren’t quite ready for a direct conversation, make sure you have website pages and
conversion opportunities to empower visitors to learn more.
They’re beginning to trust you. Now it’s time to use that trust. Work with them to identify and
remove the underlying issue that created the initial roadblock in the first place. As your prospects
start to define and give a name to their problem or opportunity, make sure you’re aligning your
content efforts accordingly. Continue to use tools like live chat, messaging apps, and bots to
answer your visitor’s questions as they arise. Provide offers, both gated and ungated, that match
their priorities as they move through awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

Again, consider how you might best be able to reach and connect with your leads using paid
advertising. This helps you provide timely and relevant content when they need it the most,
wherever your buyer is spending their time online.
During the engage stage, you should also be focusing on discovering more about your prospects,
beyond just what your buyer personas tell you. As your leads gravitate towards certain pieces of
content on your website and provide you with more information about their interests and
problems, craft ads that are targeted based on this data with content offers most relevant to your
buyer’s questions.
Gradually collect details about them, and you can start to contextualize, segment, and personalize
their experience with you and your company. Each email or message becomes that much more
meaningful as you speak to them directly as a people rather than generalized, faceless visitor.
By the time you reach the delight stage, you’ve added enough value and removed enough
roadblocks to cement your one-to-one relationship with a visitor. Ultimately, the goal of the delight
phase is to empower people to think beyond their immediate roadblocks and grow with your
company. By consistently acting as their go-to knowledge broker and support system, you can
become the resource they recommend and evangelize to others.
And that brings us back to the attract phase of the inbound methodology. If you’re truly focused
on delighting your customers, they’ll naturally refer their friends to you. Take your delight a step
further and ask your customers questions about how you can improve your process. That,
combined with the attract work we discussed earlier, will help power your company’s long-term
growth in a sustainable way.
VIDEO 3: WHAT DOES INBOUND MARKETING LOOK

LIKE?
Understanding the fundamentals of your inbound marketing efforts will be what puts you on the
path to success.
Remember, in the world of inbound, your prospects don’t want to be sold to, they want to be
educated. And inbound tactics can deliver the kind of information your prospects need to help
them make smart, well-informed decisions.
The fundamentals of inbound marketing begin with five key pieces - contacts, buyer personas, the
buyer’s journey, content, and setting goals.

Let’s start by covering contacts. Contacts, and a contacts database, are the most important tools
you have in your inbound toolbox. They’re the real people you provide value to who, in return,
help you grow your business.
Your contacts are the heart of your inbound marketing efforts and those that are moving through
each stage of the inbound methodology. To understand the importance of contacts let’s define,
what is a contact first.
A contact can be anybody your company markets to, sells to, partners with, engages with, or
employs.
Your contacts are not names and email addresses inside your database but individuals you are
building relationships with. A constant reminder of why inbound is and should always be
customer-centric.
And when you involve marketing, sales, and services in your contacts strategy and having them use
the same contacts database, you’re creating alignment and consistency in not only your inbound
marketing efforts but your whole inbound strategy.
A strong contact database is instrumental in allowing your business to grow. It helps you
understand who you are marketing to and stores details and context about each contact in one
central location. It is the back-end “context” system that stores information about your contacts and
allows you to use that data to improve the way you market. Because every detail and every
behavior is stored and easily accessible, it's easy to craft relevant marketing that feels more like a
1:1 conversation. You have easy access to all the information you need to understand and engage
with your lead database and delight your customers.
As your contacts move through their path to purchase: like finding your website, converting, and
eventually becoming customers, you want to gather as much contact information as possible. The
more information you gather, the easier it will be for your marketing team to identify which
contacts your business can successfully help and ultimately to delight.
Think of it this way. Imagine you work for a pet food company and you’re tasked with sending an
email about new dog food that you’re releasing. If you were to talk to someone in person about
this new food, you’d want to first ask them what type of pet they have. If they said a bird or a cat,
you wouldn’t tell them about your upcoming release. You gathered that information by asking
them the right questions. Think of your contact database in the same way. You want to be able to
segment your contacts by the type of pet they have, so that you’re sending them relevant and
helpful information. Make sure you’re collecting the right information that you can use later on.

But having a strong contact database is not enough. How do you figure out the information that
you’ll need about your contacts?
This next fundamental piece of inbound marketing is buyer personas and the buyer's journey.
Since inbound marketing is customer-centric, you need to know who you’re trying to reach.
You don’t want just any traffic to your site, you want the right traffic. You want the people who are
most likely to become leads, and, ultimately, happy customers. Who are the “right” people? The
right people are your ideal customers, what are called your buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of an ideal customer, based on real data and
some educated speculation about demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
Personas are created through research, analysis, and taking a close look at who’s already buying
from you. They can help you get into the mindset of your potential buyers and create the right
content.
They’re the glue that holds every aspect of inbound together. When it comes to creating a great
inbound strategy, it’s not enough to know just who you’re trying to reach, you also have to know
what they want to see.
This brings us to the buyer’s journey.
Every interaction your persona has with your organization should be tailored to where they are in
the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the active research process someone goes through
leading up to a purchase. Knowing the buyer’s journey for your persona will be key to creating the
best content possible.
Instead of talking about top, middle, or bottom of the funnel, the buyer’s journey is made up of
three stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage that portray the
experiences your potential customers go through.
Everyone has gone through the buyer’s journey. It’s the path you take when you have a problem to
solve, from researching potential solutions to purchasing one.
The awareness stage is when your prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a
problem or opportunity. They’re doing education research to more clearly understand, frame, and
give a name to their problem.

The consideration stage is when a prospect has now clearly defined and given a name to their
problem or opportunity. They are committed to researching and understanding all of the available
approaches and/or methods to solving the defined problem or opportunity.
The decision stage is when a prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or
approach. They are compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given
solution strategy. They could also be researching to whittle the long list down to a short list and
ultimately making a final purchase decision.
Website visitors or leads might interact with you for the first time in any of the different buyer’s
journey stages, but you need to have content prepared for each and every stage.
Once you understand your buyer personas and their buying journey, it’s time to start doing
inbound. Inbound can’t exist without content, and that’s why the next best practice is to create
remarkable, tailored content.
Inbound marketing is content plus context. Your content is your marketing toolkit. Things like
blogs, interactive tools, photos/infographics, videos, and ebooks/presentations work to attract,
engage, and delight.
Context is who you’re creating it for: you can’t just write any blog posts, you have to write the right
ones, tailored to who you’re trying to reach and what they’re interested in. The best content – the
stuff that’s really going to fuel your entire inbound strategy – has to be grounded in the correct
context. It’s not enough to just write a blog post or send out an email.
The content in that blog post and that email need to be tailored to who you’re trying to reach (your
persona) and what they’re most interested in seeing (which depends on where they are in the
buyer’s journey.) This brings us to goal setting.
If you are not setting goals for your inbound marketing efforts then you will not be able to answer
the critical question: Was I successful in my efforts? What do I need to optimize for next time?
When setting out with your inbound marketing efforts you want to start from a place where you
know what you want to achieve. Is it to gain more blog subscribers? Have people sign-up for a
webinar? Increase traffic to your website over a set-period of time?
If you don’t know where you want to go how will you know how to get there? Goal setting is one of
the fundamental pieces of inbound marketing because it not only gives your content specific
actions to progress towards but also helps you internally provide alignment between your
marketing and sales team.

While you might be focused on your marketing efforts you want to make sure that what happens
during the attract and convert stages of the inbound methodology sets up your sales team for
success in the close stage.
When measuring the success of your inbound marketing efforts, there are so many metrics to
choose from. Whether you decide to look at SEO rankings, landing page performance, an email’s
click-through-rate, you’re sure to derive some insight into how your marketing is performing.
But don’t get caught up in basing your decisions on marketing activities alone. Like having, let’s
say, 8,000 likes or followers on Facebook. Yes, that might feel like you should give yourself a pat
on the back. But what does 8,000 Facebook-likes really mean? How many of those are customers?
While it can be a goal, the metric doesn’t offer much insight in terms of real business results.
Instead, make sure to set goals that show how marketing helps your company hit the numbers and
helps with growth.
Continued goal setting provides the necessary context internally for what your marketing efforts
are achieving and the value you are providing to your contacts. And don’t forget to set aside time
for analysis on a regular basis - this could be daily, weekly, or monthly. This step will help you
figure out how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been and how they can be improved.
Inbound marketing continues to help you adapt to the fast-changing needs of your buyers and
with these five fundamentals you can create a fundamental foundation for building an inbound
marketing strategy for success.
Transcript: Planning a Long-Term
Content Strategy
Video 1: Why is long-term content planning important?
Hi there, I’m AJ with HubSpot’s marketing team.
So you’re looking to create a long-term content strategy for your business. You’ve come to the right place. By the end of
this video, you’ll understand the importance of taking the time to plan a well thought-out content roadmap. You may be
eager to get started with creating content, but if you don’t have a strategy in place, then you shouldn’t expect to be
successful in the long run. Knowing how to plan and organize your content initiatives will set you and your business up
for long term success with your content strategy efforts.
To start, planning provides a roadmap for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical decisions regarding
what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and when you’ll be publishing it.
With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad-hoc content requests like company
initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.
To get the most out of your content planning efforts, think of your long-term content plan like a savings account. If your
goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan. In order for that plan to be successful, you need to be dedicated to
putting away a certain amount of money on an ongoing basis. The more consistent you are with contributions, the
better your return on investment.
The same can be said about your content. If you make a plan and are consistent in executing, then you’re giving yourself
the best chance at achieving a positive return on investment from your content creation efforts. Think of each piece of
content you create as an installment towards a growing library of helpful, educational content. The more content you
create, the stronger your authority and relevance, turning you and your business into thought leaders within your
industry.
It’s important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way. It happens to everyone. But having a
plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand your team’s bandwidth and priorities for
what needs to get done and when.
And speaking of priorities, a long-term content plan helps you stay organized.
Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one content initiative at any given time. A long-term plan
accounts for all upcoming initiatives and allows for an agile content creation process.
When you're organized, you can align your content marketing goals with the overall goals of the business. In essence, it
gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization.
Content is not just about supporting the marketing team; it should be about supporting the sales team, customer service
team, product and services team, and so on.
By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured, knowing that
your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most — creating the best end-to-end experience
possible for your audience and customers. How do you do this? Tell a story. Content is the fuel that keeps the inbound
methodology running. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Inbound
Content Strategy
businesses use this methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in
your customer's journey with you.
If you want to learn more about the inbound methodology, then check out the resources section below.
With this inbound approach, you'll grow a well-informed audience. And when this audience is ready to make a
purchasing decision, they’ll likely consider your products and services. And even if they don’t become a customer, by
you taking the time to educate them, it’s possible they’ll share your content with someone else who may find it helpful,
another opportunity for you to convert this person into a lead, customer, and promoter of your brand.
Video 2: How to create a long-term content plan
Let’s review three things you need to do to set yourself up for success; setting marketing goals, auditing or assessing
your organization's initiatives and assets, and identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas. A buyer persona is
a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about
customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The buyer’s journey is the active research process
someone goes through leading up to a purchase.
To learn more about buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link
to HubSpot’s free Make My Persona tool.
The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content
marketing initiatives.
First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.
Setting marketing goals provides you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It helps you organize your time and
resources so that you can make the most of your content creation efforts.
Each piece of content created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the
overarching goals of the organization. Alignment like this creates purpose and focus with each piece of content you
create.
Let’s take a second to think about this. Assume your company’s quarterly customer goal is 100 new customers. You
know the number of leads needed to generate 100 new customers is 250 website leads, and that the number of unique
website visits needed to generate 250 website leads is 1,500. Now, you need to take into consideration what content
you need to create to hit your unique website visits goal.
Each goal you set should be a SMART goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
A potential SMART goal example could be, “Increase monthly unique website visitors from 1,000 to 1,500 by the end of
the year.”
The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and assets.
Your audit will consist of two parts. First, a content audit to organize and evaluate your current assets, and second, and
event-based audit to account for upcoming activities or events your business plans to host.
Content Strategy
Let’s begin with the content audit.
Your goal with the content audit is to identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience. Your
goal here is to identify gaps or opportunities in the content your business is currently using to help turn your audience
into customers. And while your entire business may be creating and using this content, understanding and organizing it
is generally a function of your marketing department.
There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no
idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.
Content has likely been created by you or your predecessors for a long time. However it’s possible content has also been
created by other individuals in the marketing department, or subject matter experts from other departments, and is
scattered just about everywhere.
By doing your content audit, you’ll be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save you hours of
content creation time in the future. No use in duplicating your efforts.
And don't forget to stay organized when conducting your content audit. To keep things streamlined, organize your
content audit by these categories: content title, buyer’s journey stage, lifecycle stage, content format, targeted buyer
persona, topic, and any additional notes that provide value or context.
Now, it’s time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I recommend
systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically hide, like that old file manager or
marketing folder on your computer. Ask your sales team what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more
tenured employees (you’ll be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here). And pore through your customer relationship
management system, also known as a CRM, and your content management system, also known as a CMS.
Okay, I think you get the picture here. Let’s take a look at a content audit from a company called Kids Talk, created by
Maren Schmidt. Maren offers advice and resources backed by 30 years of experience working with young children.
Notice how Maren already has content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision stage of the buyer’s journey
for multiple buyer personas. Additionally, each piece of content corresponds to a specific lifecycle stage. Moreover,
Maren has many different types of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a study guide, and a
webinar. Notice how Maren uses the “Notes” field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she may not
need this for each piece of content in her audit.
Now that Maren has documented her assets, she’ll be able to refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content
she already has as well as easily identify gaps for future content creation projects.
The second part to completing your audit is to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. This means you’ll need
to take into account any upcoming projects, priorities, or events that would involve content creation.
By doing this exercise, you'll identify content that could support each initiative. Additionally, it will give you the
opportunity to see how you can connect this content back to the buyer’s journey through an inbound marketing
campaign.
Content Strategy
An event-based audit should be organized by the following areas: upcoming monthly priorities, initiative overview,
theme or topic, prospective blog post topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing campaign that ties
your efforts together.
Take a look at what Maren did for her event-based audit.
You can see that Maren has a few events and workshops she may need content for. You can also see that the content is
grouped into an overall theme for the next three months with associated blog post topics that integrate with an inbound
marketing campaign called “Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way,” which is an ebook.
Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the month, initiative overview, and theme without topics for blog
posts that associate with a relevant inbound marketing campaign.
Yes, she would have noted there are a series of events coming up in the next few months, but she would have missed
out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a series of blog posts that could connect to a relevant content
offer and provide value to her marketing offer library.
There’s one last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term content plan, and that’s identifying the buyer’s
journey for your buyer personas.
Remember, you’re creating content that’s meant to attract and engage your buyer personas through their buyer’s
journey: from the awareness stage where this person has a problem or a list of questions that they’re trying to learn
more about, through the consideration stage where you’re discussing possible solutions to their problem or list of
questions, and ending in the decision stage where you’re recommending next steps. The consideration and decision
stage is generally where you’re talking about what your organization’s products and services have to offer, while the
awareness stage is more industry-level education. Identifying this content will help give you content ideas to work with
in the future.
But before you can identify the buyer’s journey, you first need to know your buyer personas.
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at one of Maren’s buyer persona’s, Montessori Mom Meena.
Here’s an overview of Meena as a buyer persona.
Meena’s a working professional, a married woman, and a devoted mother to at least one child under the age of six.
Meena generally skews female, is between the ages of 28 and 35, and lives in an urban environment. She also has a
bachelor's degree and earns around $60,000 per year.
Meena wants to understand child development and do what’s best for her children, understand how to set limits for
behavior, and have effective communication tools to use with her kids.
Meena’s challenges are her children won’t listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all of which overwhelm her as a
parent.
Content Strategy
Maren knows that Meena looks to her friends for suggestions on solutions they use with their children. However,
Meena’s resourceful and uses Google to find answers to problems she’s looking to solve.
Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let’s take a look at what her buyer’s journey might look like in more detail.
To start, you know it’s important for Meena to do what’s best for her children. So what about an awareness stage ebook
which offers a list of parenting problems you can avoid? This is something that would bring value to Meena’s search.
Once Meena’s been educated on parenting problems to avoid, she’ll be looking for more content. What about following
up with consideration stage information like a questionnaire regarding family needs to better understand a possible
solution—in this case, Montessori? The questionnaire outlines both the needs of the child, as well as the parent.
But maybe Meena needs a little bit more information to progress into the decision stage— something that educates her
more on how to best prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage workshop that explains how to
prepare your home the Montessori way? That could do the trick.
With a solution to her problem, now Meena’s ready to make a decision. What about offering Meena a one-hour strategy
consultation to discuss next steps for her child and Montessori? That could be a helpful service to offer Meena.
That’s an example of a complete buyer’s journey. It’s important to note that a buyer’s journey is ever-evolving. The
more you learn about your buyer personas, the more you’ll be able to refine and grow their buyer’s journey resources
over time. But it starts with first identifying content needed to complete the buyer’s journey, which you can then plan
out over the course of a year to keep your content creation sustainable.
If you’re interested in seeing how Maren organized and project managed her priorities in support of launching an
inbound marketing campaign, then check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link to Maren’s long-term
content planning worksheet. It’s in the form of a Google spreadsheet. This way you can use it as a template if you don’t
already have a solution for planning your long-term content creation efforts.
Video 3: Working with influencers to improve your content strategy efforts
Hi, this is Andy from Orbit Media and I want to explain how influencer marketing works together with content and
search engine optimization. Now, we all know that this is a big trend. Influencer marketing isn't going anywhere-- it's big
and it's getting bigger. Just put "influencer marketing" into Google trends and you will see a line going straight up.
There's a lot of people who are thinking about this and working on this and adding this to your skill set can do wonders
for your content and your search rankings.
We did some research and found that bloggers who use influencer marketing are more likely to report strong results
from their content than bloggers who use any other promotion channel. I'm going to define influencer marketing as
simply connecting with people who have already built that audience that you want to reach. And I'm really talking about
collaboration-- I'm not talking about paid influencer marketing. I know that's a big thing. I'm talking about content
collaboration as in organic influencer marketing.
Now, a lot of people, when they think about influencer marketing, they think about social media, they think about
Instagram, they think about celebrities and trying to get those people to share your stuff. I'm going to make the case
that that is not the best way to collaborate with influencers and not really the angle we should be looking for.
Content Strategy
Now, I love to have a big famous account share my content. I'll give you an example. This is a screenshot of a tweet
where the official Google Analytics Twitter account shared an article that I wrote. I was thrilled. I still am thrilled.
Now, this is exactly the kind of thing that people are often trying to do when they do influencer marketing. But what do
you think the real impact of this was? I can measure the traffic from Twitter that day to that post, and it's not a lot of
visitors. About 160 visitors total from that channel that day to that content.
So maybe there's another way to look at this. Maybe social media is not the ideal outcome, the real benefit of doing
influencer marketing. Maybe SEO actually would have much bigger, more durable benefits than just social media shares.
So how do we collaborate with influencers to benefit our SEO and our search rankings? We want a lead-- ultimately,
that's what we're looking for is a lead. Now I'm going to back it all the way up. If you want a lead, you need two things--
you need a qualified visitor and you need to convert them. Traffic and a conversion rate equals leads.
Now, traffic in content marketing comes from three classic promotional channels-- search, social and email. But it's
really the search rankings that matter, because those are the visitors that have stronger intent. They've got their fingers
on their keyboard. They're looking for something. They need help that day.
So, we know from analytics and from research that it's really search that brings the visitors who are more likely to take
action, more likely to convert and become a lead. So, we're going to focus on search, which means we need to focus on
rankings. Now, there are two main search ranking factors-- links and content, as in authority and relevance.
So now we get to one of the most important questions in all of digital-- why do people link to things? It's actually quite
simple. There are two things you need to win a link. You need a relationship with people who create content, because
they make links, and you need to have content that is worthy of being linked to.
Now, we know from other research from Steve Rayson at BuzzSumo who analyzed a million articles to figure out what
kind of content attracts the links and shares. And what he discovered is, most content nobody links to. In fact, 75% of
the million articles he looked at had zero links to them. But there's one type of content that consistently wins more links
than any other, and that is original research. So, we're going to focus on that as the most link-worthy type of content.
The next thing we need is relationships with people who create content. Now, who are those people? This is called the
1% Rule. 1% of people make the internet, 99% of people just consume it.
When we are online and we are networking and building relationships, we want to pay attention to that tiny percentage
of people who actually create content. Content creators create links, links pass authority, authority has ranking
potential, and that's what we need in the long run to rank for that really valuable phrase.
There are five types of people who create content. Obviously, the big one is the bloggers and blog editors. They're not
the only ones-- also we could say journalists, researchers, podcasters, event producers.
There arelots of different people who make links, but we're going to focus on bloggers at first here. And this is going to
sound familiar to anybody who's been involved in PR-- this is simply blogger relations. Organic influencer marketing and
collaboration is basically modern-day digital PR.
So if we want to find these people first, there's lots of tools for this. This is easier than ever to find people to collaborate
with if you don't already know who they are. Just put your topic into a Twitter search tool such as Followerwonk, add a
Content Strategy
word that indicates that there are content creators, such as "blogger" or "editor," and you're going to find tons of
people on basically any topic who create content and you might be able to collaborate with.
BuzzSumo also happens to be a great tool for this. BuzzSumo has an influencer search tool where you can just check a
box for bloggers and journalists and put in your topic and you're going to find tons of people who are all content
creators and relevant for that topic. These are people you could build relationships with and collaborate with. Bottom
line, social media is the world's greatest phonebook. You can just imagine some super specific person and find them in
seconds and begin to start a conversation.
Now, there are basically five main ways to collaborate. The first one is simply mentioning someone as you make
something, and then when it goes live, you let them know it's live. Not really recommended. You're not really
networking. You're not really collaborating. That content is something where you just made it and told them later.
They're not really invested in the piece.
Far better is to reach out to someone while you're making the content and ask them for a contributor quote. Hey, I'm
making this thing. Would you like to be involved? Another way is to do that with lots of people. Now you've got an
expert roundup.
Guest blogging is, of course, a format for collaborative content, where you are reaching out to editors and writing for
these other websites. And then when you meet the hardcore expert on a topic, it's a good thing to ask them if they'd like
to be interviewed, and then you can build a good relationship that way. Virtually everybody wants to be interviewed.
Very few people will decline to give you a contributor quote. People wake up in the morning hoping to get a PR hit,
which is what you're doing when you reach out and offer to collaborate with them.
So, let's break down the contributor quote. This is one of my favorite content marketing tricks. It makes your content
better. It's going to help you get social media traffic, which is in our main goal. But when we collaborate with those
content creators, we've got a chance to later appear in their content, hopefully.
It works like this. I'm writing an article about social media profile pictures. I know Mark Schaefer is interested in this
topic, so I reach out to him while I'm writing it.
And I say, “Hey, Mark, would you like to contribute a quote to this article?” He responds with a quote that I can include
in the article and says, no problem, how does this sound? This is perfect. Thanks. I'll let you know when it's live.
Now, the actual piece-- I'll show you an example. I included a little bit of research in this. This is basically social media
profile picture tips. And as you scroll down, you can see I've got a little tip in here for background and color and different
things.
I'm including some of the other people's research. I've got some research of my own. And as you scroll down, you'll see
I've got that quote from Mark Schaefer. A journalist would never write an article without a source. Why would the
content marketer write an article without a contributor quote?
Two bloggers, for example-- Blogger A, Blogger B. Blogger B reaches out to their network, socializes the topic, what do
you think of this headline, get some input from their community. As they write, they include people in the content.
Those people then, when the article goes live, are sort of invested in the piece. They're much more likely to share.
Content Strategy
Which of these two bloggers gets greater social traction? Not that social media traffic is our goal in this case, but we
need to build our content for promotion.
Everyone knows that content optimized for search includes keywords-- keywords in the title, the header, the subheads,
using related phrases. But what not everyone seems to realize is that content optimized for social media includes
people. You should have people in your content-- faces and names. It should be a little party in your post where people
are engaged with it already, that they're invested in the content. That is stuff ready for promotion in both channels.
The bottom line is we're answering the question, how many people are waiting for this article to go live? That number
should be greater than 0. If we have people invested in it, an ally in creating content is an ally in promoting that content.
Guest blogging and PR is another direct way to get SEO benefits from collaboration. There are two main search ranking
factors, as we said-- authority and relevance. Authority as in links, and relevance as in content and keywords. Guest
blogging directly leads to links to your content.
Blogger A writes two articles. Blogger B writes two articles and pitches one to an editor. They publish it-- that's that
yellow box there. That's going to link back to their content in the author bio, if not in the editorial, and in a collaborative
way they're inviting guest bloggers onto their platform. So that other blogger there is contributing an article so that
Blogger B has more content associated with their brand.
Round two, more links, more friends, more traction, more content. And round four, Blogger A, nice blog, buddy. But
Blogger B is building those relationships, those links, those social and search benefits, those collaborations, that
influencer marketing powered content strategy.
Now BuzzSumo again is a tool for this, because as you research people, it doesn't just show you the size of their
following, it shows you the domain authority of the site that they write for. The domain authority is a measure on the
scale of 1 to 100 the benefit of a link from that site to yours. Without doing a deep dive into SEO, paying attention to
who writes, but also what is the authority of the sites they write for, is one of the most important ways to measure the
possible influencer marketing, search optimization outcomes from that collaboration.
BuzzSumo is a paid tool, but you can do that research for free using MozBar, which is a Chrome extension. Install
MozBar in Chrome and go search for your topic, go search for blogs to write for. Put in the topic plus "write for us" in
quotes, and you're going to see all kinds of blogs who are accepting guest posts on that topic. And when MozBar's
turned on, it's going to overlay right onto search results the authority of that website, as in the value of a link from that
site to you.
To this day, one in three of my articles is a guest post. I don't know anybody who has a brand so big that they should
stop writing for other sites. Why would we ever stop doing PR?
11 years in content marketing, I'm still doing lots of guest posting. It's the most fun I've ever had in digital. I get to work
with expert editors who can make me a better writer. I get to reach a larger audience, and there's the search and social
benefits. So, it's useful to put out into the world as you interact with people online that you are open to these kinds of
collaborations.
One of the ways to remind people that you're open to writing for their site, or contributing a guest post to them, or
being interviewed in their content, it's helpful to put that little sentence out that says that you would love to collaborate
yourself. I've done this 1,000 times. I say this sentence so often that I actually have a text expander installed on Chrome
Content Strategy
so when I hit the same button three times it automatically expands into this line of text-- "If you'd ever like to
collaborate on anything at all, don't hesitate to reach out."
I love social media marketing, but what a lot of people do in social media is just trying to build a network on one
platform. What I'm suggesting here is to use social media for research and to start conversations and for networking.
Rather than build a big network on one platform, we want to connect with those key people on many platforms,
because it's those relationships that will lead to the long-term SEO benefits.
What we're doing here is basically solving the problem of bad SEO. You don't need to send cold email. You don't need to
send that a horrible form submission spam, that cold email that just says, "link to me now," or "pay me for these links,"
or "I write good article for you." I get these emails all the time.
"Take my infographic and link to me." "You have a broken link. Link to me." These are five examples of bad email
outreach and cold emails in a world where it's totally unnecessary to ever send a cold email.
Why not start the conversation, help them in some way? Include them in your content and then remind them that
you're open to be included in their content. This is really the key to making that connection between the relationships,
the links, the authority, the content, the rankings, the qualified visitors, and the lead generation. That is a much better
way to approach influencer marketing, in my experience.
Make stuff with people. Find interesting people who create things and work together with them to make content, better
content, better connections, better relationships. The benefits are much more durable for your brand.
Again, this is Andy from Orbit Media. We hope you found this useful. We'll keep making these. If you know anyone who
would find this helpful, feel free to share. We'd be grateful.
Creating a Blog Post

VIDEO 1: WHY DOES BLOGGING HELP YOUR

BUSINESS GROW?
Hi, I’m Lindsay with HubSpot Academy.
So, you’re looking to create a great blog post? You’ve come to the right spot. Let’s start with the
big picture here – why is blogging so important?
Blogging is an effective way to regularly publish and promote new content related to your industry
and addressing the problems that your prospects and customers have.
Blogging helps your inbound marketing in two ways. It helps you attract new visitors, and it helps
you convert those visitors into leads.
Think about a stranger searching for information online. They have questions or problems that
they’re looking to solve. They might go into a search engine and type in their problem. If your blog
posts provide those answers, those strangers can find your posts, and then they’ll be a visitor on
your website. That’s why blogging is a critical part of the attract stage of the inbound
methodology.
Every time you publish a blog post, you’re creating a new, unique page for your website. This
means that you’re increasing your chances of ranking in search results, having other websites link
to you, and being shared on social media. And all of this results in new traffic to your site.
But your blog, and even an individual blog post, can do much more than attract new visitors. It can
also help those visitors convert into leads. How so?
Well, you’ve already caught the attention of someone if they’re reading your blog post. Your blog
post can strategically promote related offers – anything from your latest video to a free guide. If
your visitor wants to learn more, you can provide them with that logical next step.
Your blog can help you stand out as an expert in your industry. The more you blog, the more that
people will start to look to you as a reliable, trustworthy source of information. And building that
trust with your prospects will help them turn into customers later on.

VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU CREATE A SUCCESSFUL

BLOG POST?
How do you create a blog that successfully gets those results? Let’s dive into some blogging
strategy and best practices.
The first step is to pick a topic and a title.
At a high level, write educational content.
In order to attract someone to your blog, you need to answer the questions and problems that
they’re searching for answers to. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas. What are they
going to be searching for? What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them?
Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests while you're coming up
with a topic for your blog post.
And when it comes to a topic, make sure to write about your industry, not yourself.
Remember, you’re trying to attract strangers to your blog who have never heard of your company
before – so they’re not going to find you through search engines if you’re just blogging about
yourself. You have the rest of your website to provide that information.
Next, brainstorm a list of specific topics that you could blog about.
If you’re looking for a place to start, then ask your co-workers from other teams like sales and
services for some ideas. Here are a few questions that you could ask and they could answer: what
are the most frequently asked questions you hear? What do our customers need help with? What
do you wish people knew about our industry? What are industry bloggers, social media, and even
your competitors talking about?
Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be
pretty general to start with. For example, if you provide running shoes, you might start out thinking
you want to write about running shoes. Then you might be able to expand off of that -- in other
words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing. For
example, you might decide to narrow your topic to "best running shoes for marathons" or "lifetime
of running shoes."
When picking your topics, do keyword research.


Keywords are the words and phrases typed into search engines. They’re the topics that people are
trying to learn more about. Which keywords do your buyer personas use? Which are associated
with your industry?
Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your
posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts your SEO because search engines consider this
keyword stuffing.
It also doesn't make for a good reader experience. A ranking factor that search engines now
prioritize to ensure you're answering the intent of your visitors. You should use keywords in your
content in a way that doesn't feel unnatural or forced.
A good rule of thumb is to focus on one long-tail keywords per blog post. While you can use more
than one keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow enough to allow you to spend
time actually optimizing for just one keyword.
Why long-tail keywords? These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on
the specific goals of your audience. Website visitors searching long-tail terms are more likely to
read the whole post and then seek more information from you. In other words, you'll generate
right type of traffic: those visitors who convert.
And for your blog post topic, don’t try to solve every problem in one fell swoop. This will make
each post clearer for your readers and for search engines. It will also make sure that your post gets
more qualified traffic, because you’ll know that the people clicking through are looking for
information about that specific topic.
If your brainstorming your topics, there’s a good chance that will create a long list of ideas for
topics you can cover and posts you can create. This will help create a longer-term blogging
strategy, make a list of topics that support a specific conversion. For example, if you have an long-
form guide that you want to create and promote, then consider making a list of blog topics that
support this guide’s content. This way, if someone finds your blog post and finds the blog helpful,
it increases the chances of them wanting to click a call-to-action to access a relevant offer. Think of
your offer as a heart and your blog posts as the arteries. Your blog posts keep a steady flow of
relevant prospects connecting with your offer.
Now, let’s talk about picking a title.
Think about how you read things online. You read the title first, before you commit. It needs to
catch your interest. And the title is one of the first things that your prospects will see.

Start by creating a working title for your blog post.
A working title is something to "work" off of as you begin to write your post. Start here to narrow
your topic down and focus on one single angle. A topic, like “social media” could breed multiple
different blog posts. A working title, like “social media channels for live video” is now specific.
Next, include the long-tail keyword in the title. Be sure that the keyword fits as a description of
what the blog post is all about.
Also, make the value of the post clear in the title. Your title should help readers and search
engines understand what your post is about. Set the right expectations - what is the reader going
to get out of your blog post? What information is covered? What format is the blog post going to
take?
In this example, the blog post title explicitly tells you that you’ll be reading about how to create an
infographic. Not only that but it sets the expectations that it only takes an hour to do and there’s
also free templates included. You know exactly what you’re going to get from this blog post - how
it’s valuable to you, and how much information it contains.
When it comes to the art of the perfect blog post, HubSpot did some research and looked at how
our own titles have performed. Here are the consistent principles that were found:
• The ideal blog post title length is 60 characters.
• Headlines between 8 and 12 words are shared most often on Twitter.
• Headlines between 12 and 14 words are liked most often on Facebook.
HubSpot also found that headlines ending with a bracketed clarification -- for example, like the
earlier example -- performed 38% better than titles without that clarification.
If you're having trouble trimming down the length of a title, run it through Moz’s title tag preview
tool and Twitter to see how the title will appear on a search engine results page and when it's
shared on social media. Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character count, and it
recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600
pixels, which translates to around 60 characters.
Title too long? That’s okay! Make sure to create a title for your reader first. When you have a
lengthy headline, it's a good idea to get your keyword in the beginning since it might get cut off
toward the end on a search engine results page. In this example, the title got caught off, but the
focus keyword “data visualization” is at the front.

Moving on to the body of your blog post, format and optimize the post so that both people and
search engines can easily read and understand it.
Write an intro and make it captivating. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs -- or even
sentences -- of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they've given your post a read-
through. Grab their attention, use humor, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact
or statistic.
And describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be
having. It should be a follow-up to the title that they found interesting. Nobody likes clickbait, so
you want to make sure your post is about what the headline says it is. This will give the reader a
reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve.
If you read the first few lines of this blog post, would you want to keep reading? What about this
blog post? Keep your buyer persona in mind and think about what would entice them to keep on
reading.
And what about the rest of your blog post?
The body of your blog post is where your readers will undoubtedly derive the most value. HubSpot
did an analysis and found the ideal blog post length is roughly 2,100 words, but that will vary
depending on your topic. Always solve for the reader first. Make sure you cover your topic in full
and have met the expectations that your blog title promised.
Mention your keyword at a normal cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers.
That means including your keywords in your copy, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. Don't
go overboard at the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing. Whenever you create content,
your primary focus should be on what matters to your audience, not how many times you can
include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content.
And no one likes an ugly blog post. Use formatting and visuals to make your blog post that much
more appealing.
When you blog, whitespace is your friend.
Whitespace is the empty space on the page. It allows the visitor to focus on the content, not the
clutter. Don’t write long paragraphs that form into huge blocks of text - this will make your
information look dense and hard to read.

As you can see in this example, there’s plenty of whitespace on the side margins of the post,
around the title and first image, and between the paragraphs of text within the post. The space
makes the post more easily digestible - nothing is crammed together, and though the post is long,
it doesn’t feel overwhelming or hard to read.
You can also break up the text in your blog post by using sub-headers, and bullets or numbered
lists to highlight your points.
Sub-headers are another on-page SEO element. Sub-headers organize and break up your blog
post into different sections to signal to Google (and your reader) what the post will cover.
Sub-headers should be written with H2 tags or smaller -- never H1 tags, which signal a title. Use
sub-headers to split up sections of your blog post -- making sure to integrate the keywords you're
using this post to target.
Bolding important text can also help readers quickly understand the key takeaways from the post.
And include visuals and multimedia elements to break up your text. It’s hard to grab a reader’s
attention and this can also help your readers understand the post at a glance.
Featured images usually sit at the top of a blog post and are another element to draw readers in to
learn more. The image should reflect what the story is about, intrigue readers, or provoke them. It
doesn’t need to directly illustrate what your post is about, but they should be loosely related to
your content. While most people enjoy a great cat photo, it may not always be relevant to your
content.
And for throughout the body of your blog post, use multimedia content wherever it's possible to
break up the blog post and re-engage your reader. Add images, videos, audio recordings, and
social media posts. HubSpot sometimes includes an audio version of the blog post. Or includes a
video that’s on the related topic. It changes it up for the reader but also helps them digest the
content in a different way. Changing up the format of your blog post will provide additional value
to your reader while making sure their eyes are focused on what they're reading and seeing. See
the difference? The blog post without any visual looks a lot less welcoming.
The next step is all about lead generation - promoting your offers on your blog.
As you attract more and more visitors to your blog, that increased traffic means an increased
opportunity to generate leads. If you really want your inbound marketing efforts to pay off, then it’s
crucial that you strategically promote the majority of your blogs to corresponding or relevant
offers.

The goal should be to attract someone and provide content around the topic they’re trying to learn
more about, then be helpful and offer them a relevant next step.
Make sure the CTA doesn’t disrupt the user experience. Again, the goal is to be helpful, not pushy.
Additionally, you might want to insert a CTA after the first few paragraphs. To avoid looking too
pushy too soon, try including a passive CTA through hyperlinked text. It’s important to include
these passive CTAs, as you can’t always count on your visitor reading your entire post and
converting. Think about it. Do you read to the end of every single blog post that you click on? By
not including a CTA near the beginning, you may be missing out on a valuable conversion
opportunity.
HubSpot performs CTA tests all the time--from image and text CTAs to placement of the CTAs--
we’re always looking for ways to improve click-thru rate. Interestingly enough, we found that text
CTAs near the top of blogs posts produce the highest click-thru rates. Something you might want
to keep in mind and test on your blog posts.
Lastly, include a CTA at the end of each post. This offer should be relevant to the blog content that
a visitor has just read. Your visitor is there to learn something from your blog post, so provide an
offer that gives them more educational content to continue learning.
This is a CTA at the end of the same post that was shown earlier. The title of the post is “Data
Visualization 101: How to Choose the Right Chart or Graph for Your Data” at the bottom a CTA for
an ebook on how to presenting data people can’t ignore. Another option is a pop-up that the
reader sees as they scroll down the page. The offer is about the same topic as the post, so a reader
who wants to learn more would be interested in clicking through.
Next, you’ll want to optimize the blog post. When search engines crawl your blog, they don’t read
every word. Instead, they scan certain parts of your post to understand what you’re writing about
and how trustworthy the content is.
To help search engines understand what you’re trying to communicate, you’ll want to optimize the
page around your long-tail keyword, which you already did in the title and body of the post, but
you’ll also want it in the URL, alt-text, and meta description.
The URL of your blog post should make it easy for your visitors to understand the structure of your
website and the content they're about to see. Search engines favor web page URLs that make it
easier for them and website visitors to understand the content on the page.

What if there's a specific article you want to read, like the data visualization example. Its URL
structure denotes that it's an article from the Marketing section of the blog and that it’s on the topic
of data visualization. The URL doesn’t have to match the title of the blog exactly. Keep the URL
short.
In this way, URL structure acts as a categorization system for readers, letting them know where they
are on the website and how to access new site pages. Search engines appreciate this, as it makes it
easier for them to identify exactly what information searchers will access on different parts of your
blog or website.
Alt-text with images helps because search engines don't just look for images. Rather, they look for
images with alt text. Because search engines can't "see" images the same way humans can, an
image's alt text tells them what an image is about -- which ultimately helps those images rank in the
image section of search engine results.
Your meta description is meant to give search engines and readers information about your blog
post's content -- so be certain to use your long-tail term so search engines and your audience are
clear on your post's content.
At the same time, keep in mind the copy matters a great deal for click-through rates because it
satisfies certain readers' intent. The more engaging, the better. The maximum length of this meta
description is greater than it once was -- now around 300 characters -- suggesting it wants to give
readers more insight into what each result will give them. So, in addition to being reader-friendly
(compelling and relevant), your meta description should include the long-tail keyword for which
you are trying to optimize for.
And include relevant internal and external links within the post. Link to related blog posts or your
site pages when appropriate. If you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on
another blog post, ebook, or web page, it's a best practice to link to that page.
Seems counterproductive? Well, it’s not. Blogging is start a smaller part of your content strategy. In
order to get found in search and best answer the new types of queries searchers are submitting,
the solution is to use the topic cluster model.
Choose the broad topics for which you want to rank (like you’ll do at the beginning with your blog
posts), then create content based on specific keywords related to that topic that all link to each
other (like your blog posts), to create broader search engine authority.

This model uses a more deliberate site architecture to organize and link URLs together to help
more pages on your site rank in search engines -- and to help searchers find information more
easily. This architecture consists of three components -- pillar content, cluster content, and
hyperlinks. So your blog posts can serve as cluster content that then include hyperlinks to more
information location on your pillar content page. It’s a better experience for you, the search
engines, but most important your visitors.
Make sure you have easily accessible options for your readers to be able to share your blog posts.
If a visitor finds one of your posts helpful and valuable, then they’re likely to share it to one or more
of their social media channels.
And don’t forget about mobile! With mobile devices now accounting for nearly 2 out of every 3
minutes spent online, having a blog that’s responsive or designed for mobile has become more
and more critical. Make sure to keep mobile in mind as you structuring your blog post. What would
the experience be like if someone were you read your blog post on their mobile phone instead of
a desktop computer. You might change the length of the post. You can see what the difference
looks like here. Keep those smaller devices in mind!
At the end of the day, it’s important to write consistently and frequently. There are a lot of blog
posts out there, so make sure to choose quality over quantity. Always.
Commit yourself to a blogging schedule. The more often you blog, the more likely you are to get
found. After all, each new blog post is an opportunity to attract new visitors as well as a
continuation to your overall content savings account. The more often you post quality content, the
more you will see your blog grow and influence your business.
And there you have it - the fundamental strategy and best practices for getting your blog up and
running, so that you can begin to attract new visitors and convert them into leads.
Transcript: Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
Video 1: Why are topic clusters important?
Hi, I’m Justin with HubSpot Academy.
Content marketing has seen a lot of changes over the past several years. Many of these changes can be attributed to the
rapidly evolving search landscape, as well as a shift in the way people search, discover, and consume content online.
All that said, many marketers still experience the same pain points that were common 5 to 10 years ago. “I struggle to
measure the return on investment of the content I create.” “We know the content we’re creating provides value, but we
still don’t seem to rank high on Google for our target keywords.” And, “I’ve done my keyword research. Now what?”
Let me start by telling you that creating more content in the hopes of having your website show up on Google is not the
answer. In fact, adding more content to an outdated existing site architecture can make it harder for Google to find and
rank your content. That’s not a situation any marketer wants to find themselves in.
The answer to these problems spans way beyond the amount of content your business publishes per week or month;
the real problem lies in the way that most content strategies are being developed and organized.
SEO is evolving, and marketers need to adapt.
Today, we live in a digitally informed world, one where there’s millions of people searching for content every minute as
well as millions of pieces of content being published online every minute. This makes the job of a search engine like
Google increasingly difficult to serve you the most relevant, high authoritative content possible. To remain a relevant
and helpful search engine, Google released a series of algorithm changes over the past several years.
The first notable update, which really shook things up, was Google’s “Hummingbird” algorithm update in 2013. This
update focused on parsing out phrases rather than focusing on specific search queries. Many search engine optimizers
and content marketers viewed this as an initial shift from a keyword to topic focus.
The next major update happened in 2015—Google’s RankBrain algorithm update. RankBrain is Google’s machine-
learning artificial intelligence system that interprets people’s searches to find pages that might not have the exact words
they searched for. Google is able to do this by associating past search history with similar themes and pulling together
keywords and phrases to provide a better context-driven search engine results page.
For more information on the evolution of SEO, check out the resources section below.
All this change brings opportunity to be found by your ideal audience. That’s a key facet to creating successful content in
today’s online environment. Most forget it’s not just about creating content for the search engine. Search engines aren’t
the ones filling out the forms on your website. Search engines aren’t the ones sharing your content on social media.
Search engines aren’t your customers—humans are.
If you want to create effective content that converts visitors into leads and eventually customers, you need to create a
helpful, positive user experience that solves for both the searcher and the search engine, not just one or the other.
Here’s how you can solve for both: Create targeted clusters of relevant content that each cover a specific topic in depth.
These targeted clusters then need to lead to a centralized hub, known as a pillar page.
A pillar page (also known as a content pillar or power page) is a website page that covers a specific topic in depth and is
linked to a cluster of related content.
The topic cluster model, at its very essence, is a way of organizing a site’s content pages using a cleaner and more
deliberate site architecture. Topic clusters rearrange the architecture to clusters of related content that link to a central
pillar page. Each pillar page should provide a comprehensive overview of the topic you’re writing about. By linking all
internal content within that topic to a pillar page, search engines such as Google can easily scan all the content and
understand that there is a semantic relationship between the pages' content. The cluster setup also signals to search
engines that there is real breadth and depth in the content, which gives the pillar page more authority on the topic.
Algorithms like Google’s RankBrain reward this orderly linking with higher search placement.
So whether you’re new to creating content or just getting started, consider mapping out the topics your business wants
to be known for and build authority around. Then map and organize your site architecture to support it.
Video 2: How do you create an effective topic cluster
So you're looking to create a topic cluster for your site's content.
First, you need to identify a broad topic that you want to be known for and build authority around. Instead of thinking
about specific keywords you want to rank for, focus on terms with high monthly search volume, usually 2–3 words in
length.
For example, let’s say you’re a marketing agency who does inbound marketing for your clients. In this case, “inbound
marketing” would be a great example of a broad topic that you might want to be known for and build authority around.
However, actually trying to rank for broad topics like inbound marketing could seem impossible. Not to mention, broad
topics like this don’t offer context as to what you’re specifically talking, making it difficult to solve for searcher intent.
If your goal is to rank for a broad topic like inbound marketing, then you need to be specific as to what you’re talking
about by bringing context to the equation. Let’s say your marketing agency offers a service to build personas for your
business. After all, knowing who you’re trying to reach is an important facet to a successful inbound marketing strategy.
In this case, “inbound marketing personas” would be a great example of bringing context to the broad topic, inbound
marketing. The trick to doing this effectively is finding specific terms in support of your broad topic that have adequate
search volume to justify the content creation time. This is because you will be creating a pillar page around this specified
topic with the intention of getting that page to rank on the first page of search engines like Google. And while I’d love to
provide you with a magic monthly search volume number as a baseline to go by, it really will depend on your industry
and location.
Here’s a pro tip: When doing keyword research, identify a list of keywords you could use to bring context to your broad
topic. Keep in mind, the higher the monthly search volume, the more difficult it will be to rank for. On that note,
choosing keywords that have lower monthly search volume can still make a big impact on your search engine visibility.
You may think that 250 monthly searches for a specific keyword is low, but ranking for a keyword with this monthly
search volume can pay off in the long run. That’s because the average first-page ranking will also rank well for about a
thousand other relevant keywords. Remember, search engines are much smarter nowadays. Their main goal is to solve
for searcher intent. Yes, keywords are still important, but if search engines think your content solves for the intent of a
search query, even if that search query doesn’t have the specific keywords you used to optimize your content, then
chances are they’ll choose to rank it anyways. That’s why it’s important to think in terms of topics over keywords.
Once you determine how you intend to rank for a term that’s specific to the broad topic you’re going to write about,
you’ll want to identify your topic cluster, which will be made up of relevant subtopics. A subtopic should be strong
enough to be published on its own — in the form of something like a blog post or video — but when combined with
other like-themed subtopics, it should be relevant to and support the specific topic you’re writing about.
In this case, “What are negative marketing personas?,” “How do you build a persona?,” and “What content does my
persona want?” are examples of strong subtopics that provide value on their own, but when put together, support the
specific topic “inbound marketing personas.”
Here’s a pro tip: If you’re looking for a place to start when identifying subtopics, consider the questions your audience
has around the specific topic you chose to write about. If your audience uses search engines to do research, then
chances are they’re doing their research in the form of a question. And if you’re the one who’s offering the answers to
their questions, then you’re off to a good start with creating an effective topic cluster.
And to complete the topic cluster, and solve for both the searcher and the search engine, connect the pillar page and
subtopics together through a series of hyperlinks.
At a minimum, make sure all subtopics link to your pillar page. By linking all relevant subtopics to the pillar page, you’re
funneling all your traffic to the main resource hub on this topic.
Let’s see this in action.
If you performed a Google search for inbound marketing personas, this is what the first-page listing would look like.
At the top, you’ll see Google generated a featured snippet, which is the search engine’s way of answering your search
query without you having to click through to the page. In this case, Google chose to feature a snippet about what an
inbound marketing persona is — information that’s pulled from a comprehensive resource published by an inbound
marketing agency called SmartBug Media.
Below the featured snippet, you’ll see SmartBug also claims the number one listing for “inbound marketing personas”
with the same resource, “The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Personas.”
In a world of trying to build authority and awareness for a broad topic that’s relevant to your business, this is what
you’re striving for: the featured snippet as well as the number one listing for a term that’s aligned with your broad topic.
Let’s say you’re a company looking to create your business’s personas, so you click the link in the search result to learn
more. You’re taken to this page:
Near the top, you’re greeted with a video as well as an overview of what you’re going to learn. Below that is a form to
access a guide with a bonus template to use for applying what you learn to your business. But let’s say you’re not sure
you’re ready to give your information just yet in exchange for the offer. Maybe you need more information to make sure
that this offer is right for you.
SmartBug understands this might be the case, which is why they offer the majority of the content in the guide on the
actual pillar page. This way, visitors can check out the content first to make sure it’s what they’re looking for.
And for people who do find value in SmartBug’s content and want access to the downloadable guide and bonus getting
started template, SmartBug makes it easy to access it by offering a sticky form at the top of the page that follows visitors
as they scroll. This way they’re being helpful without disrupting the visitor's experience.
One last thing before moving on, SmartBug includes helpful links throughout their pillar page. These links connect to
other websites as well as content on their site, including subtopics a part of their topic cluster. For example, notice how
this hyperlink, “getting the answers to some basic questions,” connects to a blog post on SmartBug’s site. This way the
visitor can continue consuming content around this topic. And at the top of the blog post, there’s a link that takes you
back to the pillar page.
Something important to note: Not every subtopic you have will be referenced on your pillar page (and that’s okay).
That’s because you may have dozens, even hundreds, of subtopics that make up your topic clusters. Instead, you can
strategically link to relevant subtopics throughout your pillar page when it makes sense and when it provides value to
the website visitor. Just make sure all important subtopics connect to the pillar page. Remember, keep the user
experience and the story you’re trying to tell in mind.
So that’s how this page solved for the searcher by offering a positive user experience, but how did this page solve for
search engines in terms of traffic and visibility?
In the first 3 months after publishing their pillar page and linking their topic cluster together, SmartBug’s pillar page
received over 4,800 views and 1,000 downloads.
With results like this, SmartBug started to rethink their overall content strategy and structure of their website.
Remember, search engines want to connect people with the best content possible based on their intent. Focusing on
user experience is a strong and sustainable way to search engine optimize your content.
Video 3: Examples of commonly used pillar page types
Let’s cover three of the most widely used pillar page formats, starting with the resource pillar page.
The resource pillar page focuses on internal and external links. The goal of this pillar page is to be a helpful resource in
connecting the reader with the most relevant sources on a broad topic (even if it means sending people off your site).
Let’s take a look at the pillar page Colgate, an oral hygiene company, created on “gum disease.”
This resource pillar page is composed of multiple sections that are specific to their broad topic, gum disease, like “gum
disease prevention” or “gum disease signs and symptoms.” Notice how this section offers an overview of the specific
topic using a bullet point list. Additionally, there’s a list of helpful links that connect the reader with various, like-themed
resources to continue reading like “common warning signs of gingivitis.” When clicked, Colgate takes you to one of their
helpful blog articles that explains this subtopic in depth.
Here’s a pro tip: If you have a lot of subtopics related to your broad topic, let’s say over 75, then consider only
promoting your top-performing subtopics on your resource pillar page. Colgate’s resource pillar page on gum disease
links to fewer than 60 Colgate resources related to gum disease. However, they have over 2,400 pieces of content
related to gum disease published on their site.
Remember, keep the user’s experience in mind. Too much information might be overwhelming. And if users are
overwhelmed, then chances are they’ll leave your site.
Now, let’s say you want to create a resource pillar page that’s made up of the best resources that exist on the subject,
not just what your brand has to offer.
Let’s see an example of this in action from Help Scout, a customer service software company, with their resource pillar
on the broad topic “customer acquisition.”
This resource pillar page is made up of multiple sections related to customer acquisition, like search engine optimization,
conversion rate optimization, and content marketing. Notice how each section offers a short blurb on the broad topic, a
list of specific topics that bring value to the broad topic, like “content marketing tools,” and a list of links to resources
the learner might want to check out. For example, Help Scout includes a link to BuzzSumo, a research and monitor tool,
which sends the visitor off their website.
Generally, you wouldn’t want to send people away from your website, but this approach is solving for the visitor, not
your business.
The biggest advantage of a pillar page format like this is you have the opportunity to generate inbound links from
sources you include on the page. This page has hundreds of inbound links pointing to it, most of which are sources
mentioned on the page.
Here’s a pro tip: If you decide to create a resource pillar page like this, then you’ll want to develop an outreach plan to
let the sources you include on the page know it exists. Letting others know that you’re linking to their content could lead
to that source linking back to your page if they find value in promoting it to their audience, further expanding your topic
cluster’s authority.
Next up, which is the most commonly used pillar page type, the 10x content pillar page.
The goal of this type of pillar page is similar to the resource pillar page: to provide a comprehensive overview of a
specific topic. But the 10x pillar page is generally made up of your owned media. Owned media is content you own and
can control, like social media channels, your website, and so on. The format of this page is similar to that of an ungated
ebook or a guide. Ungated means the content is not gated behind a form.
Ungating educational content in the awareness stage solves for both the search engine and the website visitor, not one
or the other. It solves for search engines because they’re able to recognize the clustering of like-themed content
pointing to a comprehensive website page or blog post. It solves for your website visitors because it gives them the
opportunity to view your content before deciding to commit to downloading it.
The trick is making the 10x content pillar page a conversion-focused asset by packaging the page’s content into a
downloadable resource.
You may be asking yourself, “why would someone share their email address just to view the same content in a
downloadable format?”
Well, HubSpot did a study, and we found that 90% of website visitors prefer to read lengthy content in the form of a PDF
as opposed to a website page. But this preference is not limited to HubSpot’s content. It’s human nature to want to take
something with you if you find value in it.
Think of it this way: Let’s say you go to a bookstore looking for a new book. You’d probably wander up and down the
aisles, flipping through pages of various books until you find one that meets your needs. Once you find a book you enjoy,
you’ll probably go to the checkout counter and buy it to take it with you, as opposed to staying in the bookstore hour
after hour and day after day, reading this piece of content.
This is the experience you’re trying to replicate, but it can only be done if your content provides value to the reader.
We’ve reached this age where everyone seems to have an ebook or guide, but the quality of that content is a different
story. Sure, you may be getting leads, but what if people don’t find value in your content? They most likely won’t
continue building a relationship with you. So that lead you captured won’t be as valuable as you think.
In contrast, the people who can view your content before downloading it and who then choose to fill out your form will
be more qualified because they’re willingly giving you their information even though they’ve already seen part or most
of what your content has to offer.
For example, take a look at this 10x content pillar page on email outreach created by Mailshake, a helpful email
outreach tool.
This 10x content pillar page covers a comprehensive approach to email outreach with sectioned content.
Let’s say you wanted to learn more about what an effective outreach email looks like. Click section 3 at the top of this
page, “examples of good (and great) outreach emails and what we can learn from them,” and the link will direct you to
that specific section on the page to learn more about it.
Let’s assume this is the content you’re looking for, and you stay on Mailshake’s website for more than 20 seconds to
read it. In this case, Mailshake generates a pop-up form and offers the content as a packaged downloadable resource.
This way, you can take the content with you and consume it on your own time.
How well is this page performing? Well, in less than one year, this page has been viewed over 43,000 times, shared on
social media 398 times, attracted 372 inbound links, acquired 5,321 email opt-ins, and acquired 402 customers.
Now those are some serious results for a piece of content that’s less than a year old.
And lastly, we have the product or service pillar page. This type is best used when creating pillar pages for products or
services your business offers.
With this type of pillar page, the aim is not necessarily quantity and breadth of content. You probably don’t need to
write a long overview about how your dentist office performs root canals or your legal practice litigates divorce. But the
content should be informative and clear.
A good example is Vital’s page on their PPC Management Services. As a digital marketing agency, their prospects
regularly ask them about their team’s PPC capabilities. This page does a great job at describing what type of services
they offer, what’s included in monthly management, their step-by-step approach, their step-by-step account setup
process, and a little bit about their pricing. It’s descriptive but not overly so. And not only is it optimized well for search,
it’s clearly written for an audience who’s looking for paid media services.
Lastly, and something important to note, this pillar page type is best suited for the decision stage — notice the decision
stage offering to get in touch with sales to get a PPC management proposal.
One more thing: A pillar page can either be a page on your website or a blog post on your blog. It depends on how you
organize your overall site structure.
HubSpot uses our blog for educational pillar pages that span the awareness and consideration stages. For example, let’s
say you wanted to learn more about the topic, “customer feedback.” HubSpot offers a 10x content pillar page on our
blog that teaches people the specific topic, “customer feedback strategy.”
Now if you’re someone who’s looking to implement a customer feedback strategy for your business, then we offer a
product pillar page for our customer feedback software. This pillar page is a page on our website that’s organized under
our product offerings.
There’s not a right or wrong way to go about this. But whatever way you choose to organize and map your site
architecture, stick to it. Your audience as well as search engines will appreciate it.
These 3 types of pillar pages are by no means exclusive or fixed. Feel free to take elements from each type and build
something custom. But hopefully they give you enough guidance to create something truly amazing.
Video 4: How do you create an effective pillar page?
Let’s cover how a company called Etuma created their business’ first 10x content pillar page. Etuma is a company that
helps businesses transform unstructured text data into decision-making information.
Before diving in, keep in mind there’s more than one way to create an effective topic cluster and pillar page. For
example, if bandwidth is not an issue for you and your team, then you can create your pillar page in as little as a week.
However, if your business is strapped for time, then you may need to create a plan to construct your pillar page over
time. That’s exactly what Etuma did. Let’s review a 7-step process Etuma used to create their first topic cluster and pillar
page with limited resources.
First, identify a specific topic you want to be known for and rank for online.
Here’s how Etuma did this.
To start, Etuma performed research on keywords their primary persona, Customer Experience Manager Maggie, might
use when looking for information online. They identified the broad topic “text analysis” and decided this would be a
helpful starting point.
Next, Etuma brought focus to their broad topic by being specific as to what Maggie might be looking for when doing
research. They know Maggie is trying to make sense of a lot of text data and is actively looking for step-by-step guidance
with possible solutions or tools she can recommend to her team. Keeping this in mind, Etuma decided to focus their
pillar page around the specific topic, “text analysis guide.” This way Etuma can provide a comprehensive overview to
becoming a text analysis expert as well as a list of solutions and tools to consider, including their text analysis tool.
Here’s a pro tip: If you’re going to take the time to create content that educates your audience, make sure it connects
to, and supports, at least one of your products or services. If it doesn’t, ask why you’re creating it in the first place.
Second, identify your topic cluster.

You may already have content created in support of the topic you’re intending to rank for. Instead of re-inventing the
wheel, identify current owned media that’s relevant to the specific topic you’re planning to write about.
In this case, Etuma already had 4 pages of text analysis-themed blog content and a series of YouTube videos.
And while having existing content is great, don't sell your business short.. Brainstorm a list of as many subtopics as
possible that bring value to your topic that have yet to be published.
Once Etuma made a comprehensive list of subtopics, they narrowed it down to 6 of the strongest subtopics to
repurpose and expand upon to create their pillar page. Remember, you can continue growing and improving the
authority of your topic cluster and experience of your pillar page over time, so having a list of subtopics already
identified will make that process easier. That comprehensive list you made is the content gift that keeps on giving.
Third, create blog posts for needed subtopics.
Etuma needed content for their subtopic “text analysis categorization systems,” so they created a blog post titled “How
to Create a Customer Feedback Taxonomy.”
Once Etuma created this article, they had a blog post for each one of their 6 subtopics.
Fourth, repurpose your subtopic content into a downloadable content offer.
I recommend you create the content offer before the pillar page. This way, you can include a form on your pillar page as
soon as it’s published to start generating leads immediately.
Once you have all the content you need to create your pillar page, repurpose and expand the subtopic content into a
downloadable content offer. And repurpose doesn’t mean copy and paste. Etuma used the content from their blog post
as inspiration and repackaged it to bring new value and meaning as a downloadable content offer. Remember, the goal
here is to use the content you already have to put together a helpful story for the reader, which explains the topic in
depth.
Fifth, deconstruct your downloadable content offer into a 10x content pillar page.
Etuma took the same content offered in their guide and formatted it to fit on a website page.
You may have heard the phrase “content is king.” Matt Cutts, formerly with Google, coined this phrase many years ago.
However, design is sometimes forgotten, even though it’s just as important as the content. You want people to have a
positive experience when they’re reading your content.
Think about it: If you walked into a restaurant with fantastic food but a poor design—dark, cramped, noisy, cluttered—
would you stay? No way! Design is just as important as what you offer—whether that be food or site content.
To make sure your 10x content pillar page provides a positive experience, check out these 13 layout tips outlined on
Etuma’s example.
Let’s review each layout tip in more detail.

Starting at the top-left of the example, with tips one, two, and three: Apply consistent on-page SEO best practices,
referencing the specific topic you’re intending to rank for in your page title, URL, and H1 tag.
Moving down to tip 4, include conversion-focused landing page elements. Really, this is what a standard landing page
looks like: text to the left with bullet points to describe the offer’s value, an image of the offer’s cover in the middle, and
a form to fill out and access the offer to the right.
Insert the form directly on the 10x content pillar page. Doing so reduces the amount of conversion actions a reader
needs to take to download the resource. That being said, if you’re more comfortable with a dedicated landing page with
a form to access the offer, insert a call-to-action that links to it on the pillar page to send readers there.
Moving down to tip 5, add an anchor-linked table of contents below the conversion point with the line “Click the link to
go directly to a specific section.” An anchor link is a web link that allows users to jump to a specific point on a website
page. This makes it easier for people to navigate your content and see what it has to offer.
Additionally, adding an anchor-linked table of contents near the top of the page helps Google understand what this page
is about and what it has to offer in a condensed fashion. This is a great way to optimize your page’s content for Google’s
featured snippet.
Moving up to the top-right of the example and layout tip 6, you’ll notice there’s website navigation. The goal of this page
is to create a positive experience for the visitor, not force them to convert as a landing page would.
Moving on to tip 7, use relevant images throughout the page, with the specific topic referenced in the alt text. This
optimizes the images used on the page for image search results.
Moving down to tips 8 and 9, use H2 tags for sub-headers and H3 tags for list items. A proper HTML structure provides a
clean user experience and makes it simpler to update the page. Not to mention, taking time to do this the right way is
another opportunity for your website to be chosen as the lisitcal featured snippet.
Moving down to tips 10 and 11, use relevant internal and external links to dig deeper into resources. That’s right:
external. External links validate your claims. Just use them strategically, like to support a claim or data point you need to
reinforce. If you don’t want to drive people off your site, then consider having the links that point to external websites
open in a new window.
Moving down to tip 12, reference the keyword of your specific topic throughout the page. But don’t just repeat the
exact phrase — search engines are smart enough to understand synonyms of what you’re talking about.
And lastly, tip 13, have a back-to-top button. This way, when people click a section they want to learn more about, they
can easily jump back to the top. People probably won’t read your entire page, but they may find one section interesting
enough and want to download it and take it with them. You want to make this process as easy as possible for the visitor.
Forgetting this step would require the reader to scroll endlessly, or it might feel like it, which could lead to frustration,
which could lead to them leaving your page and going elsewhere.
Here’s a pro tip: If you want to make it easy for people to access your packaged downloadable content offer, then
consider inserting a pop-up form on your pillar page.
The average top-performing pop-up forms convert at 9.28%, with some instances as high as 50.2%. To put that into
perspective, if you get even 150 visitors per day to your site, you’d have 418 sign-ups in a month.
Moving on to step 6, link your relevant owned media to your 10x content pillar page.
Once you complete your 10x pillar page, you need to hyperlink your subtopics to it, forming your topic cluster.
The goal here is to connect all owned media that’s relevant to the pillar page using a hyperlink. The more content
associated with your topic cluster and pillar page, the better.
And don’t just add any old link text. Take the time to update the anchor text to something descriptive to let the visitor
know where they’re going.
Etuma linked over 20 relevant pieces of content to their 10x content pillar page. And you’ll notice they took the time to
create descriptive anchor text to let the searcher and search engine know where they’re going.
And 7, create a conversion path for people to access your 10x content pillar page.
The goal here is to let people know this content is available. If you don’t, you run the risk of a large portion of your
website visitors never finding it. Forgetting this step would be similar to building a new addition on your house without a
door. No matter how great that room is, no one would be able to get in, so what’s the point?
Consider calling out your pillar page in the top navigation through a 1- or 2-click process: 1 click if you offer it directly in
the dropdown menu, 2 clicks if you have a resources page with multiple assets to organize and call out.
Etuma calls out their 10x content pillar page as a one-click option in their Resources tab.
Another place to consider is the top of the home page with a call-to-action, with an image and descriptive supplemental
text.
This doesn’t mean it always needs to stay here on this page. You can promote the pillar page for a limited time, possibly
for 2 weeks or a month, to support its publishing launch.
And there you have it: 7 steps to creating an effective 10x content pillar page for your business.
Etuma has been creating content consistently for years, but this 7-step process helped them make more sense of how to
create, grow, and connect content effectively.
But how well is it performing?
After 2 months, their VP of Marketing and Sales said, “We are receiving about 4 times the leads (if you measure by
quality) compared to before the text analysis pillar page.”
And why do you think Etuma’s quality of leads went up? Because their content provides so much value that interested
visitors are willing to give up their information to take a packaged download with them.
If you’re looking for a place to start with creating topic clusters and pillar pages, consider deconstructing your existing
awareness- or consideration-stage offers into 10x content pillar pages. For example, in an effort to solve for website
visitors as well as search engine web crawlers, I deconstructed a do-it-yourself truck camper guide I created for my
alternative lifestyle website into a 10x content pillar page.
The result? In 4 months, our non-paid, organic traffic coming from search engines increased 329%.
Remember, if you have something valuable to say to your audience and the world, don’t keep it gated behind a form.
Get it out there for all to see. Just make sure to package it in a way that makes it easy for people to take with them and
enjoy elsewhere.
Video 5: How to optimize and grow your pillar pages over time
Your pillar page should always be under construction. You might need to make updates to keep it relevant or add new,
fresh content to keep it performing at a high level. You need to maintain it. Otherwise, you’re leaving yourself
vulnerable for someone else to come in and outperform you — it happens all the time.
Let’s check out a company that’s taken the time to grow their topic clusters and pillar pages into the backbone of their
content strategy. That company is Townsend Security. They’re a full-service data security provider.
Townsend started 2016 with a positive lift in organic, non-paid visits coming from search engines due to their content
efforts. They worked hard in 2015 with regular blogging, webinars, podcasts, white papers, and ebooks. The result: Their
traffic held steady in 2015, and in the first quarter of 2016, they had a 27% rise in organic search visitors.
But all that changed in the second quarter of 2016. Competition for their narrow band of keywords increased as new
competitors entered the marketplace, and their larger rivals outspent them on online marketing. After a record high in
March and April, they saw a 38% decrease in organic search visitors during the next 3 months (with a 28% decrease in
one month alone). Their hard work from the previous year evaporated. While they fought back and did recoup some of
that traffic, they still struggled to regain their high ground in the organic section of the search engine results page.
In late September of 2016, Townsend’s HubSpot Inbound Consultant, Erin Sliney, introduced them to the concept of
creating a pillar page and supporting it with a relevant topic cluster. They took this advice and ran with it. The Townsend
team’s goal was to become thought leaders on “encryption key management.” And that’s exactly what they did.
During the editing process, Townsend wrote 20 social media updates and scheduled them to be published to their
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts once the pillar page published. They mixed their publishing dates with their
regularly scheduled updates during the following 8 weeks. Coupled with an email campaign promoting the pillar page to
their active lead community, they were able to get the word out to those already familiar with them.
To reach the wider community who might not yet know them, Townsend inserted links to their pillar page by
thoughtfully answering questions on Quora, adding insights to other websites by visiting their blog and commenting on
relevant blog posts, and contributing thought leadership guest blog posts on other websites that shared a similar
audience.
And lastly, since Townsend had been blogging on encryption key management for years, it was easy for them to identify
a topic cluster through a few dozen subtopic blog posts that were contextually similar. They could place internal links
with descriptive anchor text on these posts pointing back to their pillar page. The links enhanced the reader’s
experience, since they were providing additional, relevant content for them to binge (as well as being a clear signal for
search engines to understand what the pillar page was all about).
This is how Townsend created and promoted their initial 10x content pillar page. But how did they continue growing it
to become the authoritative source on encryption key management?
Let’s review 3 ways to improve the on-page experience of your pillar pages based on learnings from Townsend’s
encryption key management pillar page.
To start, offer various forms of media per section for the reader to engage with.
First, Townsend created graphics and optimized them for Google search results. To take it a step further, Townsend
turned their images into interactive infographics with pop-up text using HTML5, which search engines can also read.
Next, Townsend repurposed various data points into infographic-like images.
And lastly, Townsend repurposed content on the page into a short descriptive video, providing a quick overview of
encryption key management. The video led to a 20% increase in average time on page.
Second, Sprinkle in relevant content offers that progress your buyer personas through their buyer’s journey
Townsend offered additional content offers throughout the page based on relevancy, like an ebook and a whitepaper.
This is an effective way to guide your visitors through the buyer’s journey — showing them what other content you have
to offer when it makes sense.
Nowadays, people love to binge content. Platforms like Netflix promote this by releasing full seasons of a show at once.
People want content now, and as much of it as they can consume until they’re ready to make a decision, whatever that
may be. The best thing you can do is find a way to keep people coming back to your content. Continue to either educate
or entertain them (or both). If you don’t, someone else will.
Now back to Townsend. 10 months after first publishing and promoting their 10x content pillar page, Townsend's
organic search engine traffic increased over 150%.
10 months after first publishing their 10x content pillar page and continually promoting it, Townsend’s non-paid, organic
search engine traffic increased over 150%.
On top of that, 63% of people who visited the encryption key management pillar page decided to download the content
and take it with them.
What about visibility on search engines? In August 2017, Townsend’s 10x content pillar page claimed the number one
position on Google for “encryption key management,” the specific topic they intended to rank for on Google. And it’s
remained at the #1 position for close to 2 years.
Something else interesting to note, Townsend has built so much authority to their pillar page over the past few years
that they’re actually ranking at the third position on Google and claim the image featured snippet for their broad topic,
“encryption key.” No surprise here, as Townsend is constantly looking for ways to improve and optimize their pillar page
to keep it performing at a high level. Remember, if Google deems your content as a relevant, authoritative resource,
then chances are your average first-page ranking will also rank well for about a thousand other relevant keywords, even
ones that are more broad with higher monthly search volume.
And third, Insert a heatmap on your pillar page to better understand performance and optimization next steps.
Townsend’s pillar page offers a lot of valuable content with multiple conversion actions. And because they want to
ensure their visitors are receiving the best content experience possible, they used a heatmap to see the engagement
patterns on the page using Hotjar.
Hotjar offers a fast and visual way to understand your user’s on-page website experience.
After placing a Hotjar heatmap on their pillar page, Townsend learned that people who visit the page are more
interested in learning about what encryption key management is before downloading the content as a packaged
resource. Here’s a screenshot of Townsend’s heatmap at the top of their pillar page. Notice how all the engagement is
happening around the call-to-action.
But once visitors start clicking around to learn more about encryption key management, they’re more interested and
willing to give their information in exchange for a packaged download of the content. Interestingly enough, the call-to-
action for the guide three-quarters of the way down the page led to the most conversions.
This information helped Townsend understand which sections people found the most value in that lead to conversions.
It also showed them that people prefer to peruse through their content before giving their email address to download it
and take it with them — another effective data point to support Townsend’s choice to ungate their content and offer it
as a packaged download.
This experiment sparked a lot of interest at Townsend. News traveled up to the CEO, who was so delighted by their
results that he decided to create Townsend’s next pillar page for the specific topic “SQL server encryption.” Townsend
created this page using the same template and learnings from their first pillar page. There’s information about what this
page is about at the top of the page, followed by an anchor-linked table of contents, a call-to-action to access a
packaged download of the page’s content, as well as a relevant short video.
Currently, this pillar page ranks at the fifth position on Google and claims the featured snippet. And just like Townsend’s
encryption key management pillar page, they know if they constantly look for ways to improve and optimize this pillar
page, they’re giving themselves the best chance at claiming the #1 position for the specific topic, “SQL server
encryption.” And once they achieve that, chances are this page will also rank well for about a thousand other relevant
keywords. It’s an on-going cycle, one that can be repeated.
Inbound Marketing Certification
Transcript: The Fundamentals of Social Media Promotion

1: Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
Hi, I’m Crystal from HubSpot Academy. Let’s learn about why you need a social media strategy!
Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the
conversation, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners. Social media shouldn’t replace other
Inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations, but instead, should augment them, offering
another set of marketing channels for you to explore.
There are many benefits to having a social media strategy. It will:

Help you expand your other marketing efforts, so your content has the chance to be seen by a wide
audience, and hopefully, the right audience. It will also help you:
build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through
billboards or magazine and television ads. With social media, you have the ability to bring your brand
content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects. Now you can be where your audience
already is.
Social media is a key driver for word of mouth, one of the most powerful ways to connect with your
audiences. In fact, Nielsen reports that 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service
experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.
Additionally, social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services, and
it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their
choosing.
It sounds like a lot of opportunity, doesn’t it? In fact, social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do
inbound marketing. That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to
market in a direct, but very human way.
That brings us to one of the most important parts of your social media strategy. It’s also the same thing that sits at
the heart of your inbound marketing strategy: The buyer persona. A buyer persona helps you determine who
your ideal customer is. Understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways, from choosing
the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to being able to target
advertising to the right audience.
Make sure you understand all the basic demographics about your buyer persona like age, gender, income,
occupation, interests, motivations, and objections. But if you can, also go a few steps further and dig into their
psychographics — which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like
best. Social media gives you the ability to be more personal and really hone in on the right type of persona for
your products and services, so the more you know, the better you can target social audiences.


There is one other crucial piece of the social media promotion puzzle: Aligning your social strategy to your
business objectives. Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social
media goals that will transform viewers and readers into buyers. As with your business goals, you want your
social media goals to use the S-M-A-R-T method: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.
As an example, if your company has a goal of building brand awareness among college students, one of your
social media goals might be to develop videos with content that’s helpful or funny for college students, and set
an advertising goal of reaching 250,000 college students by the end of the year. Even better, you can set a
secondary goal of having the students interact with the content in some way — commenting on it or sharing it
with their friends — thus increasing brand reach and giving you a direct way to measure if and how you’re
meeting your goal.
Being able to articulate your social media goals and plan the impact your goals will have on the company’s return
on investment, or ROI, is also the key to securing executive buy-in and budget for your campaigns.
Having your buyer persona and business objectives in mind will be helpful as you traverse your way through
building your social media strategy.
To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to:
Explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion,
Understand the impact of social listening and engagement,
Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan,
Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts, and finally, how
to
Integrate social media into your other inbound efforts, including your website, conversations, and blog
posts.
There are a lot of moving parts in developing this strategy, but mapping out the actions you’re going to take will
get you one step closer to achieving your business goals.
2: The Social Media Channels Explained
There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the right social media platform to use for your inbound
marketing efforts. To help you decide which channels are the best fit for your social strategy, let’s walk through
the basics and benefits of each of them.
Let’s start with the giant: Facebook.
You may have heard the adage that if Facebook were a country it would be the largest on earth. That’s because it
currently boasts over two billion users — far more than the largest country, China, with 1.4 billion people living
within its borders. It’s likely the majority of people you know are on the social platform. And even more important


to your business, it’s not just for personal use anymore. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 67% of
Americans are using Facebook as their primary source of news. Millions of companies use Facebook Business
Pages to share organic news, events, talk to customers and manage highly targeted advertising campaigns. This
means Facebook is potentially going to be one of the most important platforms to your social media strategy.
There are two types of Facebook pages: a personal page and a business page. You might have heard organic
reach is better on a personal page, which is true, but there are several reasons you should use a Facebook
business page for your company instead. First off, Facebook requires businesses to use business pages and can
shut down pages that do not comply with their policy. Personal pages have a 5,000 person friend limit, whereas
business pages can have millions of followers. Having a business page also gives you access to analytics (they
call them Insights) and the ability to correctly categorize your company for search, add a mission statement, a
product catalog, awards, and give your customers the chance to give reviews.
But the most important reason for you to have a Facebook Business page is for advertising. Facebook
advertising allows you to hypertarget the audiences you care most about, including your own prospect lists so
you can directly deliver content of value. You can also use Facebook Advertising across their other services —
Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Adding a Facebook pixel on your website even helps you
retarget those visitors with ads on Facebook.
On Facebook, you can publish a variety of content including text and photo posts, carousel photo posts, and
video posts. You can even do live Facebook videos and share “Stories,” microcontent designed to disappear
after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
With over 1.3 billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network and, interestingly enough, it’s also the
second largest search engine in the world — behind Google, of course. To give you a sense of its importance,
more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched on
Youtube every single day. It’s almost mind boggling to think about! Google reports that 6 out of 10 people
prefer online video platforms to live TV, which means, in many ways, you have the potential to reach an even
bigger audience for a more affordable cost than on television. On mobile, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year
olds in the US than any cable network.
When it comes to marketing on the platform, YouTube offers a variety of interesting possibilities. Remember how
I mentioned it was the second largest search engine? That means not only does it help with SEO, but YouTube
also has some of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. Also important, the platform has high
conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising. If you offer a complex product or service, having great
videos can help sway prospects into a purchase. Creating video isn’t always easy or free, but the benefits and the
statistics far outweigh the cost of not participating at all.
So what can you do on YouTube? Not only can you host original content and have channel subscribers, it’s a
great place to syndicate content and to consider advertising, including interstitial advertising — short clips that
appear before a video. Approximately 20% of the people who start your video will leave after the first 10
seconds. All the more reason to consider allocating resources to create great content.
I mentioned Instagram already, but let’s give it a longer look. It’s owned by Facebook, but the audiences and
purposes are a bit different. It’s the third largest social media platform and the fastest


growing. Instagram is a photo- and video-based social network, and users follow individuals and brands to be
delighted by interesting visuals. Instagram is a younger network, with 90% of its audience under the age of 35,
but even that is shifting as more and more individuals adopt the platform. While the primary functionality is
sharing photos and videos, there is another feature rising in popularity. Like the Snapchat platform, Instagram
Stories enable the sharing of quick, “instant” photos and videos, often with fun filters and visual features. Stories
disappear after twenty-four hours for viewers but remain stored in an archive for you to see or repost again.
You’ll want to convert a personal Instagram account to an Instagram business profile to include a phone number
and address in your bio and enable the “shop” button. And to do that, you’re required to have a Facebook
Business page, which you will also need to take advantage of advertising on this channel.
Instagram is important because it has very deep engagement, especially for brands. Over 80% of users follow at
least one brand account. Forrester tells us that engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than
Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter. That means advertising on Instagram
is going to be even more successful for your business. Sounds like a great reason to use Instagram, doesn’t it?
Let’s move on to Twitter, the popular microblogging network. Twitter is the ultimate by-the-minute news
network. It’s a place where you can see what’s happening in that very moment around the world, whether it’s
someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching a football game in Boston. Users share messages of up to
280 characters, called “tweets,” which can include photos, videos, links, and animated .gifs. To give you a sense
of the volume of information shared, there are more than 500 million tweets sent every day.
Twitter is a fantastic place for you to discover what’s trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners,
and prospects. You should be sharing content frequently — more frequently than on other platforms, in fact — and
you should be engaging regularly with your audience. Twitter reports that 80% of their advertisers’ inbound
social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It’s also a place where people frequently express both
pleasure and dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a channel your business can’t afford to
ignore. Twitter also owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over 350,000 hours of live video are
streamed on the network every day.
There are several forms of advertising on Twitter, including ads in the news stream, with trending topics,
promoted profiles, and a lot more. But one of the best uses of Twitter is the organic networking you can do
directly with your audience, engaging in conversation that helps build loyalty and trust.
LinkedIn is the platform most business-to-business, or B2B, marketers are familiar with. It used to be a network
primarily used for recruiting, but these days it’s also becoming a platform to find the latest news and to stay
networked with people all over the world. Now users can share status updates much in the same way as they do
with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared, liked, and commented on. There are several
reasons to use LinkedIn. It’s a great way to look up individuals you might be meeting with, or to find out more
about a prospect you’re interested in reaching out to. Additionally, it’s a great place to build thought leadership,
to offer value through targeted advertising, to network in groups, and to share content that will drive links back
into your website properties.
Pinterest is a channel many people think of as only for business-to-consumer, or B2C, but there are a myriad of
ways B2B companies can take advantage of the platform. If you aren’t familiar with Pinterest, it’s essentially a
series of shared, often thematic bulletin boards where users can “pin” images, video, and links that resonate with
them. What is unique to Pinterest is the average life of a pin is over three months, whereas on Twitter, a post’s life
is a matter of minutes and on Facebook, maybe an hour. Pinterest pins build SEO with referral traffic — referral


traffic that can directly turn into leads and sales. And while women used to make up the biggest audience for
Pinterest, that is changing. 40% of new signups are now from men. So, how can your company use Pinterest?
Create a board with links to your products and services. Or a board with your blog posts. Or a board
demonstrating your company’s thought leadership and awareness. Your HR team can benefit from a board
detailing great things about working at your company. Consider creating boards for case studies, employee
stories, white papers, or videos. The possibilities are truly endless.
Snapchat is a channel that lost a bit of market share to Instagram when Instagram Stories launched, essentially
copying the Snapchat business model. But it still has a strong user base, and it’s moving into areas like
augmented reality, which may have exciting applications. Like Instagram Stories, Snapchat stories disappear after
24 hours. There are a bevy of filters users can employ to liven up video and images. Today, brands can advertise
with stories more dynamic and longer lasting than personal snaps. The Snapchat audience skews young, with its
largest demographic between the ages of 12-24.
Whew! There’s a lot to learn about all of the social media channels! Do you need to be on all of them? Maybe
not, but consider that not everyone gets their news and information in the same way. You might read online
newspapers while I am looking at trending topics on Twitter. Everyone consumes information differently, in the
time and place of their choosing. You want to be found in as many of those places as possible.
But the good news is that you can start small and focused, then build as your team builds and your resource pool
grows. And don’t be afraid to create profiles and test out the channels! They can often seem more overwhelming
than they are, and once you dip your toe in the pool, the water gets warmer and warmer.
3: The Power of Social Listening
The rise of social media is arguably one of the most important advances in modern history. It has the power to
influence music and art, to change and shape governments, and it’s very important to businesses — to connect
sellers with buyers all over the world.
But why is that? Because of the power of one-to-one relationships and the incredible reach now available from
the one to the many. Through digital and social media, you have the ability to directly reach your customers and
prospects in unprecedented ways, with greater reach and more specific targeting than ever before. And yet,
those same customers and prospects wield a great deal of power themselves. They choose when and where they
want to respond to your marketing messages. They also have the ability to be vocal with their opinions about
your brand and your products.
That’s why social listening is crucial to your digital strategy. Social listening is how you track, analyze, and
respond to conversations across the internet. By monitoring social media discussions about your industry, your
company, and your products and customers, you can shape the direction of the conversation. It will help you get
a leg up on your competition and inform both brand and business decisions. Done right, it will even help you
save both time and money.
You can do social listening with free tools such as Google Alerts, Hashtagify, Social Mention, or Twitter’s
Tweetdeck. There are also a variety of paid social listening tools available, such as HubSpot’s social media tools,
which are available as part of HubSpot’s paid offering.


There are eight key benefits to doing social listening:
The first benefit is that it gives you the opportunity to measure the performance of your social media, web, and
even to some extent, your conversations and offline content strategy. You can measure the results from
marketing and sales campaigns, including mentions, comments, shares, reshares, and the volume and sentiment
of the conversation around your content. Did people love your last blog post or did it ruffle feathers? Do videos
resonate better than static images? Did your customers share content to their social channels from the last email
you sent to your mailing list? Once you discover what types of content work best, you might consider how to use
similar content in targeted ads. Social metrics should be a crucial part of evaluating your content strategy as a
whole.
Second, social listening helps you manage reputation. If that blog post did ruffle feathers and you suddenly have
a Tweetstorm on your hands, understanding the full extent of the conversation is key. If you’re aware of the
conversation early on, you can respond in a timely manner and potentially turn the tide of the conversation. If
your customers are complaining about your company or product, you can respond, publicly, how you’ll make it
right.
Third, social listening helps you identify your biggest fans and influencers. This is important because people trust
word of mouth more than they do brand conversations. In fact, a recent Harris Poll discovered that 67% of
people are more likely to purchase a product if a friend or family member mentioned it in social media. Once
you’ve identified your super-fans, thank and reward them for their loyalty and support. Engage with and involve
them in conversations, content, and your campaigns. Leverage their word of mouth to increase the reach of your
messages.
Fourth, social listening can help you discover new product ideas or ways to enhance features on existing
products. Listen to what your customers and prospects are talking about to discover their pain points, and make
shifts to address them with better product features or services. You can identify some of the biggest detractors
and invite them to meet with your product team to share their ideas. You can also look for gaps and weaknesses
in your competition’s products and up the ante with your own development schedule.
I just mentioned the fifth benefit of social listening: Watching the competition. You can learn a great deal from
monitoring your competitors, ranging from how their content performs with their audience, to how happy their
customers are and what the world at large is saying about them.
Sixth, social listening can lead to new business opportunities. Monitoring can help you identify gaps in your
current industry offerings. Are your customers and prospects asking for something that isn’t yet provided? Is
there an underutilized sector of your industry that your company might be able to service? You can also identify
trends early on and shift direction to take advantage of those opportunities.
The seventh way that social listening can make a difference for your business is by helping you find leads. For
example, some companies look for unhappy customers of a competitor and reach out with an offer to help. If the
company is responsive when other companies are not, then switching may often be an easy decision for the
customer.
The eighth and final way you can use social listening to make a difference is to help you determine how to set
strategic benchmarks for your future. Including listening metrics in your strategy — metrics like volume of


engagement, sentiment, shares of your content, mentions, and more — will give you the baseline you need to set
better social media and business goals for the quarters and years ahead.
There are two modes of listening to think about: monitoring and engagement.
Monitoring is the method of actively looking for mentions and conversations that pertain to your brand, your
products, your hashtags, your employees, your competitors, and your customers.
Engagement is the step you take to have conversations with individuals talking about your industry, brand,
products, and services.
If you’re in the early stages of developing your digital promotion strategy, you may only need to be monitoring
social media. But as your company grows — or, in fact, to help directly drive that growth — you’ll need to consider
how you’ll engage with your customers. In the ideal world, you’ll monitor and engage your audience on all social
channels, but when starting out, perhaps you might decide to only engage on Facebook or Twitter, depending
on which network your buyer persona tends to frequent. Just make sure you’re adequately directing your
audience in all channels to the best way they can have a conversation with you, whether it’s directing them to a
specific social channel, a web page, or to an email address. You don’t want to appear unavailable to an audience
that’s trying to reach out to you.
There you have it! Social media listening is one of the best ways to get a jump on your competitors and to build
loyalty with your customers. It really is one of the most important strategies any business can take to understand
what the world thinks about its brand.
4: Social Media Content: The Basics
At HubSpot Academy, we talk a lot about content, and finding ways to provide ongoing value to your audience
through content that is meaningful. I’m sure you’ve even heard the phrase that “content is king.” That’s because
content is at the heart of the inbound methodology. It’s used in every stage to attract, convert, close, and delight.
But, in the world of social media, there are really two main things that matter: the content, plus how individuals
on the network interact with that content.
There are a number of different types of content specific to social media, many of which can be used on a variety
of channels. Let’s break it all down.
Text used to be the mainstay of social media, and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were text-heavy channels, but
in recent years, they’ve shifted to becoming more visually prevalent. In fact, Cisco reports that by 2021, 82
percent of all consumer IP traffic will be video.
Visual images usually consist of, but are not limited to, photos, infographics, animated gifs, and illustrations.
These days, your typical smartphone camera is often all you need to take photos. The possibilities are limitless.
Product shots, office and team highlights, conference selfies, customer spotlights, and more. You can share more
than a single photo in many cases. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, you can create galleries and use
photo carousels. Twitter also allows for multiple photo uploads per post.


Animated .gifs can take you one step beyond the standard photo, giving you the ability to convey emotion and
grab attention, all at the same time. They can also help you demonstrate complex concepts quickly and easily, as
in this example from SAP in which they explain how AI will change the world.
[https://twitter.com/SAP/status/942779031136751616
You can make animated gifs in Photoshop or online at a variety sites, of which giphy.com is the most popular.
In 2017 we saw the rise of Stories, a type of content that got its start with Snapchat and that Facebook copied for
its platform and for Instagram. Essentially, stories are quick bits of content, both video and photo, often with fun
filters and “stickers” that disappear after 24 hours. They’re less posed, more entertaining, more casual, and tend
to be more conversational than other types of content found on those channels. And guess what? Viewers love
them. Facebook tells us that more than 250 million people a day are viewing Instagram stories, and the average
viewing time is a mind-boggling 24-32 minutes! Stories give brands the chance to share fast content that is often
more economical to produce and delivers incredible brand awareness. When users view your story, they can
choose to swipe up or down to “see more,” which can then take them to an offer or your website, so it’s a great
way to drive traffic. Polls are also a fantastic way to drive engagement through Instagram Stories.
Video is the next big content bucket for us to look at. Did you know that video company Animoto says that four
times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, and even more
startling, one in four consumers actually lose interest in a company if it doesn’t have video? And when it comes to
product demos, four out of five people believe that they are helpful.
Video can be used on every single social media site that I’ve mentioned. In short, you shouldn’t ignore it. Live
video is also becoming more common, and you can broadcast instantly from Instagram, Facebook, Periscope
(which is owned by Twitter), YouTube, and a variety of channels such as Livestream. Video is not always cheap or
easy to create, but you would be surprised at how often it is. Consumers appreciate brands being authentic on
video, and sometimes that’s easier with a smartphone camera than it is with an entire studio.
Now let’s go over some other types of content that have the potential to help your business jump ahead of the
pack.
First, there are quizzes, surveys, and polls. You can engage your audience directly in Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter with polls. Check out this example from Evernote:
This helps you build brand awareness and more importantly, affinity. Plus, along the way you’ll receive some
valuable insights into your audience that can help you boost other marketing and product efforts.
Next is real-time marketing, which B2C companies have embraced, developing content on the fly for local,
national, or global events happening online or offline. Doing so helps your brand be part of larger consumer
conversations, boosting both brand recognition and engagement. You’ll sometimes also hear real-time
marketing referred to as newsjacking. Doing this kind of marketing requires a hyper focus on a specific event
using social listening. You’ll also need to be able to generate content quickly, like Oreo and their marketing
agency did for the Superbowl in 2013 when the lights in the stadium went out.


In some cases, you can anticipate content ahead of time and insert your audience into the conversation, such as
sporting events, new television shows, holidays, or fun designated days such as National French Toast day.
This brings us to two types of content that you actually don’t generate yourself — influencer content and user-
generated content.
We love celebrities and give them enormous power to sway our opinions. And when they share content, people
listen. Influencers are individuals that have huge, highly influential audiences, often on a global or national scale,
such as a movie star or other celebrity. However, social influencers could be individuals who began as bloggers
or content creators in a certain field or on a certain platform and built an audience around their amazing ideas
and visual imagery to amass a huge following. More and more brands are finding that these types of content
producers are more advantageous to work with than a celebrity — both from a cost and reach perspective.
There are a few ways to find influencers including working with companies such as FanBase, TapInfluence,
Influenz, Speakr, or Hypefactory who will book individuals to develop or share your material. You can also build
relationships with budding influencers who are creating amazing content and can help you stand out among the
crowd.
And finally, there’s the holy grail of social media content, user-generated content, often referred to as UGC. What
is itm and why is it so important? UGC is content such as blog posts, tweets, posts, videos, images, or reviews
developed by a fan of your company or your products and shared on a social channel. It could be a video
unboxing a product, a photo of a fan interacting with your company swag or designing other kinds of content to
show their adoration for your products or the work you do. It’s the best kind of social content for a reason. 76% of
individuals surveyed by content company Olapic said they trusted content shared by "average" people more
than by brands. Here’s a great example of UGC developed by the team at Interware in Mexico, sharing their
excitement of completing a certification. We loved this photo and the enthusiasm of this team. But this photo
does more than make us feel good — it shows others that these individuals appreciate and are excited about
learning with HubSpot Academy. It’s a strong endorsement for our brand, one that potentially carries far more
weight than any advertisement we could devise on our own.
You can influence the creation of user-generated content by offering rewards, contests or giveaways, for
example a photo or design contest. Or, create a quiz and have people share their results. And finally, you can get
creative with hashtags too, like how RedBull did with their #PutACanOnIt campaign in which fans added RedBull
cans to all manner of things in their photos then shared those photos on social media.
Hashtags are helpful for search, but they also enable the curation of specific types of content. You can create a
branded hashtag to track a company effort or specific campaigns. If you’ve never created a hashtag before, it’s
simple, and you need no tools to do so. Simply put the pound sign (#) before the word or phrase. Don’t use any
punctuation, including spaces between words. For example, our HR team uses one called #HubSpotLife to
showcase our fun culture.
As things continue to shift and change in the world of social media, there’s bound to be new forms of emerging
content. Don’t be afraid to experiment with content types and different platforms, and also with the best times to
share that content. There are a million studies that point to certain times being better for different types of
content than others. The challenge with all those studies, however, is that the algorithms for social channels


change regularly. What works well one week might not the next. A better bet is to dive deep into your social
analytics to determine what content is really resonating and to do A/B testing to fine tune your process.
Now you know the basics to developing meaningful content for your social media audiences.
5: The Social Media Audit: The Key to Understanding Your Success With Social
Media
You have an idea of who your buyer is, you’ve figured out what channels to use and have started posting on your
social media channels. But how do you know if what you are doing is working? Are you posting the right content?
Is your audience responding? Is there a return on investment, or ROI, in your social campaigns? Or, are you even
investing in the right things? That’s where social metrics come in.
Let’s start by learning how to look at all of your data as a whole and set up some benchmarks for future reporting.
You’ll want to conduct a social media audit — a hard look at the data from all your social accounts and the social
conversations about your brand and your competitors.
Conducting a social media audit will help you:
• Develop or adjust a social media strategy that aligns to specific, actionable business objectives and goals.
• Discover trends you can use to create or modify social media campaigns.
• Receive valuable insight into customer sentiment and perception of your brand.
• Provide executives and your team a look into what is or is not working so you can manage and justify
social media spend.
An audit gives you the opportunity to see the ebb and flow of your audience engagement, content performance,
and what’s working and what’s not. It’s a way for you to put your thumb on the pulse of everything you are doing
in social.
As part of your audit, you’re going to be looking at a whole bunch of data. There are a variety of ways to record
all this information, but many social managers find that developing a tabbed spreadsheet is the way to go. It will
be helpful if you have a social analytics tool such as Netbase, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon, or another type of
metrics tool that can aggregate your data, but if not, you can manually pull the data and compile it from each
channel’s social media metrics. Some of these metrics are easy to acquire by going to the social networks
themselves. Facebook has business insights and Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube all have
analytics you can explore.
If you use the HubSpot social tools, you can use reports to analyze some of what is needed, namely your social
website traffic and your content post data.
If you are just starting out with social media, you might not need to conduct an audit yet, but understanding what
goes into an audit will help you set up a framework that can help you capture much of this data on a weekly or
monthly basis, which will save you time in the long run.


Let’s dig in. The metrics you need can be found in a variety of places, whether it’s in Google Analytics, on the
social network’s main pages, or within the account, in the analytics sections for each channel. A spreadsheet can
help you keep track of all this information. Note that the metrics for each social media channel will be slightly
different based on the available numbers you can measure, but there are a few commonalities that you should
look at:
• You’ll want to start by listing your owned channels — those social handles that your company owns. The
bigger your business, the more likely you are to have many channels.
• Then list who the internal owners of the channels are and who has the passwords or who has been
granted access. This will help you know if you need additional governance for your channels. For
example, are there people who have access to Facebook that no longer should?
• Also record how many followers you have on your official social channels. You’ll want to keep track of this
metric moving forward.
• Next, you might want to explore your non-owned channels and followers: Are there channels that are
illegally using your assets and logos (and potentially taking a share of your followers?). Are there fan
channels that co-opt your branding? Should you consider filing take-down notices for some of these
channels, or find better ways to interact with those accounts? If there are channels that are co-opting
your logo, name, or other brand visuals, you can report them to the individual networks for removal.
• Then consider the profiles for each channel: Do all your social channels have a similar look and feel?
Does your profile imagery (such as your covers, icons, and avatars) adhere to your company brand
guidelines? Is your tone and voice consistent across the channels?
• Let’s move on to content performance: This is a big one, and you’ll want to analyze each channel
individually. Afterward, you can also use this data to determine if some of that content might resonate
differently or better in other channels.
Some of the metrics you should track include:
o Best- and worst-performing posts

o Posts with the most engagement (things like comments and likes)
o Post frequency
o What types of content have the best and worst performance

o The publish time of posts that have the best engagement
o Video views
o Click-through to content
o Post reach and impressions
o Number of Twitter mentions
o Effective keywords
o Response rate (are you responding in a timely manner?)


o Sentiment (note that some tools enable you to measure positive and negative sentiment)
• Don’t forget about advertising: If you do a lot of social media advertising, you might want to conduct a
separate, in-depth audit using the analytics in the ad tools found within the networks where you’re
advertising. You’ll want to track similar metrics to the above for content performance, but also look at
budgets, ROI, a/b test results, and areas for opportunity.
• You’ll also want to analyze your competition. Go to each of your competitors’ social media channels and
take a look at how they use their networks. How are your competitors using social media? How many
followers do they have compared to you? How is their content performing? What types of content
perform the best? How do they engage with their followers? By examining the competition, you can get
a sense of how you stack up, but also where you might have gaps that you need to close.
Seeing all of this information in one place is a powerful way to analyze the effectiveness of your content and
tactics. You can identify weaknesses in your approach, determine what is working well so you can do more of the
same, stop ineffective programs, or understand if you need more resources to do a better job. Even better, now
you have the metrics you need to argue for those additional resources.
Conducting an audit might take some time, but the value it will provide can help you do a few different things:
• Develop new benchmarks and KPIs
• Determine the best mix of content on the right channels at the right times
• Identify opportunities to better engage with customers
• Adjust budgets and calculate ROI
• Identify how you need to make resource changes to boost social media efforts
Be prepared to conduct an audit of this depth every 12-18 months at minimum — more often if you don’t have
strong metrics you regularly track. With the rapidly changing social media landscape, you’ll want to always have
an eye on how your efforts are making an impact.
Now step back and take a look at this overall audit. Consider your buyer persona and your business goals. What
are the metrics that your executives will care about most? Pull those details out and prepare a shorter, more
condensed version that you can deliver on a weekly or monthly basis.
There you have it — all the basics of measuring your social media, a step that can be a game-changer for your
business.
6: Taking your Inbound strategy to the next level with digital marketing
Let’s talk about how to integrate your social media strategy with your other inbound marketing campaigns. It’s
not enough to share content on your social media channels; you also have to figure out how to build your
audience in the places where they may see your content.
The first step is to consider all of the locations where you can include links back to your social media channels.
This could include: adding your Twitter handle to your email signature and to presentation templates; including


LinkedIn on your business cards; adding links to your printed collateral or your website footer; and even adding
your company’s social handles to the bottom of your email newsletters.
Those are the most basic places where you should include links back to your social channels, but there are
deeper ways to integrate social media into your campaigns.
Let’s consider your website. In addition to your contact us page and your header or footer, you may want to
include social sharing links on blog articles or on product descriptions. For example, B2C companies may want
to consider adding Pinterest links so people can easily pin and share individual products. You can also embed
YouTube or enable Facebook live videos on your landing pages with an embed code. Single sign-on, or the
ability to log into websites and accounts with a social network is also something to think about. There are a
variety of services that enable single sign-on, which is not only convenient for your website visitors but also gives
you deeper insight into demographics and data for those individuals, which is useful for tailoring future
campaigns and advertisements.
Advertising is another way to boost visitors to your social channels. In Facebook and Twitter, you can promote
your profile directly, highlighting it to a wide audience to gain followers. But also consider how you can include
social media in your ads themselves to gain followers across different channels.
In addition to including social links in your email footer, email marketing campaigns are also an ideal place to
include links to social. For example, in your next newsletter consider including a campaign in
which you ask people to share a piece of content with a tag back, or to respond to a question by tagging your
business handle with an answer in photo or video format.
Also, make sure your sales people are empowered with the right messaging and tools to connect their prospects
with your social media channels — think business cards and email signatures, as well as digital and print collateral.
Prospects that follow a company’s social channels are far more likely to convert into customers, especially if
they’re seeing brand messages that resonate alongside the salesperson’s own social business activities. Have
your sales people share a link to a video on YouTube or to content hosted on Facebook and Twitter.
There’s one last item for your consideration — ask your followers directly to follow you on other social networks.
You’d be surprised at how many people will be happy to follow you on Instagram if you tweet out the link, or will
connect with you on Pinterest following a post on Facebook.
Building a network of touchpoints between your marketing, sales, and customer campaigns and all your social
media channels will help build affinity, loyalty, and word of mouth among your customers and prospects.

Transcript: Developing a Conversational Growth Strategy
Video 1: Why is Conversational Growth Important to Inbound Marketing?
Before we dig into strategy, let’s take a moment to define what a marketing conversation is and how it fits in with
the other moving pieces of your inbound marketing strategy.
So what is a conversation?
A conversation is defined as an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas between two or
more parties. When you think about conversations today, however, these interactions happen over a variety of
channels. If you want to chat with someone, you can meet in person, talk over the phone or through a video chat,
via email, using a platform like Facebook Messenger, over even through social platforms like Twitter or
Instagram. You’ve got quite a range of options.
With this in mind, let’s expand the definition to: a conversation is an interactive communication between two or
more parties. And did you happen to notice a common theme in the ways people communicate today? A
majority of them involve technology.
This interplay between technology and conversations is changing the way people are choosing to
communicate. According to a recent study by Facebook, one-to-one messaging is becoming a preferred way to
communicate across all generations. 56% of people would rather message than call customer service. Customers
are expecting more information, more personalization, quicker. Today, customers decide how they want to
engage with a business.
So what does this mean for your inbound marketing strategy?
By using channels that deliver or simulate a conversation with your website visitors, you can deliver your content
in a consistent and relationship-focused way. This can help your prospects feel valued because they’re chatting
one-on-one with your company. Your relationships with your visitors build over time as you deliver the right
information to the right person at the right time, every time. Each interaction will be transactional in nature, as
most conversations are, so make sure you’re gathering your visitors’ information progressively and in a non-
interruptive way.
For example, if you’re using a chat bot, you can collect information over a series of conversations rather than
asking for it all at once. Instead, you can break down that information collection into a series of conversations that
maintain a level of contextual relevance for the visitor without them feeling like they are being mined for
information. As marketers, data has value. But as we collect information, we need to ensure visitors either feel
like they are getting more value out of the information exchange or that they aren’t really parting with any of their
personal information at all.
And as marketer, that’s what having a conversational growth strategy is all about — catering to your website
audience and ensuring they can connect and engage with your company using the channels they know and love.
Think of the content on your site as a present for someone you care about. You’ve spent a lot of thought, time,
and resources making sure it’s just right. Now, you need to think about the best way to deliver that present to the
right person. If it arrives too early, it could ruin the effect. If it arrives too late, you’ve missed the opportunity to
make the right impact. By focusing on the conversations, you give yourself more flexibility in the timing and
delivery of your website experience.
By diversifying when and where people can interact with you and your team, you're enabling all website visitors
to have experience they want. Whether they’re choosing to interact via social media, messaging apps, or natively
on your site, delivering content through multiple channels means you can continue to delight and optimize for
your audience. The result? Your company is seen as helpful, human, and holistic.
To quote Justin Champion, an inbound professor here at HubSpot Academy, “content strategy is the long-term
planning, creation, and management of content marketing efforts.” With this in mind, your company’s
conversational growth strategy is driven by the goal of delivering the right message, to the right person, with the
right information, on the right channel, at the right time, every single time. When integrated with promotion,
conversion, and lead nurturing that is also conversational, you’ve got a pretty well-rounded inbound marketing
strategy.
Video 2: What Are the Steps to Implementing a Conversational Growth Strategy
To help you learn more about how to put a conversational growth strategy into practice, we reached out to
Connor Cirillo, a conversations marketing manager here at HubSpot, and asked him the following question:
What are the steps to implementing a conversational growth strategy?
Hi everyone, Connor here. There are three steps to implementing a conversational growth strategy for your
business: think, plan, and grow. Let’s dig into each one of those a bit more.
First, there’s the think step. Spend time thinking about the most impactful conversations your company has with
its website visitors. You may even find it helpful to sit and write out every way your business interacts with people.
As you identify the areas where you build the strongest relationships with your visitors, keep in mind the
following criteria that each conversation should meet:
One, It should be repeatable. Any conversational messaging you implement should be based on a frequent and
popular interaction. For example, most businesses get asked the same few support questions over and over
again. This type of repetition shows that automating and optimizing for this interaction could improve a visitor’s
overall experience.
Next, it needs to be predictable. Any conversation you implement will need a defined start, middle, and end.
When you’re using that interaction to qualify a lead, there are specific pieces of information that you’ll need to
make the most out of that interaction. Much like a conversation that happens in person, you want to make sure a
conversation online is structured to end when it’s appropriate.
Finally, A conversation should be designed to be impactful. Every conversation should add some form of
tangible value to your business. For example, helping people understand your pricing model moves them
further down the funnel.
If one of the interactions you listed checks these three boxes, it's a great place for a conversation.
Second, there’s the plan step. Based on the criteria above, you’ve started to identify the most impactful use cases
and areas to implement conversations. Now, work backwards and lay out every piece of information you'd need
from a prospect in each type of exchange. Roleplay how the conversation might go if you had this interaction in
real life. Write down what you say, as the direction of the conversation may surprise you. And when you’re
designing the conversation, try to plan ahead for all the places that prospects may stray away from the ideal path
of the conversation flow. Challenge yourself to find ways that you could steer a visitor back on track if the
conversation goes off in an unexpected direction. Writing in a conversational tone can feel tough at first, but
you’ll get better the more you practice. Great conversations will occur if you pay attention to the details.
And third, there’s the grow step. Conversations are not a "set-and-forget" experience. You need to iterate and
optimize them over time. If possible, use the script you wrote and speak with prospects yourself. You may find
they answer in ways that you couldn’t predict beforehand. This exercise, which I call "the puppeteer," is the best
way to work toward a delightful experience. Customers will tell you in their own words what they want out of a
conversation with you. This is a departure from the old ways of guessing what visitors want and hoping you're
right. The more people you can chat with, the quicker you're able to adapt the conversation. You already talk
with people every day. A great conversational growth strategy is about taking this skill and applying it to your
website experience.
The think, plan, and grow steps will help you identify the conversations that will make the most impact on your
users. While each conversation may be unique to each visitor, you’ll also be able to start to design the desired
flow of every interaction and what information your team will need to collect in order for it to be successful.
Overall, conversations are just like any other element of your inbound marketing strategy. You’ll need to be
experimented on and optimized over time. Doing so will ensure you’re continuing to create delightful
experiences for your visitors throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Video 3: What to Consider When Comparing Different Messaging Channels
To help you learn more about how to put a conversational growth strategy into practice, we reached out to Dylan
Sellberg, a product manager here at HubSpot, and asked him the following question: What should you consider
when comparing different messaging channels?
Hey there. I’m Dylan. When you’re comparing messaging channels, you’ll want to consider three things: one
where your prospects are, two how they want to communicate, and three what channels work best for your team.
Let’s explore each of these in a little bit more detail.
First, let’s consider where your prospects are. Think about which of your channels are generating the most
website traffic and if it’s possible to add interactivity to that experience through messaging apps. Facebook
Messenger is the obvious channel here, but also consider other options like WhatsApp or WeChat. Finally,
consider directly asking your prospects where they prefer to communicate. By knowing where your prospects
are and customers prefer to communicate, you’ll be able to start developing a strategy to meet their needs.
The second thing to consider is how your prospects want to communicate with your business. This often
coincides with the buyer’s journey and what a visitor is trying to accomplish when they come to your website. In
the awareness stage, visitors are looking for educational resources. A chatbot might be one of the best
conversational tools to consider because it could speed up how quickly someone can find the information that
they’re looking for.
On the other hand, for visitors in the consideration stage who are looking to find out more about your business,
consider using an always-on channel like Messenger or WhatsApp. Finally, for your visitors in the decision stage
who are looking to get in touch with your team directly, having access to a live chat option may be the most
useful. The exact options you choose are up to you, however, you should directly coincide them with the needs
of your buyer personas.
Finally, make sure the channel works for your team. If you have a small team who is not always online, maybe on-
site chat isn’t right for you. And, conversely, if your team thrives on one-on-one customer communications, it
might be a good idea to stay away from app-based channels as they can feel a little bit less personal than a
conversation with an agent.
Using the insight you’ve gained from these three areas — where your visitors are, how they prefer to
communicate, and what channel work best for your team — will help you make the most informed decisions when
it comes to implementing a conversational growth strategy. Not every channel or every messaging app will solve
the needs for every business, so you want to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success by making data-
informed decisions. With this in mind, start exploring the opportunities of conversational channels today.
Video 4: Why Is It Important to Select the Right Conversational Marketing Channel
Hey there, I’m Courtney with HubSpot Academy. Let’s have a conversation about conversations with your buyer
personas.
In our day-to-day lives, we have more conversations than we can think to count. But we all know the frustration
when we’re trying to have a conversation but in the wrong place.
Matching the right buyer persona with the right conversation is how you’re going to show value to your personas
and help them grow -- in turn helping you grow.
Having the right conversation with your buyer personas means selecting the right channel to have that
conversation on.
There isn’t anything more frustrating than having a great conversation but in the wrong channel. Take for
example, the other day when I was trying to have a conversation with my mom over Facebook Messenger. Sadly I
got no reply. It wasn't the right channel, but when I sent an email, a reply came right back.
As inbound professionals, you want to be conversational with all the types of interactions you have with your
prospects and customers. From emails you send to messaging over live chat. Delivering the right information at
the right time on the right channel is where you’re providing the most human and helpful experience and, in
turn, creating the most value for your prospects.
To review, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some
select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Your persona’s behaviors give you insight into which channels they prefer to have conversations on. These
behaviors can include everything from the pages they view to the times during the day they open email and even
their un-engagement behavior when they do not click or open emails.
With this information, you’ll then be able to structure the right conversation to have with them. Buyer personas
are key in the world of inbound because inbound marketing is focused on attracting your customers through
relevant and helpful content. By structuring the right conversation, you can add value to your customer at every
stage in the buyer’s journey.
So how do you make sure you choose the right conversation for the right buyer persona?
We’re going to look at three different conversation channels — email, messenger, and live chat — and some
examples of how to match a buyer persona with a conversational channel.
A study done by HubSpot exploring global content trend data looked at how you can match buyer personas with
the right conversational channel.
For example, the study found that buyer personas who are millennials consume more video than Gen X and
Baby Boomers, who prefer more news articles, research reports, and email content. This means that more
traditional content still has interested readers — you just need to know if those readers match the personas you’re
trying to target.
The study also found that other buyer personas, such as baby boomers, communicate more via email. The data
shows that baby boomers prefer email by 33% vs. only 17% of millennials who prefer email as a communication
channel.
The key is to balance content and conversational channels and keep in mind, people’s behaviors change, and
just because your audience didn’t like video two years ago, doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in it today.
HubSpot also found that consumers’ changing preferences does not mean that brands should abandon any one
channel because of the broad range of content preferences among consumers in the current state.
Each channel will serve up information differently, which is great, because not all of your personas are the same.
Having these different channels allows you to structure the conversation the right way for each persona.
Each persona will probably have a different ideal channel, but your overall conversational growth strategy will
need to bounce between channels, depending on the user.
In fact, when HubSpot asked about what people do to proactively learn more about a brand, the top channel was
still the brand’s website, across all age ranges. While offsite platforms such as social media are critical to gaining
consumer awareness of a brand, when someone is ready to learn more, the company website is still an important
source of information.
It comes down to bringing content and context together. A great conversation provides information to your
buyer persona with the right context.
Building a conversational growth strategy around the correct buyer persona helps you provide them with value
as well as grow your business. Remember, having the right conversation with the right person is the key to
building success with inbound marketing.
Transcript: Understanding Conversion Strategy
Video 1: Why are conversions important to inbound marketing?

To review, a conversion is defined as a moment when a website visitor takes a desired action. Ideally, this will occur
throughout the visitor’s lifecycle. In this way, the inbound methodology is less about a visitor’s distinct start and end point.
Instead, think about the inbound methodology as the process of adding value at every stage in your customer's buying
journey. Conversion, and the information gathered at those points, is about knowing who’s getting value from your resources.
Understanding who you’re talking to allows you to continue to supplement their online and buying experience in a human,
helpful, and holistic way.
So besides helping you gather information about potential leads, opportunities, and returning customers who engage with
your content, why is it important to keep an eye on your conversions? The answer, in short, is data.
Conversion is one of the marketing areas you’ll encounter that’s intrinsically tied with data. That’s because conversions are
only tangible if they can be measured. Think of conversion data as a way to incrementally check on the health of your strategy
and inform you if and when there needs to be changes. It allows you to ask your inbound marketing strategy and areas like
your content strategy, conversation promotion, and lead nurturing efforts fundamental questions like, is this working as
expected? Or, is there anything I could do to improve this process? By starting to answer these questions with data-backed
answers, you’re taking speculation out of the equation. Numbers, after all, don’t lie.
Conversions also allow you to start thinking outside the box when it comes to how you’re interacting with your website
visitors. Traditional landing page or blog post conversion paths, for example, can be static resources that need to be updated
every now and again but still manage to facilitate a one-to-many value add for your website audience.
Designing touchless conversion paths can be your best friend, especially if you’re thinking of scaling your business. These
types of conversion opportunities, when done correctly, never remove the personalization from the experience. The correct
use of brand voice and tone on areas like your forms, landing pages, blog posts, buttons, and pop-ups, coupled with
optimization processes, can help ensure you’re still tailoring your content to speak directly to the visitor.
As technology continues to advance, the way people choose to interact is likewise evolving. According to a recent study by
Facebook, one-to-one messaging is becoming a preferred way to communicate across generations. 56% of people would
rather message than call customer service. This demonstrates the beginning of a paradigm shift for marketers and sales
representatives. How do you continue to automate and drive impact in one-to-many interactions while still creating a
personalized experience?
Experimenting with different formats and tools, from forms to chatbots, is a great way to look at the types of interactions and
conversion points that work best for your buyer personas. You'll discover some methods and conversion paths that don't
perfectly align with what you're trying to accomplish. On the flip side, you could uncover new ways of interacting with your
website visitors and making their experience that much better.
Video 2: How to build an effective conversion path

You can use conversions to check on the progress of your inbound marketing strategy and ensure you’re aligning with your
online audience in a helpful, human, and holistic way. Conversion paths are just that — a path. They’re steps carefully crafted
to lead your website visitor through your site, to help them interact with the variety of content at their disposal.
The first step in building a conversion path is to create awareness. You need an element to attract visitors to your offer. This
can be flashy, like a red button or a pop-up form, or subtle, like a little chat icon in the lower right corner of your homepage.
Your website visitor is coming to your website page for a reason. They may even have a specific question. The first conversion
tool you use to attract their attention needs to show them you have the answer, or at least showcase you’ve got value to add
to their experience.
This bring us to step two: Determine your end point. If you’re linking to and redirecting your visitors directly to a PDF via a CTA
button, then that’s a single-step conversion path. Often, however, there’s an ultimate goal for your website visitor to
complete a series of steps. If you’re creating a multi-step process, where is your conversion path attempting to guide the
visitor? What is the most important action that they take? Identifying your end goal early on can be critical to the long-term
success of your conversion path and any future improvements it might need.
If you’re using the traditional landing page conversion path, you’re probably looking for more contacts to complete that final
step of filling out a form than just clicking the initial button that attracted them on the page. But this will vary depending on
the tools at your disposal and which ones you want to use. A button could take visitors to a meetings link, for example. A pop-
up notification could take visitors to a form. A simple chatbot could bring someone to a knowledge base of resources. The
possibilities are endless.
The third step in building your conversion path is to chart your course. You have an element that kicks off the conversion path,
and you’ve identified where you want the visitor to end up. Now you need to design the experience that occurs in between.
Think about ways to create the best flow between elements on your site, and really tie the experience together. Don’t be
afraid to experiment with different combinations of tools as you work out what’s best for your buyer personas. Landing pages
might work best for certain offers, but you might find methods like messaging apps or live chat are also great ways to deliver
content and delight visitors.
This brings us to step four: Analyze. Ideally, after the conversion, your visitor has their question answered, is off to enjoy your
offer, or has left delighted. Your work doesn’t stop there, though. Now it’s time to take a step back and get a health check on
how your conversion path is performing. After about four weeks, check in with your reporting. Does the amount of visitors
converting align with your expectations or goals that you set for this specific conversion path? If it is, great job! If it’s not, think
about ways you could experiment and optimize, or improve, the way the conversion path is set up.
So, now you’ve crafted your conversion path, but now how do you ensure you’re choosing the right conversion points to tie
together your conversation, promotion, lead nurturing, and content strategies? When building your conversion paths, it’s
important to consider the following areas: value proposition, relevance, urgency, clarity, anxiety, distraction, and optimization
strategy. Let’s dig into each one.
First, you have the value proposition of your offer. If it’s a content offer, you need to create the type of content your buyer
personas are looking for. Choosing a format can be difficult, so when creating your content offer, consider your SMART goals.
Remember, SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. What is the outcome you want to achieve
with this piece of content in the short term? Where do you see it fitting into your long-term strategy? Alternatively, how does
this content likely fit into your visitor’s goals and where they are in the buyer’s journey? Likewise, consider what format would
likely provide the best experience.
Think about the value of the content you’re producing as well as what resources it will cost to make. You don’t want to invest
a lot of effort into a piece that ultimately doesn’t have a place in the larger narrative your company is trying to tell. How much
time and resources can you reasonably set aside to create this piece of content? How will you promote it to the world once
it’s created?
Each content format will take a distinct amount of time and resources to build. Creating an engaging podcast is different than
producing a blog post or publishing an ebook. When thinking about the conversion path or call-to-action you want to build for
your content, consider the value it’s adding to your visitor, lead, opportunity, or customer. This will help you determine how
much information you can reasonably ask for in return for this offer.
Not every conversion is monetarily transactional, but there is an element of exchange. In marketing, contact information is the
currency that helps you hit your lead generation goals. With this in mind, think of the price tag you’re placing on your content.
Price it too high and no one buys. Price it too low and you might not get the type of information that can help you identify
necessary information to get a sense of who is converting and why. It’s all about balance. You want to ensure you’re creating
the content that makes people want to convert without adding any additional obstacles that could stand in their way.
Knowing what type of information you’ll want in exchange for a piece of content informs you on the best way to deliver it.
Similarly, knowing the value of your offer can help you determine how many steps your conversion path can reasonably have.
But that’s only a piece to the puzzle. Relevance is also a piece to consider when building your conversion path and
determining which conversion tools to use to deliver your offer. Ask yourself the following questions: who are you trying to
target with this offer, what are you trying to accomplish, when should the offer expire, where should it live on your site, and
why would your personas want to engage with this offer? Where does this specific conversion opportunity sit in the buyer’s
journey? Immediately offering a demo with a longer form might not be most effective to someone who has just landed on
your site and is still in the awareness stage. Similarly, more qualified visitors might not be as interested in pop-ups offering
content that answers industry-level frequently asked questions. It’s about knowing what information your visitors want to see
and when they want to see it.
In the context of conversion path building, urgency is defined as how compelled your visitor feels to take the desired action.
Oftentimes, buttons can create this sense of urgency with the use of action-oriented phrases, such as “download now,” “start
your trial,” or “join today.” Urgency is about taking a step into your visitor’s shoes and seeing how you’re currently framing
the offer. What value is your visitor critically missing if they don’t click the button, enter their email into the pop-up, or fill out
the form? Based on the relevance and value proposition of the piece of content, does it make a difference if they download
today, tomorrow, or in a month?
When a visitor looks at your conversion tool — your button, form, or live chat icon — how well are expectations set about
what will happen if they take that action? Clarity is about making the transaction clear. A best practice, particularly for landing
pages, is to use any accompanying copy or images to summarize what the offer contains or what your visitor can hope to gain
from that offer.
If you’re asking for an anonymous visitor’s email, that visitor is likely experiencing some minor anxiety. While many marketers
today follow the inbound methodology, there’s plenty of concern of exactly who will have access to a lead’s information once
it’s in your hands. This can be a bit tricky to counteract, but strategies like directly linking to your company’s privacy policy can
help mediate this stress. You want to make sure you minimize elements that could cause your visitor, lead, or customer to
hesitate and wonder if they should be completing the conversion. You want to guide them down the path of “Of course I
should download this offer, this is remarkable content!”
Look! Up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane! Actually, it’s a distraction. When building an effective conversion path, you need to
consider what might be preventing people from taking that action. In the context of landing pages, it’s considered a best
practice to remove the navigation bar from the page so that visitors focus only on the content and conversion at hand.
Similarly, adding too many buttons to a page or pop-ups across your site could create a distracting and confusing experience.
When building a page or adding a conversion opportunity, think about what you can do that makes the conversion point stand
out from the rest. How you do so will depend on the specific tool you’re using, but experimenting with elements such as
design and location can help you inspire visitors to take that action and connect with the offer.
This brings us to the last one, optimization strategy. This is where you swap to a more data-driven mindset. How do you plan
on measuring the success of the conversions on this offer? Will you be looking at measurements like form submissions, clicks,
or views? Are you planning the content to be relevant long enough to conduct A/B experiments on? If you are, make sure
you’re keeping a tally on conversions over time, not just at the beginning or end of the proposed experiment. If not, are you
basing your conversion path on any conversions that have proven successful in the past? Having a data collection plan will be
key to improving your content strategy because this data will help you inform your conversion optimization efforts.
Often, you’ll find some of areas will inform the action you take in others. Using these areas as a guiding framework, you’ll start
to craft a well-planned and effective conversion experience. Paying attention to these key areas can help you create a variety
of conversion opportunities for your online audience. Landing pages work well, but they aren’t the answer for every need
that’s bringing your persona to your site. By asking these questions, you’re laying the groundwork for a diversified experience
that will cater to the preferences of your audience. You want to ensure you’re offering the types of content interactions
people want, and sometimes, that might not always align with what’s the most intuitive.
As you might have guessed, conversion can take a variety of formats. Across your website, you can have buttons, landing
pages, blog posts with buttons, forms, pop-ups, live messaging, meetings links, or chatbots, just to name a few. Each can
contextually function as the right tool. The exact combination of tools or how many conversions you want is not an exact
science and is highly contextual depending on what you want to accomplish.
A tried and true conversion path that aligns well with the inbound methodology is the landing page conversion path. This
usually includes an attention-grabbing call-to-action button, which redirects to a landing page tailored to speak directly to
your website visitor. An optimized form usually sits above the fold and acts as a gate to the offer. After filling out the form, the
anonymous visitor, now considered a known lead, is redirected to a thank you page where they can then download the offer
and access the navigation back to the rest of the website. This method is typically used as top-of-the-funnel lead generation
for a variety of offers, from ebooks to demos.
That said, think of your site in terms of your funnel. By using only one type of conversion that targets only one kind of offer,
you’re only harnessing a portion of the possible traffic. If you’re not offering the type of conversion your visitors expect, it
might be time to experiment and repackage your offer differently. Diversifying your conversion points and investing in
ongoing conversion optimization ensures you’re using data to gradually widen your net and make the most out of your
website traffic.
Video 3: What is conversion optimization?
Hi there! I’m Jorie with HubSpot Academy. You may have heard of conversion optimization. But what exactly does it mean?
Let’s take a look under the hood of conversion optimization, and discuss where it fits into the inbound methodology and how
to ensure you’re using the method to its fullest capabilities.
Conversion optimization, also known as conversion rate optimization, is the process of testing hypotheses on elements of your
site with the ultimate goal of increasing the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
Conversion optimization is about data and experimentation. As marketers, you may be used to reusing your content.
Repurposing can prevent duplicate efforts and identify evergreen pieces of content your team creates. The same could be said
for your website design and user experience. Your website is not a static resource but rather an organic ecosystem for your
buyer personas to interact with your resources. As traffic ebbs and flows to your site, optimization helps you evolve with it.
Conversion optimization is more than just crunching the numbers. It’s about adopting a mentality to always be growing as the
needs of your buyer personas change. You can always find ways to improve your website experience. Conversion optimization
takes speculation out of your decision making by providing concrete data on how your visitors are reacting to your
experiments. By using data as your feedback mechanism, you can start to gather valuable insights about what your visitors
like, rather than what you think they should like.
A key principle here at HubSpot Academy is to always be learning, and that’s exactly what you should be doing when it comes
to your conversion optimization.
Think of your site as a large conversion funnel for your traffic. Optimization is about widening the scope and reach of every
stage of that funnel and making the most of the traffic already coming to your site. As you scale, your website needs to be a
well-oiled machine that you can count on for maximum efficiency. This means shifting your focus from exponentially
increasing lead generation to increasing the amount of movement from one stage to the next.
But where does this fit into the inbound methodology?
Conversion optimization can fit into any stage of the inbound methodology. Have you ever heard the saying, “if it’s worth
doing, it’s worth measuring”? Likewise, if it’s being measured, it can be optimized. Customers are interacting with your site at
every stage of the buyer’s journey. So whether its an anonymous visitor or a known customer, you should always be looking at
your website and promotional channels with an empathetic eye and user experience top of mind. To limit the optimization
process to a single stage is to silo its impact.
Speaking of impact, how can conversion optimization affect your ROI, or return on investment?
Think of your marketing or sales funnel. At a high level, your funnel is composed of a series of steps that define the unique
stages a visitor will go through with your company on their way to becoming a customer. No matter how many steps you have
or what you call them, the overall shape remains the same. Wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.
This is because with each stage, you’ll experience a bit of drop off. Not everyone will choose to convert or continue along the
buyer’s journey. They might not be ready to buy, or they got the information they were looking for — the reasons vary. But
it’s rare to have the same amount of visitors start at the top of your funnel and complete the entire journey. This affects your
cost to acquire a customer, or CAC. The more resources your company is spending to acquire a customer, the lower your
return on investment.
If you’re considering your company’s bottom line, you could take two approaches. You could invest more resources and more
time, exponentially driving up the amount of traffic coming to your site to increase revenue. This would increase the amount
of people in your funnel and therefore the amount of people moving through your funnel. But long-term, this tactic could
negatively impact your cost to acquire a customer and your return on investment. Another option is to increase the chances of
your current traffic choosing to convert and move down your funnel. Over time, this has the potential to drastically lower your
cost to acquire a customer and positively impact your return on investment. So which strategy do you choose?
It’s important to keep in mind that conversion optimization is an iterative process. It’s not a set of quick-win tactics, so you
likely won’t see results overnight. As a method, it means more than simply changing CTA buttons from green to red. Think of
conversion optimization as a way to look at the wider picture of continuing to provide value to your customers and
systematically improving it one piece at a time.
Video 4: How to implement conversion optimization?
Interested in conversion optimization?
Much like the scientific method, a problem-solving approach scientists use to mediate bias and answer questions, conversion
optimization is an iterative and replicable process. It contains five steps: define your objective, establish your baseline, form a
hypothesis, design your tests, and analyze your data. Let’s run through each of these a little more in depth.
Defining your objective may seem simple at first, but this is often an overlooked step in conversion optimization. This step
requires a three-pronged approach. First, define your goal. Where does this experiment fit into your long-term or short-term
goals? What performance metrics, such as OKRs (objectives and key results) or KPIs (key performance indicators), is this
experiment attempting to influence? Ultimately, the goal of conversion optimization is to squeeze the most action out of your
website traffic, but understanding where each of your experiments fits into the larger picture will help you quantify your
efforts to key stakeholders.
Step into the shoes of your buyer persona. Look at your conversion opportunity with new eyes. Write down the problem you
think your persona is having that’s causing them to turn to your content. Write down anything you think might be affecting
their conversions. You might even consider sending a survey directly to users to see what influenced their decision to convert
on an opportunity. This type of data will become key when forming your hypothesis later in the process.
Narrow down the page element you want to experiment on first. You can start with the design of the conversion opportunity
itself, such as how many form fields you’re using, or the verbs you’re using in your buttons. You could also choose to start
your experiment on areas that frame the conversion opportunity, such as any supporting images, links, headlines,
testimonials, social proof, or more. Where you start your experiments is up to you. However, you don’t want to experiment on
multiple areas of a conversion path at once. While that may seem time effective, later on when you need to analyze your
results, it will be difficult to definitively say which change affected your outcome.
The next step in the conversion optimization process is to establish your baseline. Take stock of the current performance of
your conversion. Try to figure out what your current data is telling you before trying to fix it. If you’re working with a landing
page or blog post and its form, what’s the current conversion rate? If you’re working with a call-to-action button, what’s the
view-to-click ratio? Write down this conversion rate and save it somewhere you’ll remember and can access later.
After taking this step in your conversion optimization process, it’s time to form a testable hypothesis. Ask yourself questions
like, “Is the traffic coming to this page the right kind of traffic?” “Does the eye path direct someone to the target action?” And
“Is the page confusing, overwhelming, or distracting?” Outline the question you’re trying to answer about the numbers you’re
seeing first. Then, think about the observations you made while defining your objectives. In clear, simple language, write a
hypothesis statement about what you think will happen. You can use the format, “by making X changes, the conversion rate
will increase by Y because it fixes Z problem.”
Let’s look at an example. Say you’re working for a marketing agency, and you’re trying to increase the conversions on your
services inquiry page. You take some time to study the page and decide that you need to establish credibility that backs some
of claims seen there. A good hypothesis for this situation would be something along the lines of: By adding testimonials and
photos, the conversion rate will increase because it gives social credibility to our work and makes us seem more genuine to
cold prospects coming to our website to sign up for a consultation. This hypothesis outlines the change you’re making: Adding
testimonials to the page. And the problem you’re testing: lacking genuineness. Now it’s just a matter of testing it out.
The fourth step in the conversion optimization process is designing and running tests. As you’ve already identified the
conversion to test, now it’s time to make the adjustment that you outlined in your hypothesis. Six factors typically affect
conversions: the value proposition of the offer, the relevance of the content, the clarity of the conversion path, visitor anxiety,
distraction, and urgency. With those six areas in mind, almost any element on your site, from headlines to copy to
testimonials, that affects user behavior can be tested on. Remember — you only want to test one element at a time to ensure
you data is accurately demonstrating impact.
After making the change, establish a schedule to benchmark your experiment. Periodically record its performance and
compare it to the baseline you recorded earlier. Are you noticing any trends over time? Depending on your page traffic
volume, let your test run for at least four weeks. On average, this ensures your data is statistically significant enough to draw
accurate conclusions.
Finally, we get to the fun part, analyze your data. Did you see a noticeable conversion lift on your variation page? Did you see
an improvement in bounce rate? Now is the time to determine if the prediction and hypothesis you made is correct. Look at
your final data set and compare it to the benchmarks you’ve been collecting throughout the process. What are the trends in
your reporting and analytics? What are they telling you?
If your hypothesis turns out to be correct, great! You’re one step closer to determining what really works for your website
audience. If not, that’s okay too! Take the insight you’ve gained and use it to form a new hypothesis. Conversion optimization
is a continuous process. You start with the element that you think may be preventing the most visitors from converting and
run through the method to try to improve their experience. After analyzing that data, if you find the conversions now align
with your end goal, you could choose to move on to improving another page or conversion opportunity. Alternatively, you
could choose to keep experimenting on the same conversion path. You don’t have to stop at just one experiment. You might
continue to rework pieces that get the most visitor focus, such as headlines, subheaders, or paragraphs could be the key to
maximizing conversions in the long run. This is particularly important if you’re working on areas of your site that currently
provide the most qualified conversions. What’s most important is that you’re always learning as much as you can about your
website traffic.
To review, conversion optimization is the consistent, structured, ongoing process of improving your website over time. It’s not
just about quick wins or changing button colors. Rather, it’s about digging into the psychology of why people do or don’t
convert. Conversion optimization is about identifying what factors you can control in your visitors’ experience with your
website and how to pull the right levers to make it that much better. The result? A smoother buyer’s journey and more
effective inbound marketing strategy.
Transcript: Understanding Lead Nurturing
VIDEO 1: WHY IS LEAD NURTURING IMPORTANT?

The Fundamentals fo Lead Nurturing
Hi. Welcome to the importance of lead nurturing. I’m Courtney from HubSpot Academy.
Lead nurturing is important to inboundIntroduction

marketing becauseto
it’s Inbound Sales
your opportunity to provide value to your leads
and customers and help them grow with your business. As an inbound professional, you might ask yourself,
“How do I connect with my prospects and turn them into customers in the most helpful way?” Lead nurturing is
the answer.
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your prospects with the goal of earning their business
when they’re ready. In practice, lead nurturing is a marketing effort focused on engaging with your leads and
customers in a way that encourages them to progress toward a specific action.
Lead nurturing is the timely, efficient, and targeted approach to connecting with your contacts. And by taking this
kind of approach, you can deliver helpful content with the right context. So the big question you need to answer
is what makes lead nurturing so important to your success with inbound marketing?
It’s important to know where your lead nurturing efforts fit into the inbound methodology. How are you going to
use lead nurturing to achieve your goals?
When we look at the stages of the inbound methodology — attract, engage, and delight — lead nurturing lives
primarily in the engage stage.
Successful lead nurturing helps you focus on providing value to your leads by offering them the information they
need at the right time.
Each lead you have in your database should be nurtured according to their interests and lifecycle stages. Pages
they’ve visited and content they’ve consumed all indicate shifting interests. Good nurturing adapts the
messaging to stay relevant and helps you win new customers, faster. Good nurturing helps you keep up the
conversation with your contacts. And this helps you continue to connect after they become customers and could
be looking for more information from you and your company.
You provide this value to your customers, and they give you value in return, helping you grow your business. This
is where you see success with lead nurturing. It’s the best of both worlds – growth for your leads and growth for
you.
So what exactly is lead nurturing? It’s the timely, efficient, and targeted approach to connecting with your
contacts. Let’s look into each of these three aspects to understand how to connect with your contacts.
The first aspect is timeliness.

One problem that inbound professionals face is finding the right time to connect with leads when they’re most
interested. And one problem your leads face is being contacted at the wrong time. This is where lead nurturing
comes in.
The Fundamentals
Lead nurturing is delivered through marketing automation. When we fosay
Lead Nurturing
marketing automation, we’re
referring to the software that exists with the goal of automating your marketing actions. Many marketing
professionals have to automate repetitive tasks, such as emails, social media, and other website actions, or they
Introduction
want to build systems of automated workflows to streamline
that help them Inbound andSales
manage their campaigns.
Marketing automation technology makes these tasks easier and helps you delivers your content to your leads at
the right time.
With marketing automation, you can develop nurturing campaigns that deliver the right content based off the
actions your leads take with your company. Using your marketing automation software, you can trigger events to
happen after your contacts have taken certain actions, such as downloading a piece of content, opening a
specific page, or requesting information from you.
For example, if a contact downloads a piece of content on “The Best Ways to Create Subject Lines for Email
Newsletters,” you’ll then be able to send a follow-up piece of content that builds off that subject. This could be a
blog post on how to write effective email copy. You’re continuing the conversation with additional content that
has context in what they’re interesting in learning about.
With marketing automation software in your inbound toolbox, you can take full advantage of the benefits of
timeliness and help your leads get their answers faster.
Marketing automation software doesn't just help you be timely but helps you to automate in general.
That brings us to the second aspect of lead nurturing: efficiency.
HubSpot found that the odds of an inbound lead becoming qualified are 21 times greater when they’re
contacted within 5 minutes vs 30 minutes. This type of speed is possible through automating tasks and reducing
the time a salesperson has to spend on qualifying or warming up a lead. It’s all about efficiency. The content and
interactions a lead will experience through your lead nurturing campaign will do the heavy lifting to leave you
and your teams to focus on creating helpful content, connecting with leads through sales faster, and reviewing
data to continue
optimizing your efforts — in other words, being human, helpful, and holistic. Your marketing automation
doesn’t do marketing and lead generation for you, but it can scale your efforts and increase the value you
provide to your contacts in a more efficient way.
Timeliness and efficiency together bring us to the third aspect of lead nurturing: Targeting your leads in the right
way.
By using lead nurturing, you can tie a series of emails to a specific activity or conversion event. In other words,
you can craft your emails based on the action your lead or customer takes. This shows them you’re aware of their
interests and providing them with what they might need next. When connecting with your contacts, you want to
be as human as possible. Being human is what builds trust, and trust is what helps you become successful as a
business. Your lead nurturing campaigns provide contextual messages to your contacts, which is key to building
that trust — it’s about being targeted and more engaging to your lead or customer.

These are the three most important aspects of lead nurturing and why it’s crucial to your success with inbound
marketing — it’s a timely, efficient, and targeted approach to connecting with your contacts. Inbound
professionals use lead nurturing to helpIntroduction towith
their contacts grow Inbound Sales
their business. You can nurture your leads by
engaging with them on an ongoing basis and gradually guiding them through the buyer's journey with both
helpful content and context.
VIDEO 2: WHAT ARE THE FUNDAMNETALS OF LEAD A LEAD NURTURING

STRATEGY?
Let’s talk about how you can create a lead nurturing strategy for your business.
Your lead nurturing strategy will be the foundation you’ll build successful lead nurturing campaigns upon.
Knowing what you need to do before you map out a campaign will help you develop a clear path for you and
your team to create campaigns that add value to your leads and customers.
It takes around 6-8 touches to generate a viable sales lead. That’s 6-8 pieces of content that your leads
interact with before they’re a sales qualified lead. And when you’re building a strategy to turn your leads into
sales qualified leads, you’ll be using conversations to get them there.
Your marketing automation software and your conversations — which include things like emails, live chat,
Facebook Messenger, social, and any way you connect with a prospect — will work together to fuel your
lead nurturing strategy. Conversations play a critical role in lead nurturing because they’re how you deliver
messages to your contacts.
Armed with your marketing software and conversations tools, you can then develop your strategy for creating
lead nurturing campaigns.
Remember, a goal without a plan is just a wish — this is why it’s so important to create a big picture strategy for
your lead nurturing campaigns.
There are three key elements of any good lead nurturing strategy: contact management, segmentation, and
the buyer's journey.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements and how they help you create a successful strategy for your
lead nurturing campaigns.
Up first is contact management. But wait, Courtney, what is contact management?
I’m glad you asked!

Contact management is a strategy that focuses on using a software program (like HubSpot) to easily store and
source a contact’s information, including their name, contact history, email information, and so much more.
Introduction to Inbound Sales
Contact management includes everything from having a program that helps you create a contact database to
managing that database properly. Because contacts are the heart of your marketing and sales strategies, they’re
also equally important to your lead nurturing strategy.
To create successful lead nurturing campaigns, you need to understand who your contacts are. You’ll learn more
about them in the other two elements of your lead nurturing strategy, but there’s no use in learning about
them if you don’t have a good plan in place on where to store the information.
Imagine buying groceries and having no place to properly store them. Without a refrigerator or kitchen cabinets,
your food would be unorganized and eventually go bad.
Contact management relies on a healthy database that is consistently updated. You have to make sure you don’t
have contacts in your database who are ineligible, and that you remove contacts who have specifically opted out
or have an invalid email address.
Once you have a strategy for cleaning your database and knowing where to locate the information on your
contacts, you can move into the second element of lead nurturing: Segmentation.
You can use segmentation to take everything you know about your contacts and apply it. Lead nurturing is that
happy marriage between content and context, and segmentation is how you provide context.
At a high level, segmentation is breaking up your contacts into smaller groups of similar people. This allows you
to look at specific groups of people who are going to receive similar information from you and your business.
While each contact is unique and should be treated that way, it's important to segment your database to see
who's similar. These segments can be divided in an endless number of ways: demographics, industry,
company size, page views, number of emails opened — you name it.
By having a segmentation strategy, you can then set appropriate lead nurturing goals based off the actions your
contacts have taken with your business.
Segmentation is an important part of having great conversations. And having great conversations is an
important part of lead nurturing. Your lead nurturing strategy will start with your contact management strategy
of keeping a clean and updated database.
Then you can move into segmentation, which relies on your contact properties — specifically the custom
properties you've created that tell you about your contacts.
Keeping these contact properties organized, clear, and concise will help you create effective segments.
Regularly review the titles and descriptions of each contact property, and observe the way your teams are using
them. It’s also important to make sure you don't have duplicate contact properties.

In the same way you go through your contact lists and make sure they're clean and updated, you need to go
through your contact properties.
After you have both your contact management and segmentation in place, you can move into the last element of
an effective lead nurturing strategy: The buyer's journey.
This is where you define the different audiences that you send email to. When defining your different audiences,
you want to look at two things: buyer personas and the buyer's journey.
Ask yourself: Who are the key people I should be sending to, and where are they in the buyer's journey? You
might have a good idea of who your buyers are, but separating the different types of buyers into lists will help
you look at them and decide what type of content they need.
To review, the buyer's journey is broken into three stages: awareness, consideration and decision. In each stage,
you’ll need to provide different content for your contacts.
For example, a lead in the awareness stage is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or
opportunity and should be receiving educational content that helps them further understand the problem.
By using contact management, segmentation, and the buyer's journey, you’ll create a lead nurturing strategy that
will help you grow your business and create lead nurturing campaigns that provide value to your leads.
This strategy is your plan to help you and your leads achieve your goals: together.
VIDEO 3: WHAT DOES AN EFECTIVE LEAD NURTURING CAMPAIGN LOOK LIKE?
Creating a lead nurturing campaign will help you provide the most contextual content to your leads while staying
highly productive. Let’s take a look at what, exactly, a lead nurturing campaign looks like.
Before you get started building a campaign, you need to figure out which lead nurturing tools you’re going to
use. Lead nurturing uses automation tools that help you take specific actions, guiding your marketing
efforts toward a specific goal. One example of a lead nurturing tool is the HubSpot workflows tool.
Once you’ve decided on the tool you’ll be using to execute your lead nurturing campaigns, you can move on to
creating one.
Setting up a lead nurturing campaign is not a science, but there are certain steps you’ll need to follow.
To create an effective lead nurturing campaign, there are five main steps: setting goals, selecting personas,
creating content, identifying the timeline, and then measuring and improving.
Let’s take a look at each of the steps and define what you need to do to provide value to your leads.
First, you have to set a goal. Determining what you want to accomplish is the first step because without a goal,
how will you know if you’re successful or not?
By identifying the goal for your lead nurturing campaign, you can answer the question, what actions are my
contacts taking that I need to target?
To answer this question, you’ll want to go through the process of defining a SMART goal. A SMART goal is a
goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
This goal could sound something like, “I’d like 15 of my unengaged leads to click a link to a resource article
by the end of my month-long workflow.”
After defining this goal, you’ll need to know who the contacts are that will be going through your lead nurturing
campaign. This is the persona selection step of creating a lead nurturing campaign.
To review, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and
some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and
goals.
Buyer personas are key in helping you create the most contextual content for your campaigns and
understanding who will be consuming it.
Your persona should represent a pretty vivid picture of who you’re ideally trying to reach. By having an image of
the persona you’re trying to reach, you can create the right content or re-purpose existing content.
For example, let’s say your buyer persona is HR Manager Tina, who’s concerned about hiring top talent but
has the challenge of senior management not being on-board. Tina would benefit from content that’s targeted at
her boss and demonstrates the value of the top talent Tina wants to hire. This content will be valuable to your
sales team, too, since they'll need to pull in the decision-maker at some point.
That leads us into the next step of creating your lead nurturing campaign: Creating the content.
The idea behind lead nurturing is to nurture leads through the funnel first to make them more educated and
more ready to buy.
Instead of pitching your product or service as the greatest thing ever, you should first offer value.
Examples of valuable offers include videos, webinars, ebooks, blog posts, and even free tools that you have to
offer. You don’t have to create a new piece of content for every conversation. If you have a backlog of content,
use those assets. If they’ve been successful at converting leads in the past, there’s a high chance the leads you’re
nurturing now will find value in them, too
Once you have your content outlined or have identified areas to repurpose content, you can move into the next
step of your lead nurturing campaign, which is identifying the timeline in which you are sending it. Remember,

one of the most beneficial aspects of lead nurturing is its timeliness. This step in creating your lead nurturing
campaign is crucial.
Your business has a typical sales cycle, and so should your lead nurturing campaigns. Typically, it’s a good idea
to send two to three emails to your prospects in a lead nurturing campaign. According to HubSpot research,
75% of leads buy within 18-24 months. That’s a long purchasing process. This means you might want to space
out your emails monthly.
With lead nurturing, patience is a virtue. It’s important to remember not to push a lead into the sale. Instead, let it
take its natural course. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different times and see what resonates with your
audience best. For example, if your typical sales cycle runs for 30 days, you might want to set up a campaign for
emails to be sent out on the 1st, 10th, and 20th days after a conversion.
The last piece of any effective lead nurturing campaign is measuring and improving your strategy for the next
campaign.
When you set up a lead nurturing campaign, you need to ensure the accurate tracking of your conversations.
You need to make sure you know what’s working and what’s not so you can continue to improve it. Have metrics
in place that tie to the goals you set in step one.
Looking to drive brand recognition and awareness? Measure branded search or direct traffic to your website.
Looking to increase lead quality? Measure quality of conversions or lead ratings over time.
Interested in generating new leads or email opt-ins? Measure how you’re growing your database from your lead
nurturing efforts.
As your campaigns run, experiment with the offers you send, the subject lines, the questions asked in live chats,
and the calls-to-action found within the emails. There’s always room to improve your campaigns.
Those are the five steps to creating a great lead nurturing campaign: setting goals, selecting personas,
creating content, identifying the timeline, and then measuring and improving.
But before you go, there’s one more question we need to answer: How do you know when to nurture your
leads versus your customers?
You’ll use campaigns to nurture not only the leads coming in but also your customers. So what’s the difference
between nurturing leads and nurturing customers?
You want to focus on nurturing leads after they take a specific action. This includes things like: after their first
conversion, after they’ve downloaded a content offer, after they’ve subscribed to a blog, after they
request a trial or demo, or if they haven’t interacted in a while and you want to re-engage them.
When you nurture your customers, on the other hand, you want to focus on two separate segments of customers.
The new customer and the existing customer.
You can nurture a new customer during onboarding, with product or service education, new product and
feature promotion, support resources, or recommending pro-services.
For an existing customer, you might want to look at asking for referral recommendations, re-engagement,
feedback initiatives, and renewals. Introduction to Inbound Sales
These are just some ways to nurture your leads and customers. There are plenty more for you to explore.
With the five steps of creating a lead nurturing campaign — setting goals, selecting personas, creating content,
identifying timelines, and then measuring and improving — you now have the foundation to start nurturing your
leads and customers. Don’t forget that contacts are at the heart of your lead nurturing strategy, and having
helpful conversations with your contacts is your tool for effective nurturing.
Now it’s time to start using lead nurturing to help your contacts grow with your business.
Aligning Your Marketing With Sales
VIDEO 1: WHAT IS SALES ENABLEMENT?

Hi there, I’m Lindsay with HubSpot Academy.
It’s important to understand that a marketer’s role doesn’t end after the engage stage of the
inbound methodology. Marketing plays an integral role in helping engage and delight. Marketing
is a part of the entire inbound methodology.
It takes a lot to turn a lead into a customer: multiple interactions on multiple channels, good third-
party coverage and reviews, a solid sales team, and much more. So it can be daunting as a
marketer to try to build lead nurturing that has a significant, measurable impact on the process.
An excellent way to get sales and marketing working together is to implement a sales enablement
strategy. Sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that empower
sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity - and that’s a task marketers are well equipped
to help support and execute.
Sales enablement can happen at any scale. In a small business, it can center around the marketing
and sales VPs, but as the company grows you can pick leaders in the marketing and sales divisions
to scale the alignment.
Once marketing starts focusing on empowering sales to sell efficiently at a higher velocity,
marketing and sales become more aligned—and sales becomes more willing to adopt inbound
practices.
VIDEO 2: HOW MARKETING CAN ALIGN WITH SALES

Effective marketing and sales teams use every bit of customer data to their advantage. Today,
prospects spend time interacting with your website and content long before they ever speak to a
salesperson. Inbound tactics help you capture everything these prospects do, giving your sales
team more insight into who they’re selling to and allowing them to be more like advisors than
sellers.
Here are a few best practices to make sure you’re aligned with sales and continuing to help solve
for the buyer’s journey in an inbound way.
First, you need to have an agreed upon definition of what a sales-ready lead is. If you’re spending
the time to develop lead nurturing campaigns, you’ll want to make sure you know the signals to
look out for if someone is moving further in their buying journey and closer to becoming a
customer.
Your lead nurturing is built on a foundation of lead qualification. You can qualify your leads using a
matrix that looks something like this. This is a fairly traditional lead qualification matrix. In the top
row, you have leads who are a good fit for your product or service. In the bottom row, you have
leads who aren't such a good fit. In the left column, you have people who are really engaging with
your content. In the right column, you have people who aren't so engaged.
This is a good place to start with determining those leads that are sales-ready or you should
continue to nurture.
Let’s add another column. That column is for hand-raisers. A hand-raiser is someone who explicitly
asks to talk to sales. This means their further in the buyer’s journey and has a great intent of making
a purchase, so they should be in their own category.
Filling in the the lead qualification matrix is a team-wide effort, and you should structure this so that
it works for your organization. Once you have your lead qualification matrix established, you'll be
ready to develop playbooks for the leads in each bucket like If someone requests to talk to sales
but we know they aren't a good-fit, they could get an email from a marketing alias offering to help
them grow into being a good fit. The thing about any determination of good fit or bad fit leads is
that it's inherently based on a model. Models require inputs. Experiment with your definitions of fit.
If your leads aren’t ready for sales just yet, use various channels like email nurturing, paid
retargeting on social media channels, monitoring specific segmented social media streams, or
even interacting with these leads one-on-one. The idea is that the more touch points where you
can build trust (don’t forget it’s all about trust!) the more ways we have to move leads along the
buyer’s journey.
Even with having a lead qualification matrix, you’ll want to make sure that, as a marketer, you’re
also aligned with sales on how you define and refer to the different lifecycle stages of your
contacts.
These are some suggestions, and while you may inevitably change these definitions to meet your
organization’s needs, both marketing and sales need to agree upon them.
The most generic term for anyone in a marketing and sales funnel is a contact. The term contact
doesn’t indicate which part of the buyer’s journey someone is in, just simply that you have some
sort of contact information on them. And you wouldn’t want sales to reaching out to any contact
that you have, right?
Prospects are website visitors who you’ve gathered minimal data on or who have signed up for a
blog or an email newsletter.
When you use the term ‘lead’ you’re referring to a contact who has submitted their information,
maybe that’s by a form or starting a chat on your website. Remember, it’s important for your
organization to define, agree and commit to using these definitions.
Then you have Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads.
Marketing qualified leads, commonly known as MQLs, are contacts who have raised their hands
(metaphorically speaking) and identified themselves as more deeply engaged, sales-ready leads.
Ideally, you only allow specific forms or form fields, such as company size, to trigger the promotion
of a lead to an MQL. Offers like demo requests, buying guides, and other high-interest-level offers
are typically defined as MQLs.
Once a lead has been promoted to an MQL it’s time to pass it on to sales to be reviewed more
thoroughly.
Sales Qualified Leads, or SQLs, are MQLs that your sales team has determined to be worthy of a
direct follow up after thorough examination. Using this stage will help your marketing and sales
teams remain on the same page in terms of the quality and volume of MQLs that marketing is
handing over.
Once sales has marked an MQL as an SQL their goal is to move them along to an opportunity. An
Opportunity is an SQL that a sales rep has communicated with and logged as a legitimate
potential customer.
The final step is closing the sale and marking the opportunity as a customer.
The key here is to understand which contacts are owned by marketing for nurturing and which
contacts are owned by sales to take it to the finish line. You want the teams to be on the same page
so they understand which contacts they're responsible for communicating with.
If you’re speaking the same language as sales, you’ll also want to make sure your goals are
aligned. A clear revenue goal is important for a business to work towards. But how does that help
you as a marketer?
You’ll need to understand how you, as a marketer, and sales can each help achieve that goal. And
the best way to do that is to implement a service-level agreement, or SLA, between the two teams.
When it comes to sales and marketing, this is a two-way agreement, with marketing committing to
a certain number of leads to sales, and sales committed to contacting those leads within a certain
timeframe. So for a marketer, the goal, here, is to provide sales with the exact number of leads they
need.
Whether you're a one-person team that owns both marketing and sales or a two thousand-person
company, SLAs formalize the marketing and sales goals to ensure the company is set up to reach
its revenue goal.
To create the simplest version of an SLA, you need to know three things: One, the average
conversion rate from lead to opportunity, two, the average conversion rate from opportunity to
closed sale, and three, the average value of a sale. With these three pieces of information, you can
calculate how many qualified leads you’d need to send to sales in order for sales to meet its quota
and, ideally, for your company to meet its revenue goal.
The sales SLA to marketing requires the sales team to commit to a specific number of MQL follow-
ups. Depending on the number of sales reps and their individual quotas, they’ll only have a certain
amount of time to commit to calling and emailing MQLs. You’ll want to address the number of
customers that they need, the number of leads that they need to get there, and the quality of those
leads. All of those things factor into what marketing commits to sales.
Let’s walk through an example and keep it simple. The timeframe is one month, the average value
of sale is 1,000 euros, and the average conversion rate from lead to opportunity and opportunity
to closed sale is 50%. In other words one out of every two contacts progress onto the next stage.
When writing this SLA, you’ll want to start with the shared goal, revenue.
Say your monthly revenue goal is 100,000 euro. Take your historical average deal size 1,000 euro
and divide it by your revenue goal to identify the number of customers needed each month.
In this example, your company would need 100 new customers to hit your revenue goal of 100,000
euro.
Next take the opportunity to close sale rate to help identify how many opportunities your sales
team will need in order to close 100 customers. Here you see that the sales team needs 200
opportunities.
So, as a marketing you now know that you need to be sending over the best qualified leads, that
you’d consider to be opportunities, to your sales team and that it needs to be at least 200 to help
sales meet quota. This is why a lead qualification matrix is so important. To make sure you’re
defining opportunities in the same way.
It might sound easy but there’s still one missing part. Not every contact is going to be an
opportunity. There will be some contacts that are still in the awareness stage and not ready to be
sold to. As a marketer, you’ll be constantly improving and using conversion optimization tactics to
help nurture and build trust with those leads.
That’s why you repeat the process again and use the average conversion rate from lead to
opportunity to determine how many how many leads you need to convert. For this example, 400
leads are necessary.
So, for your company to reach their annual revenue goal, they’ll need 100 customers. That means
marketing’s SLA would be to have 200 sales-ready leads and 400 leads every year.
You can certainly add more layers to this with the other lifecycle stages. All you’ll need to keep in
mind is the different, average conversion rates. If you’re conversion rates are low, that’s where you
test and experiment with conversion optimization without sacrificing the quality of your leads.
Don’t forget, SLAs work both ways, so sales will also have a number to commit to. Their SLA is
based on how sales will contact the delivered leads.
Here’s how the completed SLA example might look:
Every month, marketing will deliver 200 qualified leads to sales, and sales will contact each of
those leads within 24 hours of receiving it.
What if the average conversion rate between stages changes from 50% or the average number of
follow-ups necessary to close a sale increases or decreases? Having a carefully-built SLA can help
solve for these problems before they arise.
Now that you are speaking the same language and there is a clear understanding of the numbers
and activities marketing and sales is responsible for it’s time to set-up closed loop reporting.
Closed-loop reporting completes the feedback loop between marketing and sales. At its core
closed-loop reporting allows you to pass more lead intelligence and data over to the sales team
and get more feedback from sales to marketing about which marketing efforts are translating into
customers.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to identify if your organization needs to set up closed-loop
reporting.
Do you send leads to sales and never hear about them again? Do you end up creating and trying
to manage duplicate leads? Do you send leads to sales with the basic contact information, but
without intelligence about what content those leads consumed? Or are you unsure of the impact
your marketing efforts are having on revenue?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, closed-loop reporting will be key for your SLA to be
effective. For example, if every sales-ready lead passed to sales is no good, but sales never notifies
marketing, you’ll continue to produce low-quality, sales-ready leads that sales never identifies as
sales-qualified.
Closed-loop reporting enables marketing and sales to improve conversion rates over time.
As a marketer, there a few benefits for closed-loop reporting, like getting up to date contact info
and status updates, learning which marketing programs are working and which aren’t, and gaining
visibility into ways to increase marketing return on investment.
The major benefits to sales are de-duplicated contacts, the prioritization of contacts, more
educated contacts, and an increase in close rate and Sales ROI.
Specifically, closed-loop reporting allows you to:

1. Analyze which marketing sources (organic, social, referral, etc.) are producing the most
customers.
2. Allows you to use conversion assists to help you understand how each individual piece of
content you create contributes to closing customers. This will provide you insights as to
which content to surface to contacts to turn more of your contacts into customers.
3. Provide a timeline of all of the interactions a contact took prior to becoming an MQL or a
customer such as the content they download, the emails they click, and other changes
4. Pass information to sales that can help aid them in connecting and engaging with contacts
within the first 24 hours
5. Send automatic updates to your sales team when their leads revisit the website or take other
key actions, to make sure to follow up at the best time.
Now that you are gathering data from closed loop reporting, as well as typical marketing and sales
activities, it’s time to start relying on data to make decisions.
Marketing dashboards can be a great way to surface the data that helps align teams around
revenue goals. How has your marketing impacted the bottomline?
Dashboards are great because they provide frequent, public, and transparent updates as to how
marketing and sales are performing. This allows the team to quickly change course when problems
arise, instead of waiting until the end of the month or quarter..
Here are a few must-have marketing dashboards.

Start off with that SLA; it’s key to communicate the progress towards your primary contact and lead
goals on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis. This is an opportunity to measure both the volume
and the types of qualified leads you are generating.
You can also dive into the other key metrics for the marketing team. Like the volume of visits, leads,
customers, against a monthly goal or compared to a previous months so you can understand how
your efforts are performing and quickly adjust if need be.
You can track your leads by their source. You might even want to set specific goals for each of your
marketing sources, so that you can measure your progress for your email marketing contacts or
your organic search contacts.
You can do this on a micro level as well. For each individual campaign you can analyze the results
to understand which efforts are successfully driving visits, leads, and customers.
Track the volume of MQLs generated that marketing is passing off to sales on a daily basis.
In addition to the daily reports, a monthly marketing report provides the necessary time to analyze
why you did or did not hit your targets and what to improve on for next month.
Finally, if you want sales enablement to work well for your company, you need to align around
using the same customer relationship management system for not just your marketing but also
your sales process.
In sales, speed and ease are critical. Spending precious time searching through their inbox or call
history to get a prospect’s number or recall when they last spoke is a huge waste of a salesperson’s
time. It’s also unreliable -- if they forget a touchpoint, they risk sending the same email multiple
times and annoying a prospect.
A CRM, which stands for customer relationship management, provides a full, accurate record of a
prospect’s entire interaction history. Sales reps will never have to manually reconstruct a timeline of
touchpoints again. Not only that, but the marketing activities are also recorded.
Like other sales enablement best practices, a CRM will help improve communication. As a
marketer, you can immediately assess what’s already been done with a given prospect and what’s
next. Your sales reps don’t need to reach out to their colleagues to get interaction history, because
the information they need is already in the system.
Keeping activity recording consistent also reduces friction when passing a lead from marketing to
sales or from one sales rep to another. Not only will all relevant information be accounted for, it will
also have been recorded in a manner that makes sense across your entire company.
To help you your marketing and business grow better, your ability to do so is dependent on
contacting your prospects at the right intervals and providing them relevant information at the
right time, and you simply can't do this effectively without a CRM.
So there you have it, define your lifecycle stages, implement a service level agreement, set up
closed loop reporting, and make sure you’re using the same system or software for customer
relationship management.
Applying a Customer Marketing Approach

VIDEO 1: WHY IS CUSTOMER MARKETING IMPORTANT?

Hi there, I’m Lindsay with HubSpot Academy.
With today’s empowered buyer, you need to be in the mindset that your best marketing channel is
actually going to be your existing customers and when your customers succeed, it’s your best
predictor for business growth.
Your customers will help prove your brand values. Buyers used to decide primarily on what the
company had to say, but now they primarily decide based on what the company’s customers have
to say. It’s now shifted to word of mouth. Reviews are more important than ever before. The ability
to gather word of mouth as a consumer of almost everything has improved.
Have you ever looked up a restaurant’s reviews before making a reservation? What about asking a
question to your network on social media if they’ve had any experience with a product that you’re
looking into? Or looking at different review platforms before purchasing a new software for your
business? You do this because you trust opinions.
Consumers are faced with way more choices. Emerging technologies have expanded to let people
create products and companies more easily, everyone is competing for attention. So it makes
sense that consumers rely so heavily on word of mouth. If you’re practicing inbound, you’re putting
your buyer in the center of your business. You need to build a delightful end-to-end experience
tailored around your buyer's journey and every experience they have with you. This includes their
experience with you after they’ve purchased.
Marketing doesn’t end after you pass a qualified lead off to sales. Marketing is part of the entire
methodology and fits nicely into the delight stage. The inbound methodology outlines how
customers who are delighted will become promoters of your business, and can help you attract
more strangers to your business. Why would you tell a friend about a product or business? Why do
you promote a business or product? Take a moment to think about that. It’s because of trust.
If you establish trust with people, chances are they’ll recommend your product or service to their
friends and family. Marketing can help play a big role in turning a customer into a promoter and
helping the promoters influence those that don’t know about your business. Promoters help
continuously move people through the inbound methodology. Serve your website visitors, leads,
customers – and most importantly, your promoters!
Sales and marketing alignment is just as important as customer service and marketing alignment,
as is sales and customer service alignment. If your business strategy revolves are the customer,
you’ll need to have a customer success strategy that leverages cross-department collaboration and

integration. The need for a coordinated marketing and customer service relationship is only more
important now, with consumers increasingly turning to social media as a way to communicate with
businesses.
Word of mouth will happen if you’re building what should feel like a more personalized, 1:1
relationship. The trick is how to facilitate that in a way that is both unique and scalable. Your job is
to help each customer get the unique support they need to be successful. Supporting customer
delight is an investment in retention and revenue. Your priority should be to serve people and
serve your customers.
VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU CREATE LASTING

RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Most businesses spend the majority of their money and time on acquiring customers, rather than
serving their customers. As a result, customers sometimes feel left out or unappreciated. You know
the feeling: when a business thinks of you as a number, doesn’t want to spend time helping you
solve your problem or answer your question.
What's crazy about this is that it costs far more money to attract a new customer than it does to
retain an existing customer.
And customers expect more. They want interactions that feel more conversational, contextual, and
human. For customer marketing, you need to help your customers achieve their goals, solve their
problems, and then exceed their expectations by providing additional recommendations,
education, and world-class service.
Trust is what will help you retain your customers, build loyalty, and create long-lasting
relationships.
To create lasting relationships and to build trust you have to listen to, serve, and follow up with
your customers; it’s the best way to learn how to provide the best, personalized experience.
Use the 80/20 rule. Spend 80% of the time listening and spend 20% of the time talking.
The second step of good listening is acknowledging. By doing this, you’ll confirm that you
understand their needs. At this point you should also display some genuine empathy. The best
way you can show this is by using your product or service yourself and really understanding and
feeling the experience. And if that’s difficult, try being in the mindset of your buyer persona. Act as
your buyer persona for the day.

Social media monitoring is a great for listening to your customers in a scalable, efficient way. You
can listen for when people mention specific, key phrases or when people mention your
organization, product, or service.
But keep in mind that consumers also expect more from their social spaces. They want brands to
respond to them in social, quickly, but also in the way that they desire. People will make decisions
because a brand responded to them faster than another brand, or made them feel more important
as a customer.
Going above and beyond for your customers is more important than ever before.
You should be measuring and tracking as many of these interactions as you can. Collect qualitative
and quantitative data, pre- and post-sale, using manual and automatic methods.
Then, use that data to better understand how your organization can serve your customers through
communication, education, or innovative product or service changes.
There are many ways you can listen, but why listen and collect data? Data improves how you
execute on your marketing and ensures you’re always challenging the status quo.
And you should not only listen but ask.
Go exploring with your customers. Ask questions to learn more about their problem or goal.
Maybe you need to learn more about why they’re having trouble using your product, or maybe it’s
because you want to know why they’re interested in purchasing from you.
As you further explore their situation, use open-ended questions, typically starting with who, what,
where, when, why, and how. Asking open-ended questions will help you learn more about their
problem or goal. And remember to ask follow-up questions to dig even deeper. Peel back that
onion.
Take a moment to think about how much exploring you do when you market to your customers. Is
it enough? Are you learning about their whole experience, or just getting to the quickest solution?
This will help you understand your customer, your buyer persona, and improve your marketing
throughout all of the lifecycle stages a prospect or customer goes through.
So you’ve spent time listening to the person you're trying to delight. You've asked them more
questions to better understand their problem or goal. Now it’s time to serve them.

Your business's number one priority should be to serve people. Serve everyone, from your website
visitors to your team members. Serve people to help them reach their goal, overcome a problem
or to just help them in the day-to-day. If you lead by serving others, they will serve you back.
You know personas are incredibly important. Everyone at your business should be able to identify
a lead or customer by persona.
Understanding your personas will make it even easier to delight your customers. Personas can
help ensure that your solutions and recommendations are relevant and useful to your customers.
Spend a moment to think about whether or not you exceed your customers’ expectations during
most interactions.
The businesses who are the best educators will be the most successful.
Take some time to think about the businesses you love. Think about how much education those
businesses provide. I bet the businesses that you love are inspiring you and empowering you with
new, relevant, interesting information. The others, well, not so much.
Lastly, be sure to follow up.
When was the last time a business failed to properly follow-up with you? How did that make you
feel?
They might do everything right during the sales process, but when a business fails to follow-up
with a customer, they risk losing the trust they’ve developed. Yes, part of this is for a customer
service team but as a marketer you want to continue to educate your customers just like you think
about educating your prospects.
It’s important to be sure that your organization focuses on resolving all of your customers’
problems and supports the goals they’re aiming to achieve.
Sometimes you can use reciprocity to help you build even more trust during an interaction or right
after an interaction. In this case, ‘reciprocity’ means responding to one positive action with another.
It’s another tool to use to help you over deliver and create magic moments.
One final way to follow-up with people and to collect data is to use surveys. It provides you with
the ability to collect customer data and learn how we could improve our communication and
customer education.
Surveys also teach you about how you can innovate your customer experience processes and your
products to ensure you’re focused on delight.

Your entire organization needs to understand that you have the opportunity to build trust during
every small interaction you have with people. People won’t remember every interaction they had
with your organization or product, but they will remember the overall feeling it imprints on them.
Remember every single interaction, no matter how big or how small, is important. These are the
interactions that will create and sustain long-lasting, memorable relationships with people.
Relationships that people will remember and share.
VIDEO 3: HOW TO SOLVE FOR CUSTOMER SUCCESS

When done well, customer marketing can help do three things - increase engagement with your
products or services, drive customer revenue through retention, or cross-sell, or up-sell, and grow
a community of customer advocates.
How should you market to your customers? Well, all of the inbound marketing best practices
you’ve been learning and applying for the attract, convert, and close stages of the inbound
methodology, also apply to the delight stage and how you should market to your customers.
But don’t market to them as if they are a prospect. A prospect and a customer are not always going
to find the same blog post helpful or relevant. A prospect and customer should not be receiving
the same email, and they’re going to be looking for different information on your website.
When you make your customers stop, think, and re-evaluate, putting them back into the decision
making process, it’s not a good thing.
Don’t bring them back to where they started. Help them grow.
Here are a few ways to solve for customer success.
First, make sure you’ve segmented your customers. At a high level, segmentation is breaking up
your contacts into smaller groups of similar people. This allows you to look at specific groups of
people who are going to receive similar information from you and your business. Segments can
help you send more targeted and personalized emails, create a better website experience using
smart content, and better report on how your marketing is being received
by your customers.
Start at least with one set group for your customers. Later on, you can always segment your
customers by other attributes like you would your prospects. This could be customer segments by
location, company size, service type, or even their role.

You could also segment by happy, successful customers, the customers that need a little extra
help, and the ones that might be ahead of curve.
When creating segments you should always have an end goal.
For example, you could have segment number one be your happy customer. The happy Customer
Goal could be to help this segment continue their healthy habits. Segment two could be the
customers that need a little extra help. Ones that you wouldn’t consider your promoters. That goal
might be to help your customer get back. And your last customer segment could be the super
active customer. And that goal might be to help your customer upgrade to additional products or
services.
Not sure how to define each segment? Well ask questions like, what key characteristics define each
segment? And What data can you use to recognize each characteristic?
Net promoter score, or NPS, is a good way to determine who is a promoter of your brand.
NPS is a quantified view of your customers’ relationship and experience with you. The better you
do at creating a valuable and enjoyable end-to-end experience for your customers, the higher your
NPS will ultimately climb (the trend is what matters).
To calculate your NPS, you first have to survey your customers. A typical question would be "On a
scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?" The responses to this
question can be categorized into three groups: Promoters will be customers who answered the
question with 9 or 10. Passives will be customers who answered the question with 7 or 8.
Detractors will be customers who answered the question with 0 through 6.
As you might have guessed, promoters are the customers who will tell their friends about your
business and bring in new customers. That word of mouth! Passives are indifferent and could
become promoters -- or they could switch to your competition. Detractors are unhappy customers.
Not only are you at risk of losing them, they could do damage to your brand by sharing their bad
experiences with other people.
To calculate Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of detractors (customers who wouldn't
recommend you) from the percentage of promoters (customers who would recommend you).
Next, take the total amount of responses you earned in each category, and subtract your
detractors from your promoters to determine the net likelihood your typical customer would
recommend to a friend. Passive responses are left out of the equation because they can't be
counted on to either recommend or give negative reviews.
The key to achieving a high NPS is having a greater number of promoters than detractors.

NPS should give you an idea of how you can later segment your contacts and better nurture them.
You’d probably want to send a different type of email to your promoter than a detractor, right?
Next, social media support.
Many marketers use social media to provide customer service. Try to vary the type of content you
are sharing on social media if you want to reach your different audiences.
Really excited to share that new blog post you created that addresses your buyer personas pain
points? Well, that might only be relevant to your prospects, the ones that are still in the awareness
stage of the buyer’s journey and knowing that they have a problem.
Your customer might see that blog post and say “well, yeah, of course! I don’t need this
information, that’s why I bought your service! You solved that pain point for me. Tell me something
I don’t know!”
Your customer audience is different, so be sure to engage and promote content that is helpful to
them.
That also doesn't mean that other people from other departments can't be involved. Why provide
your customers with a subpar customer service experience just for the sake of keeping social
media management solely under the marketing team?
You should collaborate with the customer support team to route customer-related questions to
your team, making it easy for communications to be handed off to the most appropriate person.
Coming up with a system that enables members of your customer service team will only make for a
better customer experience.
And on the topic of content, successful marketers understand how important regular and
consistent content creation is to their marketing strategy. Unfortunately, regular and consistent
content creation means marketers also need a steady flow of ideas about which to create content,
and even the most experienced content creators can sometimes suffer from the struggle to come
up with remarkable content ideas that their audience will find valuable, especially for your
customers. If your company is doing their job and helping customers grow, then your customers
will want to continue to grow with you.
This is where your customer service team can help. They are constantly communicating with
customers and learning about their problems, interests, and needs. They’re an untapped goldmine
of viable content ideas. Use real-life customer examples and successes in your content. Start to
build a community for your customers, so that they can learn and grow together.

Consider meeting regularly to hear about the problems your customers are facing, and brainstorm
about the types of content that you can create to address those problems. Do you need to create
some sort of troubleshooting product documentation? Maybe your customers prefer video?
Make it clear that you want to listen to and share ideas for content that you think would be
especially helpful and specifically for customers.
And be sure to acknowledge and celebrate your customers that have turned into promoters.
Building a customer loyalty program is a key way to keep loyal customers engaged with your
brand. And whether you're rewarding them with points, discounts, or exposure on your social
media or other marketing channels.
A valuable customer loyalty reward could very well involve a co-marketing opportunity. A
brainstorm between the marketing and customer success teams could bring about a loyalty
program that customers are clamoring to join -- without creating too much of a heavy lift for the
marketers.
As a marketer, you should make sure each customer is successful with your product or service. Put
that marketing cap on and start to think how you can better support your customers.
I’ll leave you with this - it's not what you say or do, but how you make your prospects and
customers feel that will create a trustworthy and lasting relationship. As a result, people will trust
that you’re going to solve their problems and help them reach their goals.

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Inbound Marketing Certification Lesson Transcript

Inbound Marketing Fundamentals

VIDEO 1: WHY INBOUND MARKETING?

VIDEO 2: HOW DOES THE INBOUND METHODOLOGY

VIDEO 3: WHAT DOES INBOUND MARKETING LOOK

This brings us to the buyer’s journey.

Video 1: Why is long-term content planning important?

Hi there, I’m AJ with HubSpot’s marketing team.

Video 2: How to create a long-term content plan

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Take a look at what Maren did for her event-based audit.

Here’s an overview of Meena as a buyer persona.

Video 3: Working with influencers to improve your content strategy efforts

VIDEO 1: WHY DOES BLOGGING HELP YOUR

VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU CREATE A SUCCESSFUL

The first step is to pick a topic and a title.

At a high level, write educational content.

When picking your topics, do keyword research.

Now, let’s talk about picking a title.

Start by creating a working title for your blog post.

And what about the rest of your blog post?

When you blog, whitespace is your friend.

Video 1: Why are topic clusters important?

Hi, I’m Justin with HubSpot Academy.

SEO is evolving, and marketers need to adapt.

Video 2: How do you create an effective topic cluster

So you're looking to create a topic cluster for your site's content.

Let’s see this in action.

Video 3: Examples of commonly used pillar page types

Video 4: How do you create an effective pillar page?

Here’s how Etuma did this.

Second, identify your topic cluster.

Third, create blog posts for needed subtopics.

Fourth, repurpose your subtopic content into a downloadable content offer.

Let’s review each layout tip in more detail.

But how well is it performing?

Next, Townsend repurposed various data points into infographic-like images.

1: Why You Need a Social Media Strategy

There are many benefits to having a social media strategy. It will:

To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to:

Understand the impact of social listening and engagement,

Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan,

2: The Social Media Channels Explained

Let’s start with the giant: Facebook.

3: The Power of Social Listening

There are eight key benefits to doing social listening:

4: Social Media Content: The Basics

Conducting a social media audit will help you:

Some of the metrics you should track include:

o Best- and worst-performing posts

o What types of content have the best and worst performance

Video 1: Why is Conversational Growth Important to Inbound Marketing?

So what does this mean for your inbound marketing strategy?

Video 2: What Are the Steps to Implementing a Conversational Growth Strategy

Video 3: What to Consider When Comparing Different Messaging Channels

Video 4: Why Is It Important to Select the Right Conversational Marketing Channel

Video 1: Why are conversions important to inbound marketing?

Video 2: How to build an effective conversion path

Video 3: What is conversion optimization?

But where does this fit into the inbound methodology?

Video 4: How to implement conversion optimization?

Interested in conversion optimization?