This edition we dive into:
You can listen to this episode of the show here.
Did a colleague forward this episode to you? Sign up here to get yours every Friday.
Please forward this on to your work colleagues.
Recorded: Monday 22 February 2021 | Published: Friday 26 February 2021
We’re not going to discuss in any detail in the show, but would be remiss to not at least acknowledge it - since it is massive news.
As you will no doubt be aware, last week Facebook blocked Australian news sites from being shared on Facebook, and along with it also removed a bunch of Government and health sites.
Here’s Facebook’s explanation of why they did what they did.
As much as I dislike (strongly) Facebook, and think they totally botched their implementation, I’m mostly on Facebook’s side on this one. Here’s a number of articles that I tend to agree with:
The issue is complex of course, and at the risk of oversimplifying, there’s 5 main discussion points:
In my opinion, item 4 is where the discussion should be focussed - it’s about the underlying issue at stake here (ie paying for links to news). Unfortunately item 5 is where most of the discussion has ended up - the ‘experience’ of the issue.
Regardless of what your view is, the main takeaway as a marketer is that when you build on rented land you are at the mercy of the platform.
With that in mind, in Shot 8 we chat through the impact this is having on businesses, and revisit the importance of having a portfolio of engagement channels - with some that you directly own (as opposed to renting from Facebook, LinkedIn etc)
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
‘Always create company for existing domain name’ setting.
Why would you enable this setting?
One use case might be for franchises - each franchise has the same domain - but you want to create a separate company for each. Possibly then link as a child of a parent company as well. Another example might be different branches of a company eg WeWork, or a big institution with different offices around the country.
As a general comment these settings are hard to understand.
For example, the first one ‘Always create contact for new email address’ - is potentially confusing. It’s actually the old cookie setting. This setting is intended for forms that are on shared computers, or forms that are filled out on a kiosk setting.
By default if a person filled in a form a second time and used a different email address, the second email would be added to their first email address contact - which is handy for when people update their email address.
But in a shared computer scenario, you want to make sure that doesn’t happen, and instead the second email address is a brand new contact.
But you’d be forgiven for not understanding that from the setting description.
I hadn’t seen this option in Deal Settings before - but it’s a welcome enhancement.
It affects the Deal amount when adding product lines.
Here’s the options:
Personally I set deals to just the Monthly amount (for retainer deals) as I like to report in monthly totals.
(Also, we don’t lock clients into contracts - they can pause/cancel retainers at any time - so annual reporting isn’t a fit for us. Your business of course may be different.)
When using HubSpot quotes and discounting the quote does not reflect the deal amount.
However as we later discovered that if you edit the line items first you do get a notice that asks if you want to update the deal amount so it is reflective of the line items!
Moving to AI and machine learning.
Responsive ads are going to be the default - let Google work out the combination of ad copy and description that converts best for your audiences.
Google (thinks it) knows best what ad to run and who to show to and what their intent is...
The importance of owning a range of content assets and channels.
An overview of paid, earned and owned media.
The Facebook News removal in Australia highlights how reliant some businesses are on Facebook. It’s the same with other social channels and of course Google.
Here’s some of the typical changes that can impact businesses:
If your business is overly reliant on one channel it puts you at risk.
It’s important to have a portfolio of engagement sources (whilst also keeping focus - see last episode’s Shot 8) to manage risk
The best owned channel is likely your carefully managed, cleansed and regularly communicated-with email list.
Use the channels to build a list of contacts you regularly communicate with, and who you build trust with.
Via the HubSpot product updates blog.
No throwback this episode.
Nothing extra to mention from a year ago - we’ve covered the interesting items in previous shows.
“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
— Anna Quindlen
Too funny.
For fun you can read this article critical of NPS, and this wikipedia section with further criticism links.
Here’s another one of the scam emails - asking for $3K USD to be featured in a bogus award.
I’ve clicked that Discontinue link everytime I receive one of these… they still keep spamming me.
Connect with HubShots here:
Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn
HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
Please share this with colleagues - it helps us improve and reach more marketers.
- Hi, everyone, welcome to HubShots Episode 236. In this episode, we talk about own, earned and paid media plus the new HubSpot's settings you need to know about. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focus podcast where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, service and marketing results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is Craig Bailey from Xen Systems. How are you, Craig?
- Yeah, really good, I was gonna put a news item out about this on Facebook but unfortunately no one had to see it.
- No that's right, no one's seeing your news stories Craig.
- Yeah, that's right.
- So that brings us to show one of the week which is our growth thought and the Australian government versus Facebook.
- Yeah, look, I'm not actually gonna go through this in the show, I've got plenty of all my thoughts in the show notes about it covering what's happened. I just feel like everyone's probably across the story, we're recording on Monday the 22nd. By the time you hear this lesson will be the Friday. So it's almost like a week and a half since it happened. But the thing about the whole Facebook taking news out of it for Australia, I think really highlights this whole idea of don't build your house on rented land.
- Absolutely great, I could not agree more. And I think we've spoken about this many times, haven't we?
- We have, we've covered in the show and I do wanna cover it later in shot eight. We'll talk about this in more depth and how you should be approaching it in our opinion but we couldn't really let that go past without at least acknowledging it in the show. It's a massive story here in Australia of course, it impacts marketing so definitely needs to be on your radar.
- So Craig, this is a complex issue, right? And you very aptly put five discussion points.
- I've written a big intro into the show notes. So I covered this, but I feel as the response to this, there's been five points. I mean the first is, and I wanna say three of them. We should just take out of the discussion. So the first three, the first one is are the tech companies should pay more tax. Facebook and Google aren't paying enough tax. Everyone agrees with that, so no one's debating that, so take it aside. Well, except the big tech companies. The second one is, oh, the tech companies have too much power, Facebook has too much power. Everyone agrees on that, well except Facebook, so take that out, that's not a, like there's no debate around that, that's definitely the case. And in fact, there's also, so I haven't put this in the points, but a third one could be we need to support quality journalism, no one's disagreeing. Everyone agrees, so just take that out. But then you come to what I've got is the third point is which is that the government's, the Australian government's legislation is flawed. I think everyone agrees, it's in the bar code, it's poorly written, it's just ridiculous. Everyone agrees except the politicians and a few of the media sets, so take that out, right? Yeah, take them all apart, they're not really this issue. When you bring it down to the issue, the issue is was Facebook right or wrong to just pull out of news in Australia? That's where the discussion should be. However, unfortunately the fifth is because Facebook did such a terrible job of pulling out and all this collateral damage, they didn't communicate well and it was, it's been a debark, a PR debacle really. And by the way, that's the fifth point, that the way Facebook implemented is a debacle. Again, no one disagrees on that. Like everyone agrees, they did a bad job, right? So it's only the fourth point. Were they right or wrong to pull out a news? I think that's where the discussion should be.
- That's right and you rightly said with this whole legislation that they're basically trying to bring in is about media bargaining, isn't it? And so they've come to the table and they've said--
- Yeah, we've entered this negotiation and decided, no we will try from the news business.
- Exactly and then quite rightly so, right?
- Well, I think rightly so, because it's around should they be forced to pay for links to news? And we've included a couple of links to various people at Casey Newton and Benedict Devins and others who've given their views, I think much more thoughtfully and succinctly than I could possibly do on this show. But yeah, I agree, they should, if Facebook doesn't wanna do that, they don't have to. Now again, I just wanna say the collateral damage in not showing health sites in that, total debacle. So we're not talking about that, we're talking about the actual main issue. Should they be paying to have news on their platform and know they can decide not to, they're not a public utility, they have no requirement to do, they're a business. As you know, Ian and I've mentioned on our show I am not a fan of Facebook. I think they are, well, I don't wanna say evil but we've equated them with cigarettes and cancer and terrible things so I'm not a fan of Facebook but I'm on their side on this one.
- All right, listeners on our quick shots of the week. And we've got two for you here an update to the SEO audit tool to detect pages that have images that could be delayed from loading until they're visible to the user. And what's interesting. We talked about lazy loading in the last episode, lazy loading images. And there was an interesting stat here. It said that HubSpot notice last year images made up 35% of typical website resource requests and 46% of overall page weight. And so people that often have slow loading sites is because of poorly optimized images. And so this will help you find that.
- I expected it to be much higher, what's the other half? Video? Or what would you expect to be the main weight?
- I would've actually thought it was images but I think--
- I would've thought it'd be more.
- I don't know whether it's to do with all the scripts or page size, I'm not sure.
- oh, you know, you're right, some of those scripts and that's why they have ad blockers on the news sites 'cause I download megabytes or gigabytes scripts. Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense, yeah.
- And the other one listeners is HubSpot surpassed 100,000 customers and $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. And they say it celebrates the companies using its CRM platform to scale.
- 1 billion annual recurring revenue, well done HubSpot.
- That's right, I take my hat off. Remember the days when we used to go to inbound, Craig?
- Yeah, it's just this little conference I would chat with, that is for the diocese, yeah, well done.
- Anyway, well done and well done to everybody that's made, got them there. All right onto our HubSpot marketing feature of the week. HubSpot form settings to create duplicate companies.
- All right, I thought we'd spend the next two shots just talking about some of the settings in HubSpot and listeners, you might think, oh wow, thanks for helping me get to sleep. I was having trouble, but you've sold. But the settings, I think there's some really interesting settings and they don't really announce these. I find these by accident.
- You're exactly right, we find by accident and now that helped us by putting a big green knee sign beside it.
- Yeah, this is in form, as Ian said this is informs, it's in the settings on forms. I actually feel that the descriptions for these options are confusing. So if you went to this form settings tab and you're going, like, what do these mean? We're pulling out one of them initially, there's this new setting, which says always create company for existing domain name, so confusing straightaway. And then there's this big warning it'll create duplicate companies. You think, oh, why would I ever turn that on? Well, first of all so we'll do is we'll explain what the setting does. And then second we'll explain a scenario where it might actually be useful, right? Because it'd be like my initial thoughts when I saw this like why on earth would anyone ever turn this on? We have to think about it for a while but I'll explain what does, let's say you've already got a company, let's say it's your company Ian Search & Be Found, Ian is a contact in there and he's linked to the company as Search & Be Found. And so then I go, oh, well there's another person I know at Search & Be Found, oh, this is Mary. I'm gonna put Mary in and oh, she works at Search & Be Found I've got this setting on, it's gonna create a new company record, another Search & Be Found company. Like why on earth would I wanna do that? Why don't I just wanna link to the main company? And so that's what the setting does. And so you think, well, why would you do this? Here's two scenarios and so actually, do you wanna--
- Yes, I'll go to the scenario. Let's say we have a company that has, I'll take Australia for example, has essentially representation in every state and somebody in sales might be dealing with just the people in those states. So there's still one company, but happens to be split across all the states and territories of Australia. Where this becomes useful is that you wanna associate deals and contacts to those companies in those states. So that's where you'd wanna use that--
- Particular branches--
- Exactly like branches, another one would be--
- Oh, franchises would be the good example of that as well. Yeah, they're kind of separate franchises. They have the same domain name, they have the same company name. We can create them as separate companies to keep them all contained as their deals, but also owners of that particular company. The other thing to remember this businesses that you can have parent and child company. So you can have a main kind of head office company and then have these child franchise companies or branches all linked to that parent. So that that's setting, there's another setting. We'll cover it in the show notes, by the way, you can sign up hubshots.com/subscribe. They've got this one called always create contact for new email address, right? Now that's the old cookie setting and again it's like, why on earth would you not have? I explain in the show notes what that actually means 'cause it's confusing and we should use it.
- All right on to our HubSpot's sales feature of the week. And this has to do with a deal settings for default deal amount.
- Have you seen this option before? Is this new?
- Yes it is new because I've been playing a lot in the settings recently and I did see it and I haven't delved too far into it, Craig. So tell us more.
- All right, so it's, again, this is setting, so yes, listeners, if you weren't able to get to sleep from talking about form settings, we're talking about deal settings. And by the way this is where I think just having an understanding of some of the settings, getting them right, it makes a big difference. We've been into portals where they don't have some of these basic settings on and just by turning some on, massive difference, auto associations with context, it just saves a ton of time. There's ones like automatically set insights or companies that you just turn it on. And it's like, oh wow, all this power. And they fit so well with knowing settings. But this one set the default deal amount that should represent a deal and they've got this dropdown where you can choose the various options, cut to the chase, it's when you're creating a deal, is the deal amount based on like the annual recurring revenue? Is it monthly? Is it total value? And this is the problem because when you're adding those product lines, you might've had arts, $2,000 a month. So then you're like, oh, what do you set the deal amount to? Should it be $2,000? Should it be 24,000 for the year? You can decide and I think this is a great addition. I've only just started playing around with it, for us we like to report on things at a monthly level. So even if we've got a year-long client and it's gonna be X thousand a month, we still only report on that first month for our--
- So you do monthly recurring revenue--
- Monthly recurring revenue, yeah. Whereas I know for some bigger corporates they're really interested in the overall deal size, sort of fixed commissions, all that kind of thing. So your mileage may vary, but this is a setting which I've long wanted actually, I've been frustrated with some of these.
- I totally agree with you, Craig.
- So get started on, I've only just started playing on this now and, but I think this is great. This is a little thing in, it's the little things but it makes such a world of difference.
- All right, now to our HubSpot's service feature of the week Craig, and this is another little setting that we're talking about. This seems to be the show of settings, Craig. And this is to do in the knowledge base to do with the related articles. So essentially it will appear at the bottom of every article helping customer to finances that they need and relating articles based on the article relevancy. And it's just something you gotta toggle and it'll appear there straight after.
- You know what I would like. I would like to have a standard set of settings which you could pull in as a template 'cause one of our, we do a HubSpot health check, we do a HubSpot ignition for clients when they're still getting onboarded, we have a checklist where we go, I gotta turn this on to check that, check that, I'd love to have that as a little template, little XML file or something, I'd just go, oh, load settings, chilling. And I'd have our standards set up for big companies, I'd have a standard set up for franchises and yeah, oh, I should put that in the pro wishlist.
- That's right, onto our gotcha though Craig and this I discovered while playing with quotes and line items within HubSpot deals. So I'll give you the scenario that I was doing. I was creating a deal. I was then going directly in and creating a quote, adding my items from the product library and then sending the quote. Now, if I gave a discount on the quote what I discovered the end of value did not reflect in the deal value.
- Oh, so can I check, are you doing a discount as a line item or discount on the line items?
- I was giving a discount as a line item.
- Right, kind of like taxes are line items.
- That's exactly right and then I was like, hang on. This is not lining up and then what I did was I tested it out by updating the line value items and giving the discount on those. And then I saw a pop-up saying, do you wanna update the deal value? And then it worked and then I could regenerate a quote if that's what I need to do but essentially you could get caught out really quickly here because I was going through deals and I was thinking, hang on, I'm sure that wasn't that value. And then I had to go check the quote and go, oh no it was different value because we give a discount like a family and friends discount. Am I like, oh, hang on, what's going on here? So just be aware that this can happen and their argument as to why it should or it shouldn't happen but like you rightly say, there is an argument that should remain the way it is. All right, our marketing tip of the week, Craig. The future of Google Ads.
- Yeah, just a few thoughts here. And this is thanks to you because you sent me an excellent presentation by micro ads talking about Google Ads and the future of Google Ads and well, you and I have both done Google Ads for what I'm gonna say more than a decade for a long time. And I feel I'm struggling to stay on top of Google Ads now. And in fact, we've hired a specialist. We have a full-time Google Ads specialist and you do as well, so I just can't stay up to date. I guess I've got the big picture and the themes, but like all the products nuance I have to admit I've lost, I can't do it now. This presentation just showed me how much it's changed even in the last two years, I'm just like wow, Google Ads is changing and the key things and I think this is what we wanted to highlight to listeners, 'cause you're probably working in marketing. You're probably not hands-on with Google Ads yourself but you are managing maybe people that are looking after Google Ads, it is changing very much from a expertise based manual bidding approach from maybe a couple of years ago, very tight ad groups, keywords and Skaggs and all that kind of stuff to very AI and machine learning driven where you let Google work it out. And I've always been reluctant 'cause I want control. I wanna control the bidding and all this kind of thing. But the amount of data that Google has access to that we don't and in the presentation is even talking about some of the things, you know how he says like, oh, Google takes into account the weather, the seasonal adjustments, time of day, like, is it overcast? All these kind of factors based on where the audiences are even saying like even their screen, like whether they've got light or dark screen contrast, things like that. Nothing that we could ever hope to know. 'Cause they're doing that on the fly, all of this along with audience working out and of course the main thing though is you need enough data to feed the machine in order to it, but it's changing. And so even in this interim part where maybe Google makes more mistakes than getting it right, but that's where it's headed. And it seems like by the end of this year, it's like just let Google work it out, Google here's what we want, you work it out. Even the ads, the type of ads, we don't even know the ads people are seeing now 'cause Google with their responsive ads is really just changing headlines on the fly and working out. I was kind of jolted when I just saw how stuck, well, I've kind of always known, it's lending but it's like, no, it's here.
- Yeah and I think what's interesting is that this probably started a few years ago but one thing that he mentioned was it's actually starting to work now. So your ability to outpace that machine is getting less and less. And what we understand is that we got to give it the right inputs so one of the really key things that we have discovered is that making sure our tracking is correct. We've got the conversion actions correct. We're tracking those goals like we should because if you got the wrong things you're tracking for, the machines working off that data. So if that's incorrect, we're after that, we're heading for the wrong result which then doesn't help the machine optimize itself.
- I think that's right, so the skill is, as you said, setting it up right and pointing it in the right direction and so you still need extreme skill for that. And you also need someone that can look at it and work out whether it's working and it has got enough data. And also, and this is the big problem, this is the issue I have with Google. They have all those recommendations, the suggestions to optimize your campaign. When you look at those and half of them are like terrible suggestions. So you still need the skill to not apply those exactly which we know about yet given enough freedom so it has enough data for the AI to kick in.
- All right, onto the insight of the week, Craig, owned ad and paid media and the importance of owning a range of content assets and channels.
- All right, so this is following on from shot one where we talked about Facebook, really the lead up for that at the start of the show was to highlight that the main takeaway that marketers should take from this Facebook thing, nevermind the issue of whether Facebook should or shouldn't do it, it's that if you are too reliant on one channel then you are putting yourself at risk. So you need diversification, you need a portfolio of channels and there's gotta be a balance between not going overboard as we've chatted in previous episodes, you've got to get your focus down but you still need enough diversification that you don't get caught. If you're a news site, purely relying on Facebook then last week, your business just died, like gone. So this is a reminder, don't build your entire house on rented land as we've said many times, but to have other channels. And so I kind of feel that the main channel that people should definitely have is an email list that they're building, cleansing and constantly communicating with in a relevant way. And then you use all those other channels to build that email list.
- You've put it so well Craig. And I think the other thing is is your own website, right? Think about how you utilize that, the content on there and what the intention is when you're building that. Now you can diversify that again but building that as your asset, that's something that you're gonna keep, right?
- That's definitely an owned asset, that's right. We won't go into owned paid and earned. In here I've got a good link in the show notes that talks about it, but yeah, own your website and the content build that out. And you might think, well of course we do that. Well, no there's many businesses that start today where they go, oh, we just have a Facebook page and we use Instagram ads or something like that. Okay, that's great if you're not, your livelihood not depending on it, but if it is, you need to diversify. And by the way, the flip side, which is, oh, we just have a website and rely on Google, again, risky, the Google algorithm changes suddenly you're not appearing at all. So you've got to have this diversification, the portfolio of engagement channels that build your email list use them all to channel into an email list.
- All right, we've got a few resources of the week Craig and the first one I thought was really interesting was the total number of links pointing to a website is irrelevant to Google, says search advocate, John Mueller. I thought that was rather interesting.
- I thought it was interesting, I saw the headline. I haven't dug into it yet, but it seemed, is there some context around that because I think he's talking about quality versus quantity.
- Exactly, that is exactly right.
- 'Cause the links are still a ranking factor, right?
- They are and I think what it highlights is the importance of having irrelevant quality links and not gaming the system with all of these things that people do with SEO. So that's one of the ones and I put a link into how to learn Google analytics, the ultimate beginner's guide. And this is from a good friend.
- Oh, it's Benjamin.
- That's right, I love data.
- That's awesome, I was just checking out that link now, awesome.
- And I love his stuff, it's just, he just, he's a great teacher and anyone who wants to learn more and get educated, especially with GA4, so Google Analytics 4, I'd recommend you look at that guide and learn more. Craig onto our quote of the week and this is from Anna Quindlen. Nothing important or meaningful or beautiful or interesting or great ever came out of limitations or sorry, imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
- I love that.
- Now there is a bonus link listeners and this is falling out for us talking about NPS surveys. And I thought, this is very funny, Craig It's by Scott Berkun on Twitter. And it says, you've got to look at the screenshot listeners, but it says on a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to recommend net promoter score to a friend or colleague? And I'm not gonna say what the results are because you should go have a look at the screenshot yourself.
- Just getting serious on this one a minute. I do struggle with NBS as being useful actually. And that's in previous episodes I've kind of asked you those questions. This is not from a position of knowledge by the way of me saying, oh I've looked at it and I have concerns about it. This is from a position of being there and so I'm like, I just don't get it. And the reason I don't get it is because it's based on my, when I base on my actions because--
- You don't give feedback.
- Well, I give feedback, but sometimes it's just whether I've had my coffee or not. Like, ah, I haven't had my coffee at three and then sometimes, ah I just want a deal.
- That's right, what's this? Oh yeah 10 it's so based on emotion or just the spur of the moment.
- Well, that's an interesting bit of information.
- And the other thing is about feedback. How quickly you give feedback on something. I think often determines the strength of it. So if I've had a bad experience and you asked me about it and like a straightaway, I'm like, oh, you're terrible you guys, you're the worst thing ever. Whereas if I just like hour later and that I have thought about I've countdown, like yeah actually it's not that bad. So I know personally that I'm so variable and there's always a danger of assuming you are the norm that everyone else is. And perhaps with enough people that all averages out. But I still think there's an underlying thing around being human, that's hard to represent, especially in a scale which by the way not to six almost counts as the same thing to track down. So what's the difference between going from two to four? Well nothing on an NPS and I just don't get it. So this is what I'm trying to work through. And I guess I'll raise this because some, you know what'll happen. One of our listeners will send me a few links and it'll totally educate me and change my mind. And I'm like, oh, thanks, I understand now. And of course, all the big companies do it. So obviously smart people are implementing this but I just, I struggled with it. And I'm still getting my head around it.
- Well, you'll come around Craig. Now, listeners, we have more, do you wanna talk about this last one, Craig?
- Oh, malarkey and the week not, we're not gonna talk about it. That's a bonus for people to get the show notes. Just another ridiculous.
- I know, I keep getting these to.
- Yeah, ridiculous malarkey of the week. It's a scam, really? This award scam, anyway.
- Yeah, talk about scam, I've got something else someone showed me today about scams, about people giving out these badges for certain things or joining associations and getting these badges as the top--
- When I see marketing companies now and I go to their homepage and they've got all these awards and actually makes me doubt them because I know so many awards are bogus and I'm just like, unless I recognize like award, okay, you bought that award or meaningless or you're one of the three people that entered for that award, oh, you came through, well done.
- Or you just happen to be the only company in that region and therefore you're the winner.
- That's smart, isn't it terrible that awards that should be kind of credibility signals for me in my jaded marketers that are kind of like are there warning signs.
- Well listeners I hope you enjoyed this show. Again if you would, we recommend you to sign up for the show notes at hubshos.com/subscribe and we will get it delivered to you every Friday in your inbox with lots of good screenshots and resources but Craig until next time--
- Catch you later Ian. Hey there thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots, to get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and marketing resources sign up at hubshots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better with HubSpot.