B2B Marketing Blog

Freemium 2 Premium: Lessons on How to Upsell your B2B SaaS Product

By |2023-04-05T11:05:50+00:00July 12th, 2018|

topicIcon Sales

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Freemium 2 Premium- Lessons on How to Upsell your B2B SaaS Product header

You’re hovering over the ‘Enter’ button after filling out your email address for a SaaS free trial. “You know they’re probably gonna blast you with emails,” says Mindy Kaling’s Inside Out voice in the back of your mind. For the past two months, I’ve managed to get Mindy out of my head by signing up to 100+ B2B SaaS free plans and trials. But why?

I signed up to a total of 100 trials. Those included some for some of the most recognizable tools (think Slack and Mailchimp) along with some up-and-coming SaaS products to study and understand some of the best practices when creating a marketing automation strategy to turn free users into paid customers. This process called upselling, is like inbound marketing on steroids, since technically these prospects are already in your court, using your technology. Their intent is clear and it’s now up to you to prove your product’s value and make sure they get the most out of it. Unlike investing time and energy into attracting new leads, free users are already enjoying your tool and hopefully also sharing it with their teams.

Funnily enough though, while upselling freemium to premium plans may seem like fishing in your backyard, marketers from companies big and small are still struggling with how they can best approach this unique group of users to get to them to buy paid plans. Through my research I found some interesting tactics I wanted to share with you that I hope will help you step up your ‘Freemium 2 Premium’ upselling strategy. Let’s get started.

The Research Methodology

I signed up for the Top 50 and most popular digital marketing tools, and another 50 lesser known tools and tracked their upselling strategy to document the total number of emails sent, verification/welcome email, retention email, and whether or not a sales member reached out via phone.

The results are spread out throughout this article to showcase how their strategies differ, but it’s interesting to note that the same upselling tactics were applied among all 100 tools. In fact, in many cases, the lesser known 50 companies are doing more than their more recognizable counterparts to turn freemium users into paying customers.

Pick a Plan (and be clear about it)

Before we even get into the upselling automation sequences, an important word about picking a freemium plan. Throughout my research, the most common free plans used by SaaS companies include “Free Forever”, 14-day trials, and 30-day trials.

common free plans used by SaaS companies

Free Forever proves to be the most popular across the board, which may be due to its ability to allow users to enjoy the product without the feeling they’ll lose their progress on the platform in a matter of weeks. On the company’s end, it’s also great since it allows your team to continuously nurture users into becoming paid members over time. Free forever plans also allow you to advertise and encourage members to scale their plan, as they scale their company. Kind of a win-win for everyone.

Trial plans offer a chance for users to get the full effect of your product, which can sometimes be missed with a bare-boned Free Forever plan. As mentioned above though, it can be tricky to have users fall in love with your tool, only to be forced to choose between eradicating their progress or paying up to use it on a monthly or years basis.

One last note. Far too often when I was signing up for free plans, websites had flashy CTA buttons like “Start for free” or “Create Free Account”. When I clicked to sign-up, the landing page gave no indication as to what kind of freemium plan I was getting myself into. Was this a Free Forever plan, a trial, a demo? Be sure to be clear with your new users. Bad communication from the get-go is no way to start a new relationship.

 

The Welcoming Committee

No matter what kind of freemium plan you’re running, be sure to send a welcome email. This might seem like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many SaaS companies just started sending me eBooks or guides on how to use their product. That being said, there are many ways to write a compelling welcome email. Here are a few.

  1. Offer a quick demo video – Getting started with a new tool can be daunting especially if you don’t have the time to play around with it. By including a quick demo (1-5 minutes) of your product, you can help your users get up and running in no time.
  2. Point out support centers – If you have a community page, a Slack channel, a knowledge base, or an FAQ page, be sure to add those links in this email. Customer success (and the desire to take users to the next paying level) is reliant on customer support. You can also offer one-on-one support using a call scheduling tool like Calendly or Book Like a Boss.
  3. Highlight benefits of your product – Everyone enjoys feeling like they made a good decision, so be sure to excite new members about all the ways using your product will change the way they do business. Highlight added benefits over features to show your new users how your product will meet (and maybe even exceed) their needs.

Surprisingly, the lesser known 50 companies sent more welcome/verification emails at 88% compared to the 86% coming from the Top 50.

By The Numbers

Surprisingly, the lesser known 50 companies sent more welcome/verification emails at 88% compared to the 86% coming from the Top 50.

On average, the Top 50 companies sent 6.18 total emails, and the lesser known 50 sent 4.32 emails throughout the cycle to try turn me into a premium customer.

Out of the 100 companies that I signed up for, only 8 total made the effort to pick up the phone and call me. You don’t need to be good at math to realize that’s only 8%. Phone calls can make all the difference in making a first impression and lasting connection. 

Some Notes on Nurturing

The goal of your Freemium 2 Premium sequences is to help, help, and then help some more. Yes, you want the free users to pick a paid plan, but the way to do it (as always in inbound) isn’t to harrassingly sell, but to offer value throughout their path to purchase. Here are some ways to offer support and encouragement during their test drive:

  1. Call them! Many of the freemium landing pages I filled out asked me for my phone number. If you can ask for this information and follow through with phone calls by your sales and/or customer success teams — do it! During my research, I even got a call from Salesforce saying they noticed I filled out that I worked in Tel Aviv, and invited me to go to a meetup of theirs that was scheduled to happen the following week. Offering a personalized experience on the phone is the best way to build a relationship and it’s not cold calling since they willingly gave you their info.Out of the 100 companies that I signed up for, only 8 total made the effort to pick up the phone and call me. You don’t need to be good at math to realize that’s only 8%. Phone calls can make all the difference in making a first impression and lasting connection.
  2. Webinars – 15% of my experimentees offered at least one webinar during their nurturing sequence. Some of them were product-centric (e.g. ‘Sell smarter and faster with X CRM’) while others were just helpful know-how (e.g. ‘The power of customer support data to drive executive product decisions’). Whether live or recorded, webinars can be an asset in educating users about your brand, tool, and expertise.
  3. Tips & Tricks – Your Freemium 2 Premium campaign is all about showing free users the inside scoop on how best to use your product. Here’s an example from Evernote that I loved.

  1. Short and to the point, Evernote shows you some special, lesser-known shortcuts to make sure you’re maximizing your time to get work done. These tidbits can get users reinspired to give your product another shot or take their current experience to the next level.
    • Personalization – When filling out the landing pages to sign up for free membership, I got asked endless questions about myself, my company, and my industry. I complied in hopes I’d see some killer personalization in the email drip; honing in on my details to offer me that tailormade email feeling. For the most part though, I didn’t see any of those personalization tokens other than my name and the occasional company name drop. Lesson to be learned: Be sure to do this right by creating automated workflows based on user information criteria. A little personalization goes a long way in helping you stand out.
    •  Trigger based emails – this is a very core aspect that can make or break the success of your nurturing campaigns. Make sure to map out typical user behavior on your SaaS and to send out triggered automated emails based on user behaviors or inactivity. This would be very different between each SaaS but here are some best practices to pay attention to and things to consider when strategizing this part:
      • Reaching any type of free user cap – you can email them to let them know they’re nearing their cap and once again once they’ve reached it
      • “Users who do this usually do this next” – make the user aware of things they can do next based on what they’ve done
      • Inactivity – reach out after a certain timeframe to remind them how your product can help them and why they’ve signed up in the first place
      • Congratulate them when taking certain actions for the first time

      By being aware and tracking user behavior you can also segment users based on different criteria and prioritize sales calls to users who are more engaged and seem to show a high potential of upgrading.

Of the 31 companies in the Top 50 group where a breakup email was relevant (i.e. not a Free Forever plan), only 13 sent emails (42%). Of the 26 companies in the lesser known 50 group where a breakup email was relevant, only 8 sent an email. That’s just 31%.

Not including Free Forever plans that wouldn’t need a breakup, the lack of breakup emails to me was staggering. Let’s think of this as a relationship (since relationship building is the center of this nurturing effort). You meet a girl and you decide there might be something here, so you both agree to give it a try. Unfortunately though, this new partner hasn’t been available recently. Does that mean you just let it fade away? Sure, two can play the ghosting game but wouldn’t the common courtesy be to either offer closure, say there’s maybe not a fit here, and part ways as friends or make a royal gesture to get her to commit to trying again? The same goes for trial breakups. If you value your free users, don’t let them slip away without at least a goodbye.

With less than 50% of both groupings of companies sending breakup emails, they are missing a large opportunity for key retention strategies.

Here are some of the best goodbye tactics I’ve seen:

  1. Upgrade in style – There’s obviously the standard “Your Free Trial Has Ended. Upgrade Now to Access Your Data” email subject line. But what if you offered a little something extra? Throw in a discount or coupon for rewarding your users for stepping up their ante.
  2. Point out support centers…again – If a user did in fact get invested in your software and now they don’t have a way to access it, good chance they’re feeling stuck. Offer those support lifelines again to ensure they find a solution that best suits their needs.
  3. Link that success story – Opening this breakup email, users may be thinking, “is the upgrade really worth it?” By offering case studies that show similar companies (winning chance to work that industry personalization token) who have growth or saved money using your product, you’ll have a good chance at proving your paid plans are valuable in the long run.
  4. Offer a trial extension – I’ve seen this done various ways. I’ve seen the breakup email turned into a surprise offering of an additional 14-30 days right off the bat. Other times, there’s an opt-in email that asked users to email them back if they’d like their trial extended. Both are interesting openings to keep users engaged and start up a conversation to better understand their needs. Try A/B testing both and see what works best for your SaaS.
  5. Asking for feedback – When it comes to inbound marketing, we usually avoid asking for favors. In general our goal is to offer relevant value constantly, instead of asking for it. One of the few exceptions to this is asking for feedback. Many of my guinea pig Freemium 2 Premium companies asked for users to disclose if they ever used the tool during the trial, why they didn’t think it was for them, and if they had general feedback to help the companies do better in the future. I highly recommend this! If ex-users offer you some insight to help you improve, awesome! If they ignore you, no hard no foul. It was worth a shot.Once again, the lesser known 50 group of companies did a better job at trying to improve their product, with 14% of them asking for feedback. On the other hand, of the Top 50 companies, only 12% asked for feedback.

Conclusion

Freemium 2 Premium upselling is a great way to get paid users from a pool of people who are already using your product. When done right, it can be a powerful method to turn free members into brand ambassadors through education and a helpful hand. In addition to getting you paying users of course.

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Distributing B2B content and engaging on social media – this is how we do it

By |2023-04-05T11:07:26+00:00June 20th, 2018|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

DISTRIBUTING B2B CONTENT AND ENGAGING ON SOCIAL MEDIA header

As a B2B digital marketing agency, the content we produce is made for different position holders in businesses to read and gain value from. B2B content, if you will. This helps position our clients and gain relevant traction with a goal of turning strangers into leads and further on customers. The challenge of writing fresh, informative and educational content for such narrow audiences like business owners or managers, is rivaled only by the challenge of promoting that content via social media.

Creating viral content that spreads across the internet like wildfire, bringing in new leads in droves – oh boy, how intoxicating that sounds! But in reality, most of your content will (probably) never go viral. Especially if you’re creating B2B content.

As such, you’ll need to keep pushing it strategically and persistently ever so slightly, if you want your content to be seen to solve people’s problems and educate them while it’s at it. If you’re investing a lot of time in content and nobody sees it – what’s the point? (Of course there are other ways to generate traffic such as SEO and PPC but the former takes time and the latter isn’t always realistic due to budget restrictions).

This used to be almost an automatic process for us – the main platform we used to distribute in was LinkedIn, their API was wide open, we used to publish content on our client’s blogs and then with a click of a button, publish it in hundreds of LI groups. This used to generate about 30% of our clients’ traffic and it was also the higher quality better converting traffic. But those days are long over, LI shut down their API and going full blast on automated distribution is no longer possible. When this happened we found ourselves a bit helpless, we weren’t sure how to compensate for the large gap that we were facing in traffic. We knew we had to recalculate our social distribution route and do it wisely. In retrospect I’m glad that happened, I think this forced us to be more surgical in our social efforts and step up the quality of our output. Sometimes automation can be an agency’s worst enemy – we wouldn’t have realized the untapped potential we’re missing out on, because what we were doing was working for us.

(I’ve been told I might be uncovering too much internal info about our tactics but I believe in transparency and I’m happy to share this info. If you’re reading this and have any feedback about the process below – do reach out to me and let’s discuss.)

Be there to solve your audience’s problems, become their trusted advisor

When done right, social media is a leverage for creating genuine, meaningful relationships with your target audience. Really being there, reading their problems and offering relevant solutions through the content you’re providing. Building your brand on trust and cooperation.

What I’m about to show you further below is how we organize our social media distribution efforts. Which social media channels we picked, how we find (and keep finding) relevant discussions and individuals within those social media channels, how we distribute large quantities of content, how we stay certain the content we are sharing is relevant and addresses the reader’s pain points, and how we keep track of it all. It’s quite the task, mind you, but it’s not rocket science.

How to pick the right social media channels

Choosing the right social media involves a mix of analysis and common sense. Our first step is to take a look at the buyer persona we’re aiming for and to break down and see what these people are up to when they’re online. As a wild generalization corporate B2B readers (founders, CXOs, etc.) spend a lot of their time on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit and Quora. The common-sense part lies in the fact that these are some of the biggest, most popular and most active social media sites on the internet.

Here is an example of a buyer persona who is a large publisher:

 

Buyer Persona Profile

With a little digging, we managed to find quite a few groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. These were relatively big (from 1K to 20K and beyond) groups with a lively, vivid community that was sharing experiences, asking questions, solving roadblocks and cracking jokes on a daily basis. Looking for subreddits of similar topics also turned out fruitful. Quora was brimming with questions that our content could answer. It’s important to conduct such research each time you tackle a new buyer persona. Moreover, this research should be agile and ongoing – the idea is to hone the process and make sure you’re always present “where the party is happening”.

Pro tip: we also look into the top influencers the persona might be following in order to potentially tap into relevant conversations they’re leading online:

top-influencers

Choosing what to monitor (hint: focus is key)

Tracking all of the different conversations, posts and topics across the world wide web, even a handful of subreddits or LinkedIn groups is a Sisyphean task. What we needed was a way to automate looking for fresh and relevant conversations. So, we bought us a little magic – BuzzSumo (this is not an affiliate post, we’re not biased and there are probably other solutions out there, Google alerts for one. However we work on large scales and BuzzSumo is our tool of choice for the time being). The tool allows us to track either the entire internet (which I wouldn’t recommend for obvious reasons), or specific websites. So we did – we started tracking social media channels of our choice. We track for a number of different keywords that we researched and identified as relevant for the conversations that we were looking for.

There are a few types of keywords we track:

    • Keywords that we have written blog posts about (these are based on the content research we conduct when strategizing marketing funnels per our client’s buyer personas). This is an ongoing process, we make sure to update keywords for tracking after publishing new posts.
    • “Money keywords” – these are bottom of the funnel, high intent keywords of people looking for specific solutions such as our clients offer.
    • Brand searches – mentions of the brand.
    • Competitor alternative – basically we list all client competitors and monitor conversations where people are asking about “competitor alternatives”. This is mostly relevant for technology solutions. For example we’ve identified MailChimp as a competitor of one of our clients and thus we monitor conversations where people are asking about “MailChimp alternatives”. We’d then jump in and join the conversation and set it in our favor.

BuzzSumo

(screenshot from BuzzSumo)

Once you set up keywords to monitor, you start receiving steady streams of conversations happening on the platforms you’re monitoring. This typically ends up being Quora questions, Reddit posts and other publicly available social media conversations that were relevant to the content we were producing. Or rather, that we thought our content was relevant *for*.

Hitting our first roadblock

For the first few days of launching this strategy, everything was fine and dandy. BuzzSumo would send us an email digest with the relevant conversations, we’d read through, identify which piece of our content answers their troubles, prepare a short copy and post it (never just paste a link, always stop to consider what the most appealing and helpful answer is that you can provide). Sooner than later, though – troubles came knocking. We started getting warnings from all around that we’re being investigated for spam! Unless we wanted to do ourselves a huge bear’s favor (like, a really big bear, we’re talking grizzly meets Hulk kind of bear, here), we needed to make sure we’re not flooding people, we weren’t repeating ourselves and that we were 100% relevant.

We realized that we needed to start tracking our progress and evaluating it – immediately. So we turned to Google sheets, and employed a bit more magic here. We created this large, program-like document, where we’d add literally everything:

  • Which piece of our content we’re linking to
  • Who’s the buyer persona we’re addressing
  • Where we’re posting (which group)
  • What we’re posting (the actual post copy)
  • What feedback we got from the buyer persona
  • Who posted the answer
  • When it was posted

That way we could track everything and always make sure we’re not flooding a specific LinkedIn group or a subreddit. This way we’d also double check that the content we’re sharing is always (and I can’t stress this enough) super relevant to the thread or question in front of us. And perhaps most importantly, that way we’d see which pieces of our content were most interesting / sought after. We even split the task into two parts: offense and defense.

Offense is when we were the ones initiating the discussion. If we’d post a new thread on reddit, or a new question in a LinkedIn group, we’d log it into the offense tab, to keep track of it more easily. Defense is where we were tapping into already existing discussions, like reddit threads started by someone else, or Quora questions that hadn’t yet been answered properly.

Recaping the rewards

To recap, here’s what we did:

  1. Identified our target audience / buyer personas
  2. Identified social media channels where these people hang out
  3. Chose what keywords to monitor
  4. Found groups, subreddits and threads with questions to which our content had answers
  5. Prepared a highly detailed spreadsheet where we keep track what was posted, where, by whom, and to whom

This strategy helps us solve people’s problems, kickstart meaningful relationships and nurture strangers into customers. We position ourselves and our clients almost exactly where we want (we’re never fully satisfied) – as thought leaders, opinion-makers, but also a helping hand and the friendly, laid-back type. And that is something that money can’t buy.

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Top 5 Shifts Between HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017 and 2018

By |2023-04-05T11:08:30+00:00June 14th, 2018|

topicIcon Reporting

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Just last week, HubSpot published their annual State of Inbound global report. As a researcher at heart myself, I spent a fair amount of time gushing over the stats and content over the past few days; trying to make sense of where Marketing and Sales stand and their developing trends.

One of my biggest questions scrolling through the new report was how this report compares to the report for 2017. Sure, HubSpot spends 11 multicolored charts showing how trends in the field have shifted over the past 4 years, but I just felt like there was more I could find if I did the year to year comparison myself. So that’s exactly what I did. Comparing the 2017 global report and the newest 2018 report, left me with a lot of insight on just how much has changes between December 2016 and March 2018.

That being said, here are the top 5 changes in inbound marketing and sales not to be overlooked, what that means for this ever-changing field, and what we can expect in the year to come.

1) “Thinking specifically about inbound marketing projects, what are your company’s top priorities?”

Diving right in, let’s see how the world of inbound marketing priories has changed.

HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

 

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

Holding tight for first and second place in this category are respectively ‘Growing SEO/ organic presence’ and ‘Blog content creation’. It’s the third place spot that gets interesting. While in 2017 the Bronze winner for this question was ‘Content distribution/ amplification’, that got knocked down a notch on the roster to make room for ‘Marketing automation’.

So what’s going on here?

As I mentioned in my last post on AI and machine learning, automation is the future. According to Forrester’s recently published ‘Marketing Automation Technology Forecast’, they’re predicting that over the next five years there will be a 14 percent compounding annual growth rate in marketing automation spending. Seems like automation’s about to get big, fast. Making sure your stellar content is getting in front of the right people (or more accurately buyer personas) at the right time is crucial, but even more than that, marketing teams are learning now more than ever that they’ll need to use marketing automation to nurture their leads down their path to purchase. As great and helpful as content can be, if there’s no consistent follow up, you’re missing the boat to position yourself as a trusted problem solver for your prospects. This trend of marketing automation and AI is only bound to grow in 2018. So stay tuned.

2) “What are your company’s top sales priorities for the next year?”

Moving on to sales, we see something similar to what we saw in the marketing question above.

HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

It’s a no-brainer that the main priority of a sales team across time is ‘Closing more deals’. ‘Improving the efficiency of the sales funnel’, also seems to make sense to be found at the top of the list for both 2017 and 2018. The point of intrigue comes again at #3, ‘Social selling’ (2017’s pick) or ‘Reducing the length of sales cycle’ (2018’s pick).

So what’s going on here?

2017 was the year social selling for business was the hot topic. In this year’s report, it states that in 2016 9% of sales teams thought Facebook was a successful channel to connect with prospects. One year later, in 2017, that jumped to 12%. Interested in where that stat sits in 2018? It dropped down to 7%; showing even less successful than it was 2 years prior.

The future for social selling has become uncertain. Sure, you don’t need to an email address or a phone number to follow leads and interact with them on social, but is that the best way to talk about their pains, add value, and position your company as a thought leader? It’s unclear. I’m looking forward to see how well social selling does in the 2019 report. My guess is it might make a comeback due to the compliance of many companies to GDPR. Who knows? Social might just become more important than ever to engage and nurture leads.

3) “What is more difficult to do in sales compared to 2 to 3 years ago?”

Ah yes, a good, meta reflective question. Here’s what sales teams had to say the past couple of years to this question.

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

Telephone, telephone. Email, email. So far so good. Wait — what? What channels fall into the 15% of what 2017 surveyors referred to as ‘Other’ channels? Nevertheless, it’s good to know that LinkedIn is really on the ups when it comes to channels to be investing your time in.

So what’s going on here?

There’s no denying that when it comes to business, especially B2B, LinkedIn has been and will most probably always be the social channel where professions connect, learn, and browse, all while wearing their business hats. Try to catch them on another platform, say Facebook, and there’s a good chance they’re not in the headspace to be thinking about business.

Another perk of LinkedIn is the seemingly endless possibilities of what you can do to marketing and sell using this channel. I love this guide from HubSpot on ways you can do more business on LinkedIn. Read it, learn it, and use it to start generating leads in the post-GDPR age.

5) “Do you feel that your organization’s marketing strategy is effective?”

Different from the Gold, Silver, Bronze analysis we’ve been doing up until now, I almost overlooked this these bar charts.

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017)

(HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018)

If you’re confused why these charts are set up differently from each other, not to worry. I made a sweet table of my own to help you make sense of the data.

2017 report 2018 report Difference over time
Inbound/ Effective 68% 75% +7%
Inbound/ Ineffective 32% 25% -7%
Outbound/ Effective 48% 62% +14%
Outbound/ Ineffective 52% 38% -14%

So what’s going on here?

Inbound is clearly the winner of the marketing strategy competition and its power only seems to be growing. The interesting part of this is that outbound seems to have made significant advancements in effectiveness compared to last year. So the obvious questions staring us in the face is, why? Talking it over with our data wiz and account manager Nick Kenton, we came to the conclusion that maybe we’ve just gotten smarter at how to do outbound. In the past year with the rise of outbound marketing and sales tools like SimilarTech and Drift, we’ve been about to create more personalized and targeted outbound efforts than ever before. Something tells me we can expect to see more technology like these pop up in the second half of 2018 and into 2019.

Conclusion

The HubSpot State of Inbound report is the pulse that helps marketers and salespeople around the world understand how they fair compared to other professionals in the field. It’s always important to note though that these stats don’t come in a vacuum, but are a reflection of the times we live in and how the world of inbound is changing quickly around us. The better we can tap into trends today, the better off we’ll be at predicting the trends of tomorrow.

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5 must watch TED Talks for Inbound Marketing

By |2023-04-05T11:09:02+00:00May 30th, 2018|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

5 must watch TED talks for Inbound Marketing header

I love talks. They inspire, they tell a story, they emerge you in a journey. The best of these are TED Talks. I love how freely available they are to watch online on YouTube or directly from TED. I have been following TED Talks for quite some time now, I even read the book by Chris Anderson on how to give a TED Talk. The talks are like a time capsule where you can learn from the very best. A lot of it is evergreen content too, so what they spoke about then is just as relevant today. It’s like listening to Mozart but exactly how Mozart played it and how he intended it and everyone still loves Mozart in 2018! In this post I have collected my 5 must see TED Talks for inbound marketing which I find most insightful for marketing today.

1. Simon Sinek: Great Leaders Inspire

This is one of the greatest marketing talks not just for companies but for us as individuals as well. In it we learn how everything should start with “Why”. Once you know this, then you can get your customers, your staff, and suppliers to believe in what you believe. For me this tops everything else an organization is trying to do. You can provide a bad service, you can provide a bad product, but if you have a great “Why” then customers will forgive you, at least in the short to medium term. Virgin counted on this when they launched Virgin planes. The product was poor, but people believe in Branson and his vision to eventually deliver something of value for the people, and that’s why people put up with it in its early days and in doing so helped it to become the huge success it is today. The customers reward, a market leading product a few years later. We talk a lot in inbound marketing about personalization, nurturing, and communicating better with customers. If you can get your “Why” correct you are over half way there. Join the 40 million others and watch the full video here:

2. Renny Gleeson: The story of a page not found

This short story is a small gem about the problem of the page not found. By having a great 404 page it can mean a lot to any business. The 404 page is about fixing a broken relationship between your customers and your website. It’s about using 404 to build your brand, removing the frustration of a customer arriving at the page in error, and instead making it a positive experience for them to send them on their way again to another page on your website. 404 is content, it should feel personal and it’s a great opportunity to showcase your inbound content. Renny gives a very succinct explanation of best practice and how important a 404 is and how it can help build your brand. Watch it here:

 

3. Seth Godin: How to get your ideas to spread

Great insights into how to get your company and products out there. Some great examples about the 15 year failure of sliced bread that no one wanted encapsulates the idea that you can have the best product in the world but without the right content marketing you get nowhere. You can talk about TV advertising or paid media, but interrupting adverts don’t work as well as it used to.

Although the talk happened in 2003 some 15 years ago, the points are all very relevant today. To go slightly further than Seth, interrupting ads don’t work because they are too general, people want a personalised message for their bespoke problem. Also you now need to be found by customers through searching and not through interrupting such as on TV. Seth talks about marketing to the geeks and not the majority. The geeks are the ones with questions, and searching for new solutions. What is important is they then tell everyone what they found. The majority on the other hand just wants to ignore you.

The next step is once you talk to the early adopters (geeks) you need to be remarkable and to do this you need to find out what people want and give it to them. Sounds familiar? This is what inbound marketing is. Giving people something of value, something they want to try or learn, then they will tell others.

Join 6M other viewers and watch the full talk here:

4. Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing

This talk’s about Newton’s law and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and how it relates to marketing, but what is the most interesting thing is what comes at 4 minutes into the talk. Dan calls it “The Scientific Method”. This basically says that you can’t use stats and data to prove a theory, you can only use it to disprove it.

What makes this so useful to inbound marketing is it means you can spend a lot of time with SEO and content marketing telling everyone how great you are and how you solve a problem for them, but it only takes one bad week and one mistake to disprove that theory for your customers which can quickly unravel all your hard work.

This means two things, firstly don’t make mistakes, and secondly plan ahead for how you can resolve and fix those mistakes as quickly as you can. Think about what mistakes can happen in advance when everything is calm and focused, and work out all your options for when mistakes happen and what the scale of those mistakes might be. If you know there is a flaw in your product, don’t just hope it won’t be discovered, plan for it, and focus on personalised solutions to delight customers. This will make it a positive experience. If all else fails, align your organisation around the “why” as Simon Sinek says in his Ted Talk mentioned above and customers may be more forgiving.

Having this crisis management strategy in place before the mistake occurs means you can act swiftly and correctly to keep your inbound marketing on track even if you have a bad week and your product or service is slightly disproved.

You can watch Dan’s full talk here:

5. Will Stephen: How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk

This is one of my favorite talks. Watch it, listen to every word and learn nothing. There are no useful facts, no insightful stories, in fact after you watch it, I doubt you will remember anything in it. So why is it a TED Talk and why is it so important for inbound marketing?

When you watch it you will see that value can be given in many ways. In this talk value is given by it being interesting, fun, different, entertaining, but most of all it’s about how you say things rather than what you say.

If the content you write is boring, if its too complicated, it doesn’t matter what value you think it offers it will be lost and render the content useless. The key to providing value in your content is not just informing people, it is also how you talk to them and about branding. Every word, every sentence, and the style you write, conveys your brands image and makes a big impact on your customers perception of what your brand is. A serious blog post, means your company is serious. A funny blog post means your company is funny. A complicated blog post, means well your product is complicated and you probably won’t get how to use it either.

While Will does a great job in his TED Talk, I will spell out exactly what it means for inbound marketing. Don’t let the content, the stats, the solving the problem be the entirety of what you write about. How you tell the message is most important. So before you write any new piece of content, think about how you want to talk to your customers in terms of layout, jargon, length etc. and then write it down and use it for every post going forward so that all your content is based on these parameters.

To watch the full talk from Will and help increase the views beyond the 6M it currently has watch it here:

 

Wrap up

There is a lot you can learn from TED Talks. The ones mentioned here provides great insights and different viewpoints for inbound marketing. From understanding the why, to 404 (page not found), to physics, this is just the start. Inbound is all about creating something of value, making it personal, with the intention to create relationships. I hope these talks gives you new ways to think about your inbound marketing efforts. The only thing left is to ask yourself which insights are you going to act on first and which TED Talk is next on your list?

 

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Marketing is about to get weird – AI Marketing with Jim Sterne

By |2023-04-05T11:09:31+00:00May 23rd, 2018|

topicIcon Marketing Automation

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Marketing is about to get weird- AI Marketing with Jim Sterne-1

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to go to one of Israel’s largest annual marketing conferences: All Things Data. The first speaker up was Jim Sterne, a “professional explainer” and the author of 12 books (and counting). His newest book and the topic of the lecture was “Artificial Intelligence for Marketing”, a daunting way to start my morning since data science, math, and coding are far from my vernacular of know-how.

Lucky for me, Jim must have foreseen that look in my eyes and the eyes of about 100 or so other marketers sitting in the room. So he started from the beginning.

The Basics of AI

Artificial intelligence (before we go into what it has to do with marketing), can be broken into 5 sections:

  1. Robots – Probably the most well known form of AI from the movies, robots nowadays are doing things that I can’t even imagine doing myself. Like this backflip for example.

  1. Face recognition – We’ve already seen this used both in the movies and IRL to sign in to portals, as well as knowing which friends to tag in photos on Facebook.
  2. Natural Language Processing – Think of your friends Siri, Alexa, or a bot. They can take words you type or speak, make sense of what you’re saying (or at least trying to say), and offer you a response based on your requests.

4.Computer vision – Now, imagine you give a computer a set of laws about what a chihuahuas looks like. Now try to give the computer this picture game below, with a mix of chihuahuas and muffins. As humans, this is pretty funny, and while it may take us a second to look at each picture closely, we’ll most likely ace this test. A computer? Well a computer may be faster at spitting back answers, but they can be pretty bad at these sorts of puzzles. But they’re slowly getting better due to…

5.Machine learning – This is the part of AI that allows machines to learn from their mistakes (something us mere moral are still grappling with). Let’s break down how machines do it.

 

 

3 Needs for 3 Deeds

This next part of the presentation is what Jim referred to as “3 needs for 3 deeds”. When I was jotting down my notes during the presentation, I ended up making a table that looked a little something like this:

3 Needs 3 Deeds
Data Detect
Goal Decide
Control Revise

Let’s make sense of my scribbles. In order for machines to be good learners, they’re gonna need a lot of data. Lucky for machines, we live in the era of overwhelming amounts of “Big Data”. Unlucky for machines, most of the data we have is messy. So we’ll need to clean that up so it can be used by the computer properly.

But data with no goal, is mostly pointless. Think of the computer asking you, “based on the data you gave me, what would you like me to figure out?” You answer or goal can be anything from, “let’s detect which of these cells are cancerous” to “should this automatic car stop, go, or yield?”, or in the case of marketing, “which of these people should view this ad?”. Based off the goals you set, the computer will then be sent on its way to make sense of all the data in front of it, reder which of the data is important in completing its task, and then using that data to find a solution. For our last example of a goal relating to ad placement, the computer may use pieces of data such as time spent on a website, number of pages viewed, previous purchases, and things of that nature in order to determine who should see a 15% off coupon ad.

Once the machine starts trying to accomplish a goal, you can offer it the control to, you guessed it, detect, decide, and revise what data was helpful in its mission, what it can do without, and what other pieces of data may be beneficial in completing the task. Going back to our example, the computer might learn based on real-time responses that visitors chosen to see the ad should spend more time on the website and have viewed fewer pages in order to receive the pop-up offer.

The Machine’s learning curve

Just like people, machines have different ways in which they can learn, each coming with their own pros and shortcomings. Let’s take a look.

  1. Supervised – In supervised learning, we offer the computer a training crash course where we offer it a specific data set’s input and correct output. This is explicit so it’s a great way for a computer to learn, but it can sometimes be tedious to have a human organize these data sets and babysitting their progress.
  2. Unsupervised – This is where Jim started talking about correlation and causation. In these kinds of learning models, we don’t offer the machine ‘right answers’. We leave it up to the machine to find and create categories based on data we’ve given them. Maybe a machine will look a crowd of people and divide them up as men vs. women, or those wearing hats vs. those who aren’t. You get the idea.
  3. Reinforcement – Anyone who ever took an Intro to Psychology course learned about human reinforcement and remember something about a rat and a lever. This one’s kinda similar. Here, machines are given data, a goal, a ‘lever’ of what they choose to do as behavior with the given information, and lastly are given feedback (although not always instantly) on if their behavior was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in order to learn better for next time.

AI for marketers

Throughout the talk, Jim mentioned numerous ways in which AI is beginning to play a big part in how we do marketing. For starters, he talked about x.ai, a scheduling bot that will send emails for you to help you tee-up, reschedule, or even cancel meetings for you.

Another cool example of companies harnessing AI is GumGum V.I., a company which uses computer vision to scan BILLIONS of photos across TV, online stream, and social media to ones relevant to your brand. The company can then give you serious insights on what campaigns work best in regards to gender, household income, time of day, top performance verticals, etc.

So what else can AI do better than human marketers? Jim gave a pretty nice list of marketing tasks we can hand over to ML, including testing, lead scoring, personalizing content (something I love doing with HubSpot Sales), inbound email sorting, social media monitoring (think Hootsuite), and many others.

Wrapping up

Going to All Things Data, I had the thrill of listening Jim, a man who’s seen in the marketing arena move from the streets, into digital, and now to AI. Walking in, I had a good feeling I was going to be lost in a sea of data for an hour, only to walk out dumbfounded and more confused than ever. Instead, I learned from Jim that AI is not only something that can be tangible to the average marketer, but is something we are already seeing before our very eyes come to life.

 

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Top Team Collaboration Tools

By |2023-04-05T11:10:01+00:00May 21st, 2018|

topicIcon Blog

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

The rise of collaboration tools has made email look just as slow as the old snail mail did back in its early days. Nowadays, team efforts, mobile devices and the need for flexibly available workforce (often home-based) made collaboration tools an essential component of any business effort which relies on cooperation, speed and keeping team members up to date with any development. While stressing collaboration by their very name, these tools are just as excellent platforms for people who prefer to work on their own, as they make it easier to fit an individual’s output into the larger business puzzle at the end of the day. All of this makes it worthwhile to give you the hottest in team collaborations tools on the market and make your selection process easier and better informed.

Asana

  1. Image credit: AsanaAsana is particularly close to our hearts, as it is the collaboration tool we use in Bold (though we know most agencies go for slack). Sentimentality aside, it’s really a great tool as it allows us to customize projects and task fields at a pretty granular level. For example – a sophisticated editorial calendar keeping track of different clients, different types of content and different stages of editing (from content writer draft to client approval and all in between).Asana is all about staying up to date with the projects you work on – you can organize them as a list or a board, all the while enjoying streamlined communication between all of your team members. Asana covers all bases in terms of the features on offer, ranging from task assignment and prioritization to calendar management, all neatly packaged as part of user-friendly and eye pleasing interface with project templates. With this intuitive interface, you can easily design task lists for all of your projects, while the search function is something you’ll be grateful for once the number of these projects starts growing. With Asana, you can also set deadlines and announcements for team members who are also able to leave comments on whatever is posted as part of Asana’s workspace.Pros: intuitive interface, task management features
    Cons: might lack advanced communication capabilities

    Pricing: Premium $9.99 per user/month; Free version

Slack

Image credit: Slack

Slack is often called the big daddy of all collaboration tools, not just on the grounds that they started it first, but because of the number and robustness of its features. Just like Asana, it offers support for both desktop and mobile platforms. It provides a solution for direct communication between both individuals and groups of team members by means of instant messages as well as by increasingly popular video calls. Layering and organization of all tasks and human resources is easier with Slack’s conversation organizer which creates custom channels for all of your communication needs. These can include communications with people involved in specific projects only, conversing with team members in charge of specific fields (for instance, HR, IT support etc.) as well as casual chat. To round things up, Slack can be integrated with Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and other popular services.

We tried using it internally and have opted for Asana but we use slack with some of our clients and it’s pretty cool.

Pros: easy to use, great communication channels
Cons: can become addictive/distracting

Pricing: Standard $6.67 per user/month; Free version; Plus $12.50 per user/month

Trello

Image credit: YouTube

Despite having an interface which draws comparisons with solitaire, Trello is a full-blown solution for users who prefer getting the job done without all the bells and whistles of competing project management platforms. Trello operates as a noteboard, with team members’ tasks being organized like cards which you manipulate freely by dragging them between the lists you can create based on their level of completeness. Yes, it’s that simple, and both boards and lists can be divided based either on assigned persons or individually delegated tasks.

Feedback between team members is shared by leaving comments on cards, with provided support for various emojis. In addition, Trello can be integrated with popular apps such as Slack, Google Drive or Evernote. The free option is a bit limited, but it can hit just the right buttons with smaller teams. Not bad for a “solitaire”, right?

Pros: card-based interface, free version is competent
Cons: working with cards may not be to everyone’s liking

Pricing: Business class $9.99 per user/month; Free version; Enterprise $20.83 per user/month

G Suite

Image credit:Wikimedia Commons

Good old Google has its own horse in the collaborative tool race and it is its reliable G Suite platform. The suite includes support for Google Docs, Sheets and Calendar as well as Google Hangouts platform. It supports everything a team may need, such as SMS and instant messaging as well as video conferencing. All of these features can be accessed as built-in Chrome extensions, together with native support for Android and iOS.

Hangouts is easily integrated with Google Drive and other applications provided by Google. It comes with a cloud-based chat platform which makes it possible for users to share calendars as well as all types of documents among team members in real time. The same goes for sharing files on various platforms, such as desktops, tablets or mobile phones. Business users will also appreciate embedded data loss feature for Google Drive and Gmail which is a part of its Enterprise edition.

Pros: great integration with other Google-based platforms
Cons: features such as Slide or Sheets may lag behind competition

Pricing: Basic $5 per user/month; Business $10 per user/month; Enterprise $25 per user/month

Podio

Image credit: Podio

In the face of strong competition, Podio wants to beat its competitors by focusing on customizability and excellent mobile platform support. So, instead of offering you a fixed set of tools the developers think you may need for collaboration, Podio gives you what is essentially a sandbox environment in which you create your own tools and customize your workflow. You achieve this by essentially making your own apps within the platform. You can both organize and give name to various work stacks, in addition to distributing tasks among team members. Podio offers quality communication features, which function well paired with its highly customizable and modular interface. It will give you a comprehensive overview of what goes on with your projects, as well as of any feedback given in relation to its individual stages. Podio can be integrated with Evernote, Dropbox and Google Drive.

Pros: high customizability, excellent mobile support
Cons: supported level of customizability takes getting used to

Pricing: Basic $9 per user/month; Free version; Plus $14 per user/month

Flock

Image credit: Flock

Flock posits itself as a fiery and more accessible competitor of the hugely popular Slack. For starters, it gives no ground when it comes to offering the same features you would expect from better established players in the market. These include audio and video calls, text chats and screen sharing, as well as the ability to set projects, teams and tasks according to your deadlines and workflow.

Flock includes standard collaboration tools, with features such as team member tagging in comments, creation of to-do lists and support for uploading and sharing of documents, image-based or video files. Group discussion is also supported, together with the ability to set deadlines and related reminders, as well as sending email alerts. Finally, Flock promises to get any task done just as well as others (or even better) at a highly competitive price, which is no small consideration in planning for its purchase.

Pros: offers the same features as big players
Cons: interface could use some tweaks

Pricing: Pro Plan $3 per user/month, Free version; Enterprise pricing available on request

 

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7 time and task management tools for startups

By |2023-04-05T11:10:47+00:00April 30th, 2018|

topicIcon Blog

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

The demands of modern day workplaces can be quite taxing for both managers and their subordinates, as even advanced bio-machines such as human brains can sometimes have trouble keeping track of all the tasks that need to be taken care of. You can try to juggle every task at the same time, only to end up having all of them crash around you like the spinner’s plates at the circus. This is why you need technology to lend you its helping hand. That help can come in form of task manager software which can handle the majority of workflow aspects, such as those pesky deadlines, team members organization, document sharing and keeping track of budget and communication. Let’s have a look at some of the best task manager platforms out there.

1. Trello

Image credit: Flickr

If there is a task manager software that can be described as a fan favorite, Trello is the most likely candidate for the title. It offers a whole range of plans to its users, ranking from free to paid ones ($9.99/month per user for business class and $20.83/month for enterprise plan).

Even in its free version, Trello offers a lot in terms of visual organization of tasks based on the Kanban project management system. All of these tasks can be designed as units which you can split your project into. Once the tasks are assigned, they can be easily edited and expanded with detailed descriptions, lists, boards, labels and progress checklists. File attachments are supported as well.

Finally, its trump card are power-ups which offer additional functionalities you can add to individual cards. These include supported compatibility with Google Drive, MailChimp or Evernote. Business plan removes the limit on the number of these you can have, while the Enterprise edition will easily find itself at home with large corporate-level teams.

2. Asana

Image credit: PCMag

Asana’s inclusion among the task manager platforms can be seen as controversial, as it mainly functions as a collaboration tool with the focus on workflow management. Yet, it also handles task management with ease and style, making its inclusion here a perfectly logical choice. Asana offers both free and premium plans, with both of these versions offering quality support for handling dependencies, tasks and subtasks, progress tracking, custom field design and customizable dashboards. Bear in mind that the free version will limit the use of some of these features, but even as such it remains a powerful solution.

Asana does not offer time-tracking or Gantt charts as features that some came to associate with large project management, but what it lacks in this department it easily makes up for with easy integration with other platforms. This means that literally nothing prevents you from using Asana in combination with Slack, GitHub or Trello, as well as with Chrome-based or time tracking apps.

3. Wunderlist

Wunderlist inbox

Image credit: Flickr

Wunderlist is designed with one goal in mind: making task management accessible. Yes, it’s quite possible to have too much of a good thing when it comes to included features, and Wunderlist realizes that sometimes you just want to get the job done. Free edition is available, while Wunderlist Pro will cost you $4.99/month per user. The software focuses on lists which are used for the management of projects, teams, individual members, tasks etc. To this purpose, it offers a wide selection of communication options, as well as support for file sharing and exchange.

4. DropTask

DropTask

Image credit: TechCrunch

If Wunderlist wants to charm you with the focus on the most essential features, DropTask wants to do the same with its penchant for stylish visual presentation. This does not mean that the interface is cluttered with excessive design elements – on the contrary, it’s based on the drag-and-drop system and allows for getting quick insights into managed tasks and processes. Its Kanban-based organization system includes progress tracking and status, summary of daily activities, handling of task dependencies and others. Finally, there’s the ability to integrate DropTask with various third party applications you may find useful. Just bear in mind that the free plan includes a limitation of the number of projects and team members one can have, while the business version removes these at the monthly fee of $8.25.

5. Wrike

Wrike

Image credit: PCMag

Wrike online task manager platform wants to stand out among the competitors by focusing on attractive storage and file exchange features. It also has many high end clients it can boast of, such as Western Union or L’Oreal, if that’s an important criterion in your consideration. Potentially more important information is that it offers its free edition for use with no more than five users, with extensive support for shared boards, dynamic management of timelines and breaking down of tasks. The professional plan comes with the price of $9.80/month per user, for up to 15 of them, with expanded support for 15 GB of video uploads and 5 GB of general storage. In addition to this, it will give you access to advanced analytical and time tracking options compared to the free version.

6. Any.do

Any Do

Image credit: DigitalProductMarketer

Any.do describes itself as a life management and productivity application, which is just a fancy way of saying that it will handle task management jobs you may throw at it just as easily. It boasts user-friendly and clean interface which allows for easier overseeing and management of tasks. In order to streamline this, you can assign a team member to a role of an administrator or supervisor for any particular task. The native application which comes together with the software offers access to an AI assistant which can help you define priorities as you go. Finally, Any.do wants to extend its accessibility to the financial field as well, with price going as low as $2.99/month per user for its professional version.

7. Hitask

Hitask

Image credit: Flickr

Hitask is yet another task manager platforms focused on business applications. Its free plan option includes support for unlimited projects and tasks for up to five users. The package includes support for shared task lists, calendar and projects. Yet, at the price of $4.98/month per user, the things just get better with support for much needed unlimited storage and email. In addition, its calendar can be synced with both Google and Outlook. Hitask is based on the Getting Things Done (GTD) platform for handling tasks, which includes color coding, tagging and division of tasks. All of these features can be easily managed via an integral dashboard whose main screen gives you insight into the nitty-gritty of each of managed project, deadline and individual task at one place.

 

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HUG Tel Aviv GDPR Recap: Laughs, Facts, & Drones

By |2023-04-05T11:11:17+00:00April 26th, 2018|

topicIcon Blog

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

HUG Tel Aviv GDPR Recap: Laughs, Facts, & Drones header

You can just imagine it: a room packed wall to wall with 200+ marketers, salespeople, CEOs, and professionals quietly awaiting their online fate. Once May 25th rolls around, GDPR will have changed the way we interact with prospects and customers in the EU forever.

Lucky for all who sat in that room of the HubSpot User Group (HUG) Tel Aviv meetup on Monday, they were able to walk away with answers on what GDPR is and how best to prepare for the changes needed to be made ahead. Here’s a taste of some of the main highlights for the event!

Part #1: Amit Lavi (CEO, Marketing Envy) gives opening remarks

We started off with the basics. GDPR, simply put, is the reality that in order to protect the privacy of EU members (fun fact on that in a second), three policies must be enforced:

  1. You need a good reason to collect data
  2. You need to store said data in a safe and lawful way
  3. You need to allow people to delete their data from your system.

Setting in the 6 stages of coping with GDPR (shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), you can rest assured that if you’re a HubSpot user, they’ve done their job in order for you to be ready on time for these laws to come into effect. Keep in mind, this applies to all EU passport holders, including those are who aren’t sitting on European soil.

The word of the day was easily ‘consent’. You need it for your cookies (in all languages), allowing others to download your content, and you’ll need to keep a record of all of your censenting transactions. For example, say you go to a conference in France. Gone are the days of asking for a business card and follow up when you get back to the office. You’ll now need some way to record the experience that the business card was handed to you with the consent of the other party that you mean to use it to follow up about collaborations, sales, and well just about everything else. While Amit was sure to keep us laughing and on our toes, he concluded that GDPR is no laughing matter and those looking for advice on the topic should consider speaking to a lawyer to understand how GDPR will affect their business come May.

Amit Lavi (CEO, Marketing Envy)

 

Part #2: Sinead Goggin (Senior Channel Account Manager, HubSpot)

So if GDPR stops sales team from buying lists and cold calling/ emailing EU members, sounds like there’s a lot of sales teams who are going to need a serious huddle. But before you book a time to panic together and think of what else you can do to generate leads, it may be worth inviting some marketing team members to join the party.

Sinead Goggin came in from HubSpot Ireland (the company’s European HQ) in order to discuss “Smarketing” or the alignment of your company’s sales and marketing efforts. The truth of the matter is, 54% more leads are generated by inbound efforts so these teams ideally should be in constant communication. Common language, united goals and a seamless strategy should be your first steps in getting the best leads into the marketing funnel and teed up for sales for further nurturing and conversion.

Still not convinced? 60% of the sales cycle is over before a prospect even talks to a salesperson because they’re already “sold” on what they see on a company’s website and social networks. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we all be investing more on top of the funnel content? By forming a strong alliance, marketing and sales can generate 20% more growth for a company, while a misalignment can result in a 4% decrease in annual revenue. You do the math.

In the age of GDPR, one thing is for certain. By creating a service level agreement (SLA) between your marketing and sales teams, you can begin to share a common language, plan out an end-to-end inbound strategy, and measure and report for optimal growth.

Sinead Goggin (Senior Channel Account Manager, HubSpot)

Part #3: Noa Eshed (co-CEO, Bold Digital Architects) chairs a GDPR expert panel

First of all, let’s talk about this all-star lineup. Gali Arad Kovacs (Senior Marketing Manager, Netapp), Lior Etgar (Tulchinsky Stern Marciano Cohen Levitski & Co., Law Offices), Shahar Maor (Information Security Manager, Outbrain), Omer Shmueli (VP of Legal Affairs, Como), and Eli Zilberman Caspi (Partner and Head of Data Privacy & GDPR, Konfidas) joined Noa on the main stage to discuss the ramifications of GDPR on marketing and beyond.

When Noa opening up the panel with the question, “How do companies start understanding what to do?”, Omer jumped in on the mic to utter the words that precisely set the stage for the rest of the panel. “It’s a very complex question,” he began. “First the good news, that GDPR is a kind of an opportunity, it’s not a risk or threat. If you’re bringing enough value to your customers, then your end users will be willing to pay with their data.” The bad news? GDPR can be minefield he says. Once you’ve collected data, it can be hard to find your way out of the data that you’re already holding.

So what did the lawyer of the group have to say about all of this? Lior made it clear that first and foremost, you need to offer what he called an “open approach”. As a company, it’s critical to have management awareness, and their commitment to make it happen. Like any other project or regulation that needs to be implemented, be sure to all have your resources and technical measures in place. Do that, and you’ll find everything will go more smoothly.

 

Another moment of reassurance came from Eli, who explained that, “it’s not written in GDPR that you can or cannot do an action that you do today, but there are new rules to these actions. The basic rule of profiling is that you have to have a clear handshake between you, the company, and the ‘data subject’ [the client]”. In short, by becoming compliance and transparent, you can explain that you’re following what they’re doing in order to offer the most personalized experienced possible.

What should you be doing with those data subjects in your CRM? Shahar stepped in to talk about data retention policies. When he first got to the digital marketing team at Outbrain, they insisted they couldn’t delete old leads since they wanted the opportunity to retarget them in the future. So what is the best practices on how long to keep leads around for in your CRM? According to his team’s research, “24 months is more than enough…because higher engagement comes from fresh leads and those who interact with your system.”

Last but certainly not least, Gali was there to shed insight on how to begin shifting through your potentially thousands of CRM leads and get ready for the big day. “Start auditing. Start looking at all your forms. Start looking at the disclaimers that you have. Change them, add them if you don’t have them…increase the opt-in tactics that you’re doing on your website.”

Looking for more insights on GDPR? You can watch the entire video here. If you want to see the answers to specific questions Noa asked, click ‘SHOW MORE’ on the YouTube page to see the breakdown by question and timestamp.

HUG Tel Aviv GDPR Recap: Laughs, Facts, & Drones

 

Wrapping up

Following the panel, Amit come back to offer some more action points to consider such as forgoing obsolete practices like buying lists, being sure to withdraw consent when adding new contacts to your CRM, and offering easy and granular opt-out. All in all, it was a great event with expert speakers, an inquisitive crowd, and one lucky winner who won the raffle for a Flying Spider drone. Looking forward to the next HUG Tel Aviv in Q3!

 

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How to Write a Killer Blog Post

By |2023-04-05T11:11:48+00:00April 2nd, 2018|

topicIcon Content Marketing Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

How to Write a Killer Blog Post

Every businesses and entrepreneur dreams of writing great content that engages, inspires, and activates readers to do, try or learn something new. In an inbound marketing world, getting this right can put you on the fast track to organically driving up your traffic volumes to your website, as well as driving increased awareness of your brand and in turn more sales. It can also position you and your brand as a thought leader strengthening your credibility in what you do or offer.

This works wonders for speeding up your nurturing process to help your potential customers through their personal buyer’s journey as quickly and safely as possible from awareness, consideration and then decision.

The only problem is while many try to write content that is great, not everyone succeeds. To help put you on the right track here is our style guide for creating what we like to call a “Killer blog post”.

Structure:

You need to provide content that is Interesting, Valuable and Focused. This is what we call the “I, V, F” for your blog baby. To begin this process, the best tip I can give you is to start by creating an outline. You have your title, and an idea of what you want to say, now map out the structure with clear headings and short bullet points. You should aim for it to be about half a page in length. The outline will help you pin point the exact areas you want to talk about and exactly what you think your audience will want to read more of. Spend time creating this as it will pay huge dividends when you come to write it by keeping you on the IVF path.

To help you build the structure, make sure you research your topic area for any gaps in knowledge you might not be aware of. If you know your topic area well, one great approach is to write the structure first, then google around your topic/title to see if there is anything you may have missed and then add these in. This is a great way to keep your post well informed and original.

If you don’t know your topic area well, it can be difficult to write any outline at first, so the more you can read about it before you write or plan anything, the better. Also keep notes of any external content you found interesting by writing down web links so you can find it later if you need to.

 

Intro:

Capture, engage, excite, intrigue and amaze. These are all the effects your introduction should have on your audience. The introduction should only be a few lines with the sole purpose of giving a brief insight into the benefits and value your post will bring to your audience. It’s not going to be easy to write a great intro, it’s an art, and the more you focus and try, the better and easier it will be to write one in future.

If your struggling to understand exactly what a killer introduction means, or maybe you know but don’t know how to write one, watch TED talks. The first 30 seconds of any TED talk is your blueprint of how to captivate an audience.

Here are some of the best intros ever on TED

Content Marketing

 

Flow:

This is what keeps your audience reading. Your blog needs to tell a story. The flow is you holding your audiences hand as they read through your blog. If you let go of the flow, your letting go of your audience and they will leave.

So what is flow? It’s all about sentence and paragraph structure. That A leads to B, which leads succinctly to C. This flow happens within paragraphs and within topics. First of all I am going to tell you the what, then I am going to tell you the why, then I am going to tell you the how. This is an example.

Think of Flow as the sixth sense that you must have when writing. In fact lets focus on exactly that for a moment. A great way to understand flow is by watching the movie “The Sixth Sense”. Watch it very carefully and see how everything is completely connected in more ways than you think. Ask yourself one question each time there is a new scene… “if this scene was removed would the story still make sense”, i.e. does the scene add value or could it be removed. What you will find remarkable is that every single scene matters and without it the story wouldn’t work. The Sixth Sense is actually the greatest example of this than any movie I have ever seen. Watch it again and see it in action.

Here is a great clip that explains this:

This is how your flow in your blog should work too. Read every line of your blog and then ask yourself, “Does this sentence or paragraph or section help in telling my story?”. Ask yourself, “If it wasn’t there, would it still make sense, would the value still be there?”. If not it should it be moved somewhere else or just deleted. Perfect the flow and your audience will be kept focused and with you to the end of your blog.

Examples:

For inbound marketing, examples can be king and can really engage your audience and create that personal conversation, making the reader feel you are talking directly to them. Examples help make the content as relatable as possible. Stats, quotes, short case studies, infographics, data, videos, and pictures are all great elements to include in your post to emphasise, clarify and support your key points. Try to keep them to a minimal, not every point or heading needs one. If used correctly it will really add a lot of power to your post.

Make sure any external source are attributed to their creator with a link to their page. It substantiates your work even more and offers the reader an extra resource for any further information or clarification they may seek. It can also help build relationships with other thought leaders and they will thank you for helping them with SEO with a link to their site from your page. Maybe they will return the favour next time. Always give credit where credit is due and make sure any pictural examples are free from copyright. If your not sure, check.

Takeaways and Action Points:

You blog should follow the three “I’s”. It should create interest, then inform, and then ignite an action. To ignite, you need to provide your audience with easy to follow action points. Think of it as the Ikea of your ideas. Your packing it up in an easy way for your audience to build themselves. To do this, each section should try to have clear and actionable points or considerations. It should be concise and easy to follow. You can have your takeaways as the concluding sentence or label it with a bullet point.

Words to include and exclude:

The two main spheres for content writing are scare or inspire. This can depend on the brand messaging so make sure you chose the one that fits for your business. If your goal is to scare people to think or act differently, or grab someone’s attention feel free to make it dramatic but don’t go too over the top or you may lose credibility.

If you want to inspire people to think or act differently, keep to positive language. Instead of using “but”, use “and”. Instead of writing “don’t” or “shouldn’t” replace this with “if” and “try”. Your aim here is to encourage and make everything possible, not to preach or make thing seem difficult or complicated.

Words to include and exclude

Conclusions:

The best conclusions you can write for your blog post is one that takes you right back to the start, making the post take a full circle. Conclusions are the last thing visitors are going to read, and the one thing that they will remember. If done correctly it will leave your reader thinking about your post for a long time after they have left it. It will also make them wanting to read more.

To write a killer conclusion, the best place to start is right back at the beginning with the introduction. Read your introduction several times, stick it in your head, then use your conclusion to answer any questions you might have raised in the intro.

Follow this by summarising the three key points from the rest of your post, before finally giving your readers something to think about. You can do this by asking an intriguing question about themselves relating to your post’s topic, by giving your thoughts about the future in your topic area, or by giving users a final direction in your topic area to think about.

If you need any inspiration for this, turn to TED once more and watch the last minute of these videos to give you some ideas.
Here is one of our favourites:

Final Thoughts:

Writing a killer blog post takes a little time and practice to refine and is something anyone can do. It starts with research to build a great outline, a captivating intro, a smooth story, positive wording, examples to add depth to your points, takeaways to inspire and ignite your readers, before finally, a killer conclusion that leaves your readers with a lingering thought and wanting more.

Fundamentally it’s all about providing valuable and interesting content. If you ever need inspiration for this, watch as many TED talks as you can.

Still dreaming of writing great content or ready to make it a reality? Try our top tips with your next blog post and see the difference. Remember though content is just one theme of a killer blog post, Strategy, SEO and Style are the next crucial elements for you to consider.

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Trying to Hard Sell to your Post-Conference Leads? Big Mistake.

By |2023-04-05T11:12:16+00:00March 28th, 2018|

topicIcon Email Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

trying to hard sell to post-conference leads

Phew! The conference is over. It’s been long, tiring day (or days) on your feet in business clothes, smiling wide to cover up how introverted you are, and speed dating with any CEO who will let you give your elevator pitch. No matter, you proudly took home with you a nice stack of business cards to follow up with. Sitting down at your desk and rolling up your sleeves, you begin entering all your new soon-to-be best friends to your CRM (tip: if you’re using the HubSpot CRM, you can simply scan cards and upload contacts straight from your phone). It’s time to send some sales emails.

Pause. If you’re about to send out a generic sales email that starts with, “Remember me, {your name} from the conference yesterday?” following by some serious hard selling, I’m telling you right now, don’t do it.

Before you begin spamming your new leads with borderline aggressive sales emails, it’s time to do some homework.

 

Qualifying your conference leads

I hate to break it to you, but there’s a good chance that not every one of your new CRM contacts would be a perfect fit for your business. How do I know? There’s a lot of variables that render a lead an ideal buyer profile (AKA an ideal customer). When hitting the booths and conversations are snappy, it can be difficult to gather all the information necessary to qualify a lead as relevant.

Sitting in the comfort of your own desk, it’s time to do a little research on each company and see how it relates to your Prospect Fit Matrix, or your checklist of what makes a prospect a fit for your business. Characteristics such as business model (B2B/ B2C), sales cycle length, cost of service, funding, and company size can all be factors to consider when researching each company on their website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, or their social channels.

As you begin to measure up each company to your matrix, you’ll start to develop three lists of companies:

  1. High leads – these are the winners. We’ll talk about how to approach them in a second.
  2. So-so leads – they’re a mixed bag. They may have scored low on characteristics they could grow into or have potential to acquire in the future. For example, if you’re looking for companies with a minimum of Series B funding or companies who are more SMBs than startups, both of these are subject to change over time. For starters, go ahead and send them a quick hello email. By jump starting a relationship now, you’ll have what to build off of when the time is right. To ensure they don’t slip through the cracks, set yourself a reminder to follow up with them next quarter and/or in 6 months. While they’re not a model lead now, they very well might be a stellar fit down the line.
  3. Low leads – simply put, if they’re not a good fit for your company (and most likely won’t be in the future), best not to waste your time.

Uncovering pain (if you haven’t already)

Did you talk about a pain point of theirs during your conference chat that your company solves for? Great! Make sure that any of those relevant notes that you made following your 1:1 also make it into your CRM. If you didn’t experience any grand pain revelation, not to worry. If there’s any chance you can uncover a relevant pain by looking at their website, social media, or online tech, be sure to do that. By understanding their pains, you’ll have the best shot of creating strong emails (I know, we’re getting there) that really resonate with them. One more thing: learn who the decision makers are for the company on LinkedIn. If your contact isn’t THE person, make sure your emails are written with their buyer persona in mind, and find the respectful and appropriate way to ask for that introduction. Showing your leads you’ve done your homework is an excellent way to both grab their attention and let them know that to you, they’re not just another business card.

Sending a personalized sequence

We’ve hit that point in this blog post, that if you haven’t ready, I recommend you take a peek at my previous sales enablement post about using personalized sequences to reach out to new leads. The key difference between that post and what we’re talking about now is that those sequences were cold, while these post-conference sequences are a lot warmer. That’s because, (a) on their end, they gave your their contact info and are expecting your follow up and (b) on your end, you’ve qualified them as strong potential client. Now it’s time to plan out your awesome sequence. Here are a few tips on how to make it count:

  1. Why sequences? First off, I’m calling this a sequence because you can’t just send one email. According to HubSpot’s VP Sales Vet, Pete Caputa, “Forty-four percent of salespeople give up after one follow up and the average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.” You’re going to want to send a number of emails that educate and engage over time, since you may not reel them in on the first or second go at it. But how many parts should you have in your sequence? 10 touches? No more than 5? Is 6-8 the psychological sweet spot? 7 emails over 18 days? The more the merrier? The jury is still out on that golden number so you’ll want to test the waters to see what works best for you.
  2. Get started. Your leads probably spoke to dozens of other companies during the conference. Be sure to begin your sequence as soon as possible to ensure you’re face-to-face interaction is still clear in their memory. Wait too long, and they may have forgotten who you are and what you do. Pro tip: Prepare your email sequence templates before you head to the conference. That way when you get back to the office, you won’t be wasting your time starting to write them from scratch.
  3. Sign ’em up. This may seem controversial, but during your first email of the sequence, give them the heads up that you’ve taken the liberty to sign them up to your monthly newsletter. It’s a great way to send over a constant drip of valuable content, but be sure to always give them a way out by letting them know that they can change their preference setting at any time.
  4. Acknowledging the pain. Remember the research you did on their company pain? Time to gently bring it to light. Get into their shoes and show them that you understand their industry, the competition, and the pain they experience due to the resources they lack. Instead of positioning yourself as the solution right away, offer them your expert advice that you think will help them, help themselves throughout their buyer’s journey. By adding value through your emails, you’ll begin to do something very different than your hard-selling post-conference competitors. Check you out taking the high road!
  5. Make it personal. Anything else you talked about at the booths? Make sure to bring those topics up and offer content resources (blog posts, eBooks, webinars, etc.) from your company that you feel they’d find interesting or informative. If you’ve learned something about the contact or company through your research that seems appropriate to mention, speak up. Every personalization token counts in making your follow up about them, and not about you.
  6. Long-term follow ups. For those ‘high leads’ and ‘so-so leads’ we mentioned earlier, make sure to create tasks for yourself to follow up the following quarter and in 6 months time. While the time to talk may not be right now, budgets, needs, and resources can change. Be sure to have your alerts on so you’ll be a first responder when they do.
  7. Think outside the inbox. Real talk: Four out of five marketers say that their open rates aren’t higher than 20%. Keep in mind then that email isn’t the only way to engage your post-conference leads. Go ahead and follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, and any other platform that may be relevant. By multi-channel lead nurturing you can like, comment, and interact with these leads on platforms they’re looking to engage others on. Start social selling on their turf, and watch them be amazed by how attentive you are.

Follow-up email

(Courtesy of SalesStaff)

Conclusion

Returning to the office after a conference, it can be compelling to start picking up the phone and hard selling to your new leads. Instead of assuming they’re ready to buy, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and begin educating them; allowing you to build a relationship based on value and trust. Once your leads realize you’re there to help them as a person(a), with all their company pains, successes, and goals, you can be certain to get their attention and nurture them into a sale when the time is right them.

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