HubShots Episode 148: What does it mean to ‘do SEO’? Plus #falsemarketingmindset

Welcome to Episode 148 of HubShots!

Welcome to HubShots, APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips and tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.

This episode we look at what people mean when they say they want to ‘do SEO’, plus a review of customer journeys and solving for the problem, and we chat through ‘buying cheaper petrol versus batching your travel’.

Listen to the show here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/148-what-does-it-mean-to-do-seo

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers who use HubSpot hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

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Recorded: Wed 23 Jan 2019 | Published: Wed 13 February 2019

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

What does it mean to ‘do SEO’?

Marketing people will sometimes say they need to ‘do SEO’ - but what does it mean?

Often it means ‘we don’t want to pay for traffic’ from Google.

Other times it means ‘we don’t have enough leads and our site doesn’t seem to be driving business growth, so we need to do something about it’ - and that thing is ‘SEO’.

So what is SEO?

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, and covers all the activities for improving your rankings in the Google results. Those activities include a mix of technical items on your site, producing high value content, formatting it for Google to easily crawl, and then having other reputable sites link to it.

What does Google say? Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en )

However, it’s important that the terms we rank for are relevant and valuable. It’s no use ranking for terms that have no value for your site.

And that brings us to this important process of solving for the problem.

So let’s chat about ‘solving for the problem’, and where SEO fits in.

Shot 2: Marketing Tip of the Week

Solve for the problem reminder

What stages of the customer journey are working well? What needs work?

(ie how do we best ‘solve for the problem’?)

Example: do you have a traffic problem? Do you have a leads problem? Do you have a sales problem?

*rating: (1 = bad, 10 = good)

SEO can fit in to all of these stages eg

• Content for raising awareness of problems (do I have the flu?)
• Content for considering solutions (should I take a flu pill, who has the best flu tablet)
• Deciding on the solution to use (reviews of cold and flu tablets)

Note that SEO often works best when combined with other channels eg social might help drive awareness of the questions to ask. Combining with ads allows you to control how you appear in Google.

Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

HubSpot Lifecycle stages field

Reminder about life cycle stages:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/use-lifecycle-stages

• Subscriber: contacts who know of your business and have opted in to hear more from your team. This are likely visitors that have signed up for your blog or newsletter.
• Lead: contacts who have shown sales readiness beyond being a subscriber. An example of a lead is a contact who signs up for a content offer from your business.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): contacts who have engaged with the team's marketing efforts, but are still not ready to receive a sales call. An example of a MQL is a contact who respond to a specific form in a marketing campaign.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): contacts who have indicated through their actions that they are ready for a direct sales follow up. An example of a SQL is a contact who submits a question about your product through a contact form.
• Opportunity: contacts who are real sales opportunities.
• Customer: contacts with closed deals.
• Evangelist: customers who advocate for your business and whose networks may be leveraged for further leads.
• Other: a wildcard stage that can be used when a contact does not fit any of the above stages.

Some considerations to be aware of:

• It’s easy to get confused about lifecycle stages, including thinking that a contact has to go through every stage in a single, linear process.
• Contacts can easily jump stages, and can also be manually pushed back to earlier stages if appropriate eg sales might determine that a contact that was flagged as an SQL needs to be pushed back to MQL.

Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Lead Status field

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/how-can-i-use-the-lead-status-property-in-my-sales-process

Tip: Consider the lead status field as a sub-stage of the Sales Qualified Lead lifecycle stage.

The default Lead Status options are:

• New
• Open
• In Progress
• Open Deal
• Unqualified
• Attempted to Contact
• Connected
• Bad Timing

Shot 5: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Knowing where to go if you see something is not working > https://status.hubspot.com/

This is a good start to see if there are any system issues that may be affecting you.

Shot 6: Insight of the Week

Buying cheaper petrol versus Batching travel

Consider the person who spends their time chasing cheaper petrol - they save a few cents a litre.

Consider a second person who focuses on avoiding tolls by using the back streets to get around.

Finally, consider a third person who organises their time better - batching their meetings so they don’t have to spend as much time traveling.

None of these are wrong of course, but the impact of one far outweighs the other two combined.

In our marketing we can easily fall into the same false mindset, here’s a few examples:

• focussing on saving a few cents on some Google Ads campaigns, instead of optimising landing pages so they convert better
• focussing on increasing engagement on social, instead of increasing follow-ups by sales
• chasing cheap impressions on display, instead of highly targeted impressions on an appropriate network such as LinkedIn
• spinning out lots of cheap fluff content instead of a few quality pieces
• using cheaper bulk cold calling teams, rather than training outbound callers to research and contact warm contacts
• Fixating on ‘going viral’ instead of ‘going profitable’
• Not wanting to add contacts into HubSpot because it may cost you and focussing on keeping a clean contact records
• All leads that are generated not being good instead of understanding who you want and what problem you can solve for them

#falsemarketingmindset

Shot 7: Retirement of the Week (Update)

HubSpot Predictive Lead Scoring changes are now noted as taking effect on 01 March. Last episode we mentioned it was noted as ‘some time in the future’.

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/predictive-lead-scoring-changes

Reminder of why it is changing:

“...the original predictive lead score required thousands of contacts with clean, accurate contact properties in order to produce predictive scores. In full transparency, many HubSpot customers lacked either the quantity or the quality of data to train a model that would accurately score contacts. The new model uses HubSpot Insights datasets to supplement data within a portal to make even more accurate predictions from the very first contact added to a portal.”

Shot 8: Resource of the Week

After 25 years studying innovation, here is what I have learned

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/after-40-years-studying-innovation-here-what-i-have-christensen/

“Management isn’t simply about P&L statements, meeting quarterly growth and profitability targets, and creating brand awareness. Those are byproducts of good management. Management is about waking up every day and helping people become better people so they can do better work and live better lives.”

Shot 9: Quote of the Week

“The absolute key to being successful long-term in business is to deliver remarkable value and surprise and delight your customers beyond their expectations.  If you get this right, your customers become your marketing department and it’s hard to keep up with the demand that is generated from their positive comments.”

• Daniel Priestley (24 Assets)

Shot 10: Bonus Links of the Week

Ecommerce nurtures - Shopify integration:

https://app.hubspot.com/settings/[portal-id]/ecommerce

Workflows easily added from here

Google is Creating Featured Snippets from PDF Content - some interesting reading if you want to implement this:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-creating-featured-snippets-from-pdf-content/287973/

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript

Ian Jacob: Welcome to HubShots episode 148. In this episode we look at what people mean when they say, "We want to do SEO", plus a review of customer journeys, and solving for the problem, and we chat through buying cheaper fuel versus batching your travel. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one, HubSpot-focused podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks, and strategies for growing your marketing and sales results. We hope you enjoy the podcast as much as HubSpot's CEO Brian Halligan does.

Ian Jacob: My name is Ian Jacob from search and be found, and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you, Craig?

Craig Bailey: Really well, and what a great question to be tackling in this episode, it's so important, isn't it?

Ian Jacob: I know. And why we're covering this is because I've had people contact me and say, "Oh, we need to do SEO", or, "We are supposedly doing SEO and it's not working."

Ian Jacob: So what do you think people mean when they say, "We want to do SEO", Craig?

Craig Bailey: Well, this is a good question, isn't it? And like you, I've had client say, "We want to do SEO this year", and they meant a couple of things. Sometimes they just meant, "Look, we don't want to pay for traffic from Google. We want free traffic", and, well, fair enough, why wouldn't you want free traffic from Google? But other times it actually can be a bit of a catchall. They're kind of like, "We don't have enough leads and sales, so we're not sure what the problem is. We've just got to do SEO." And so SEO becomes this kind of silver bullet that somehow they're magically going to put into place. So I think it's important that we actually understand what SEO is, but actually once we understand what it is, how it's actually applied correctly.

Ian Jacob: Correct. So let's talk about SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, and it covers all the activities for improving your rankings in the Google search results. Those activities include a mix of technical, items on your site. So we call this on page optimization, and then there's off page optimization and then there's producing high value content, formatting it for Google to easily crawl, and then having other reputable sites link to your site. But Craig, tell me, what does Google's definition of SEO say?

Craig Bailey: We've actually linked in the show notes to a Google support article where they actually say search engine optimization is all about helping search engines understand and present content. And that's probably it in a nutshell. I don't know if many people, if they didn't know SEO, would actually be able to unpack that, but you can see why it's so general. They're like, "Oh, okay, good, yeah, well, we want to do that, if that's what SEO is, let's do SEO." And that's quite right. So here's what we want to break down. So when we talked about that kind of breakdown of what it is, those activities, technical, and one of the things that you mentioned was content. We need great content presented in a way that Google can crawl. So a lot of that's SEO. The important thing, though, is you've got to be ranking for the right terms. It's no good optimizing your site to rank for terms that aren't particularly valuable or commercially relevant to your business, and as obvious as that might sound, it's actually ... it's quite often we see that, "Oh, we rank for this term." Does anyone actually really care about that term? No. So we're actually going to chat about this whole idea that brings in this idea of solving for the problem.

Ian Jacob: Yeah, so let's chat about this solving for the problem, Craig, and where that fits into the whole discussion with SEO.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, so look, I think it's good to have this reminder of solve the problem. We've covered this in the show many times, and in fact when we talked about this annual marketing review, which is a great thing for businesses to be doing at the start of the year, that's a key part of it. What are the problems you're trying to solve this year? And we've given plenty of examples in shows where people solve for the wrong problems. So we always think about this solve for the problem, and I'll just reiterate this, this idea of, well, it's the funnel, although, as we know, the funnels [inaudible 00:03:51]. But this idea of stages-

Ian Jacob: Well, let's talk about stages.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, stages that people go through on ... we'll say the customer journey or the buyer's journey on their way to purchase.

Ian Jacob: That's right. So let's start at the top. So this is an awareness, a part of the journey, Craig. Then we've got the consideration and the decision part of the journey. Now, think about something that you have bought in not so long ago, and think about how you've actually gone through the process of being aware of you have a need, and then doing research about it, then actually figuring out if there's a product or a solution that fits that, then basically going, "Well, who provides the solution or the product? "And then really going deep into understanding the product, and then making a choice about which is the right solution for you, which is the decision stage.

Craig Bailey: You know, I'm going to give a really simple example, because there's a great one that HubSpot often use, and that's this whole idea of, "Have I got a cold?" Yes, and so at the awareness stage that the questions or the problems people are asking is, "Have I got a cold?", or, "Have I got the flu?" And once they've worked that out, then the next question going into consideration mode is, "Well, what's the remedy for that? Oh, it could be flu tablets, could be other remedies." So they're in consideration working out what the solution, and then decision is, "Oh, which brand will I buy?" And I think that it's ... we've made it overly simplistic, but it illustrates that whole stages mentality really well, doesn't it?

Ian Jacob: Yeah, it does. And I think this is really important. Craig. I think I talked to lots of people and business owners, and they think, "I've got this product, I'm going to stick it on my website and people are going to find it and make their choice." But really, if you take yourself out of that position and stick yourself in the customer's shoes, and think, "Here I am on this journey, how would I even get to this product?" And that's what we need to be considering.

Craig Bailey: Well, let's think how this fits in with what we're talking about SEO. Where does SEO fit in? Where does getting free traffic from Google fit in? Because what we'll often find, you know, they don't want to pay for traffic. They're probably bidding on a term that's right at that decision stage. But that simple example of, "Have I got a cold or the flu?", shows that you can have content at each of those levels. A lot of people will just write content, the best flu tablets on the market, let's say, I'm making this up, right? But they might use that, and they're only going to write content. That means they're only writing content for that decision stage. What they need to be thinking about is, "Well, we need to write it at the consideration stage and the awareness stage, as well."

Craig Bailey: So there you can see this whole idea of, "We just want to do SEO", it's not some magic button we press on the site, it's actually thinking about these, I guess, stages, and writing content that's appropriate for them, and not only appropriate, but is really good content. Because you can bet that if it's a popular subject, other people have already written about it, and again, there's no magic button to make your site suddenly rank better for it, unless your content is better.

Ian Jacob: So, Craig, leading on from this, onto our marketing feature of the week, and this is about HubSpot life cycle stages within the system. So why are we going to use this? Because again, this is a journey where people go through. So we want to actually highlight, because people often get stuck and go, "What does that mean? What does that life cycle stage mean?"

Ian Jacob: So I'm just gonna quickly go through what the life cycle stages that are predefined in the system, that you can use, and you can change. So it's really key that you understand this.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, and I'll just preface this by saying this is HubSpot's terminology to fit with these stages, other systems like Salesforce and that, they have different terminology, and that can be confusing, but we're now moving from a general concept into actual HubSpot-specific terminology.

Ian Jacob: That's right. So let's say the first part of this life cycle stage is someone you would call a subscriber. So they know about your business, they've opted into receiving some news, and they're likely visitors to your blog, right?

Craig Bailey: Very early, yeah.

Ian Jacob: Very early. Next stage is, we would say, their lead. And this is someone who has shown some sort of readiness and is past the stage of a subscriber. So for example, they inquire ... on their contact form, and they're interested in buying a house, for example, and they're looking at certain home designs.

Craig Bailey: They've got a bit more specific.

Ian Jacob: Yes.

Craig Bailey: That's right.

Ian Jacob: The next one is a marketing qualified lead, or you would call it an MQL, and those are context who've been engaged with your marketing efforts. Right? But it's still not ready to talk to sales. So this is a really clear distinction in this step. And you would say that they have actually engaged in a response to some specific marketing campaign that you've done.

Craig Bailey: That's right, they're actually ... to talk about those three stages we said before, awareness, consideration, decision, they're moving more into consideration.

Ian Jacob: The next one is a sales qualified lead, and sometimes would say it's an SQL, and that, our customers have indicated that they've gone through these actions and they're ready to actually talk to someone in sales, or engage in that sales process with the follow up.

Craig Bailey: And I'll give you a great example of this. They've viewed the pricing page, and perhaps they've even requested a quote, that's a big sign that they're a sales qualified lead.

Ian Jacob: The next one is an opportunity, and this is a contact who are real sales opportunities. So after they've gone through some sort of qualification, then you can move them into an opportunity status. And following on from that is a customer status. So, and that's where the deal is closed, they've paid some money, or there's a transaction being finalized. What's the next one, Craig?

Craig Bailey: Well, there's two others that HubSpot use, so those ones you've talked about so far relate to a contact moving through to a customer. There's two others that HubSpot include, one's called an evangelist, which is kind of, could be a customer, could be a partner that is actually recommending your services. So they're happy with you, they know you, and they're actually recommending you. And the other one they've got is a bit of a catchall for anything else. They call it the other lifecycle stage, and it just means, well, it's none of the above, so we'll put it in other.

Ian Jacob: That last bucket. Okay, so here are some considerations to be aware of. Not to get confused about life cycle stages.

Craig Bailey: Well, not to get confused, because it is actually easy to get confused.

Ian Jacob: Yes, it is. I'll tell you why, because there's also a lead status.

Craig Bailey: Well, we're going to talk about that in a second. That's kind of like a sub stage of the sales qualified-

Ian Jacob: Sales qualified.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, but really, it's easy to get confused, because although HubSpot's defined these stages, you don't actually have to go in like a one after the other linear fashion.

Ian Jacob: Exactly.

Craig Bailey: So, people, when we explain these lifecycle stages, they go, "Oh, right, so I've got to move them from that, then to that, then to that", and I'm like, "No, you don't." They could jump from subscriber to customer, theoretically. People don't usually do that, but it's not out of the question for someone to go, "All right, I just signed up for your newsletter." Then there was an offer, "Oh, I actually bought your product." Say it's low priced or depending on what your industry is. So you can jump a whole bunch of lifecycle stages at once. However, these lifecycle stages give you a general guideline for how people move through in their journey.

Ian Jacob: Correct. So I'll give you a little example, Craig, of working with customers. We work with a lot of customers in the building industry, and because of the process that they go through, often, people can get to a sales qualified lead pretty quickly, and then once they've actually spoken to the salesperson, they can actually move back into marketing qualified lead, until they meet other criteria to move back into a sales qualified lead or even into an opportunity. A really good example is that they might actually want to build a house, but they actually haven't bought the land, or they're still searching for the land, so they're actually a qualified buyer, but they're actually not ready just yet.

Ian Jacob: So that's a really interesting scenario. Say, when we've been working with our customers, we actually put in another lead status field, is to say, "Look, they're awaiting land purchase", so then we know, okay, they've been qualified, but they're still awaiting that. That's how we do that. And sometimes they're not even ready, so we'll then move them backwards.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, because you can think also from these stages that you can only go forwards, but as you're saying, you can go through these stages, you can push them back if it's ... it's about just marking them as it's appropriate for where they are in their journey.

Ian Jacob: And I think a really key aspect of this, that I've started doing with people that we work with, is, actually, we've given you the HubSpot definitions of all of these stages. Actually try and map them to language that people understand within your business, and how does that relate to these stages. I think that will really help people really grasp what it means and how it applies to the business.

Craig Bailey: I'm going to give you one final piece of advice to listeners, because we will get this question with new HubSpot customers. They say, "Oh, okay. I understand that there's life cycle stages, that doesn't fit our business, so can we change them or make other custom properties? We don't want to use their life cycle stage." And we actually say, "No, you can't. You've got to use it." And so the advice or the suggestion to listeners that maybe this is new to, I'll say, embrace it, because HubSpot have put a lot of time into working this through and distilling a lot of different businesses, and this works well, and I've actually learned this the hard way in businesses and consulting over the decades, that when you try and take an established platform and bend it to your own ... you know, people think their own businesses so unique, we've got to bend it to our will. It always fails, it adds complexity, and if you just stick with what HubSpot tells you how to use it, that's great. Just do that, embrace it, and use it.

Craig Bailey: However, when it comes to our next field, which we're going to talk about, which is lead status, that's why you've got the flexibility.

Ian Jacob: That's right. So this is going to be our sales feature of the week, Craig, we're going to talk about the lead status field. And you can consider lead status as a sub stage of a sales qualified lead in the lifecycle stage, Craig. So let's have a look at what the lead statuses are [crosstalk 00:13:53] default.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, the default options.

Ian Jacob: We start off with new, open, in progress, opened deal, unqualified, attempted to contact, connected, and bad timing. Now, this is a field where you can actually change these to make it more appropriate to your business. So in the business that we do lots of work with builders, we actually change a lot of these, so we can actually see the different stages that people are in, just in case that we need to keep them still in that sales process.

Craig Bailey: Yeah. I don't have particularly strong leanings either way whether you should stick with what HubSpot's given as the default or bend them to your own, but I think it's flexible, and I think we've got clients that do both, some just accept as is, and others will actually tailor them. Especially around objections. Sometimes they use it as a way to mark objections on particular client pushback on things, and they might have, if they've got some common ones, they set them there. It's available for customization.

Ian Jacob: Alright, onto HubSpot's Gotcha of the week, Craig. I'm going to take you here because we had a couple of customers not so long ago, say, "Oh, we logged in and we couldn't see this record. The screen's blank." I'm like, "Hang on, what's going on?" Anyway, so there might be a system problem, there might be something wrong. The best way to find out, as the first port of call, is to go to a page or a site on the HubSpot website called "Status of HubSpot.com", and it'll actually detail how the system status is across all the marketing, sales, service products, and you can see if there have been outages, if there's things in play, if there are things to be resolved, when they expect it to be resolved, and then what is going on? So that's a great place to go.

Craig Bailey: That is a great tip. Now I just realized when I was chopping these show notes and moving stuff around as we were preparing this, our summary piece that pulled all that together got removed. So I'm just thinking, why don't we do a quick recap, because we covered a whole bunch of stuff. We covered SEO, then we covered that solve for the problem and the different customer journey stages. Then we covered the HubSpot life cycle stages, which are basically a breakdown of those different stages. Then we covered the lead status.

Ian Jacob: The lead status. So let's pull all that together, because we've started with SEO. How do we pull all that together in terms of all those different stages and where SEO fits in?

Craig Bailey: So you can actually think about, if you think about the life cycle stage, Craig, and the lead statuses, even within the lead status, you could actually say, if I'll use the example of guys looking for land that they need to build a house on, maybe, if you see somebody in that status, you could think, "Well, what content could I give this, or what email nurture could I put this person in to help them actually buy land?" Or, you know, maybe you have an option where you can say, "Well, we often have land coming up. Would you like to join our waiting list to get the land?" And you could say, "Everybody that's in this lifecycle stage with this lead status needs to be in this list to be notified." So that's one way to use it, and that's how to tie it all together, and maybe educate people about how do you find a good block of land? Because one thing I find really interesting is that people, I'm not sure you know, but if you're building a house, the flatter the block of land, the better it is, the cheaper it is to build-

Ian Jacob: I can imagine.

Craig Bailey: The evener it is to build. As soon as there's slope, and slope is in varying degrees, sometimes people look at blocks of land, say, "Oh, that's not too slopy." But to a builder, that could be a few degrees of slope, which means that they've actually got to cut and fill the site, so they've got to get a bulldozer in there, level it all out, and that's extra cost, because they might have to bring in material, they might hit rock. All sorts of things can happen. But you could look at it and go, "That's not really sloping", but it's actually not flat. So there are so many things to consider when you're actually looking for a block of land, because there are people that won't built on certain blocks, and there are people that will build on certain blocks, and that's a really good education piece to people to understand, what am I looking for?

Ian Jacob: That's an excellent example. So, just to put that in context, you're actually now talking about a very specific part of the purchase journey that someone's going on answering, answering a very specific problem that's way down in their journey, And so, to listeners, this is a really good example of all those life cycle stages. So, at a minimum, you should be thinking about content in your, like, awareness stage, general awareness, then some in your considerations stage, and then some in decision. But what we can actually see from these different life cycle stages and then lead status stages or field, you could actually have content for each one of those, specifically tailored for where people are. Are they a marketing qualified lead? We're trying to move them to sales qualified. There's a piece of content there around what's relevant to your business that they will be searching for. So hopefully that's given listeners a great framework to think about where SEO fits in. It's not just, "Oh, I'll go to a keyword tool and search for something that's got the highest volume and try and rank for it." It's really about thinking what content can provide really high value at each of these stages and how we track and think about customers going on their journey.

Craig Bailey: That's right. I think we talked about this today, in other conversations, but it's how are we solving that problem for people that are actually on that journey. If you just come with that mindset, I think the rest kind of works itself out. Alright, Craig, onto our insight of the week.

Ian Jacob: Now, this is really good. I love this comparison, and you alerted me to this in a recent conversation. It's so good, and it's this ... let me consider three different people, right? And just-

Craig Bailey: So let's give context.

Ian Jacob: Yeah. Just bear with us while we set this up. Oh, what was the context?

Craig Bailey: The context was, I was driving here to your office, right, and I could have taken all the roads that weren't tolls. My goal is to get here the quickest, because time is valuable, and so I was happy to pay the tolls, but I was also talking about the fuel, because in terms of ... I'm a bit savvy with fuels, so I have a few app, I see the trends, I fill up on days when it's low. I don't go chasing it, but I think, "Well, I'll be bit strategic about this. But just understanding time and effort in terms of, you know, it might cost me more money, but I get back time.

Ian Jacob: So first person, let's say they chase cheap petrol or cheap gas or cheap fuel, whatever you're gonna say. They chase it because they want to save a few cents a liter. Nothing wrong with that. Second person, they want to avoid the tolls, so they're going go around the back roads and things like that. Nothing wrong with that. The third person, and you can see where we're going now, the third person says, "Right, I'm going to batch all my important meetings on one day to minimize my overall travel." So three different approaches there, all totally appropriate, but one of them significantly more impactful, that third one, batching saves you a ton of kilometers, time, and everything.

Craig Bailey: So why are we bringing this up? It's a great analogy, because, in marketing, what we often come across is people that are just so fixated on saving a few cents on their gas, so to speak, that they miss out these advantages of batching whole things. So we're going to give you some examples of that, but we just thought we'd set it up with that little example, and that's why we called it "Saving on petrol cost versus batching your travel into one place", just to make the point. So what are some of the examples?

Ian Jacob: So, Craig, before we start, we're going to start using these, we call them false marketing mindset, right? So we'll just get a hashtag on that one.

Craig Bailey: Yep.

Ian Jacob: So let me start with number one. People that focus in on saving a few cents on Google ad campaigns, instead of optimizing their landing pages so they actually convert the traffic that they're getting.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, that's a good one. Or here's another one. They focused on increasing engagement on social, instead of increasing follow ups by sales.

Ian Jacob: Next one, chasing cheap impressions on the display network, instead of highly targeted impressions on an appropriate network like LinkedIn.

Craig Bailey: As an example, not recommending LinkedIn for everyone, but for some people, the higher costs are worth it. What about spitting out lots of cheap fluff content, instead of a few quality pieces. As well, in light of our discussion on SEO, hopefully that's obvious why that wouldn't work particularly well, and yet we find people doing, "Oh, now I can save. I can get these cheap articles written, save money there", instead of actually focusing on quality.

Ian Jacob: Yeah, and you know what, talking about that, the person that came to me and said, "We want to do SEO", had lots of content, but no traffic to it. So there's a good example. Next one, using cheap bulk cold calling teams, rather than training up on callers to research the contacts that they're calling. So why we highlight this, is there is so much richness in contact records within HubSpot in terms of what people do, their Twitter profile, maybe a picture of themselves. There is so much, so many things you can actually do to find out more about the individual you're talking to, and not using it that is actually placing you in a really bad place.

Craig Bailey: Yeah. I'm actually just going to expand on this a bit, because we've seen this with clients where they go, "Oh, look, we just get the junior in to do all those calls", those outbound calls. They're just on a rotator doing it. And then I've got other clients where they go, "No, we've actually got senior people that will think about a contact before they call them, get a bit of data, check them out on LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff, call them, much higher success rate." And it's kind of interesting, because you can see people go, "Oh, we just want to get this many calls out. Our KPI metric is this many calls."

Ian Jacob: Not quality.

Craig Bailey: Not focusing on the outcome, and certainly not focused on training, and they're applying the cheapest person in the business. So what you're saying is, you know what, the very first contact you have with our business is with our cheapest person, who hasn't been trained. That's your first impression of our business, and, well, I wonder why that doesn't work?

Ian Jacob: Next thing, fixating on going viral instead of going profitable. And this happens everywhere, doesn't it, Craig?

Craig Bailey: It does, I'm surprised this still happens. So we get clients ... and I don't mean to bag our clients, because it's not like they're ... I don't think it's like them being silly or something about it, but they will say, "Oh, we want to go viral with this. How do we go viral?" And I'm like, if it was easy to do, everyone would do it. Like, the whole point of it ... And so, again, I'm not actually making fun of them, but there does seem to be this mindset. And I think a lot of the blame for this goes on some of these higher profile market ... you know, there's celebrity marketers, where they get out and they say, "Oh, I did this growth hack, and look, it went viral", and all. So it is out there in, I guess, in the ecosystem there, we've just got to be mindful of that, because, yeah, going viral ... And the other thing is, often you go viral and get no benefit. You make no business benefit from it. So yeah, it's all about going profitable.

Ian Jacob: The next one, not wanting to add contacts into HubSpot because it may cost them money, instead of focusing on keeping all of their contacts clean. So here's a really good one. Having lots of contacts that are actually not active, bounced, not cleaning that out, and just thinking, "Oh, every time I add a contact, it's going to cost me money."

Craig Bailey: That's right. And just a final example, this idea of all leads that are generated not being good, instead of understanding who you want and what problem you can solve for them. So this is this idea, we get leads and they're just like, "Ah, no, that's not a good lead", without even looking at them. We've had clients.

Ian Jacob: Absolutely. And I've had this, and, you know, we've had to work with sales teams, and even tell sales teams, "People might make inquiries during the day." They might try to go, "Oh, they didn't answer", or, you know, they left a message." Even then, sometimes they don't leave a message. But how about thinking, that person might be at work and they can only speak to them in their lunch break. Or use a different method of communication with them. Maybe an SMS to say, "Hey, I tried to call you, call me back when it's convenient. We can talk about how to help you." All right, onto our retirement of the week, Craig.

Craig Bailey: Just quickly, the predictive lead scoring changes. Just an update on last episode, because we now have a date that's going to happen.

Ian Jacob: Correct. First of March.

Craig Bailey: First of March.

Ian Jacob: All right, onto our resource of the week, Craig.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, so this was a LinkedIn Pulse article from Clayton Christianson, who many people know, you know the Innovator's Dilemma, and books from decades ago. Anyway, he's got a piece just on, after 25 years of studying innovation, what he's learnt. So you should read this piece. By the way, great example of content marketing, because, basically, it's a blurb, [inaudible 00:26:17] of his latest book, which I'm going to buy, based on this article.

Ian Jacob: You know what?. When you shared this with me and I read it, I was like, "Wow", I actually got a lot out of it. So I would encourage readers to spend some time and actually read it. Let's pull out one thing from that, Craig.

Craig Bailey: Yeah, look, he's talking about the value of management, and I hadn't really thought about this deeply, but he says management isn't simply about P&L statements, meeting quarterly growth and profitability targets, and creating brand awareness. There are by products of good management. Management is about waking up every day and helping people become better people so that they can do better work and live better lives.

Ian Jacob: Gold.

Craig Bailey: I actually don't have to explain that to ... yeah, when you read that, you're like, "Oh, that's management. You're valuable." So if you're a manager, if you're a marketing manager, and you've got a team, you can actually help people do better work and have better lives. He gives a great example in this. Sorry, I've just hijacked this thread because I'd remembered something else, in that he talks about this thought experiment of, imagine a person waking up happy in the morning, going to work, but then just being so ...

Ian Jacob: Deflated.

Craig Bailey: Deflated by their manager, and then going home and, you know, that just impacts their family, their kids, all that kind of thing, versus a person that goes up and they're inspired at work, great manager, and they go home inspired, tired, fatigued from doing great work, but then, you know, spreading, well, I guess, joy and love with their family. A manager can do that. So if you're a marketing manager, keep that in mind.

Ian Jacob: Alright, onto our quote of the week, Craig, and this is from a book called 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley. And I'm going to read this out, because it was a really good quote that you highlighted to us. "The absolute key to being successful long term in business is to deliver a remarkable value, and surprise and delight your customers beyond their expectations. If you get this right, your customers become your marketing department, and it's hard to keep up with the demand that is generated from their positive comments." I don't think that requires any more explanation. Alright, we've got some bonus links of the week, Craig, and I want to highlight this one. This also is probably to do with SEO. Google is now creating featured snippets from PDF content, so have a read of that, because there's another opportunity for you, if you're trying to actually rank, and Google is now doing that, using content from PDFs.

Ian Jacob: We'd love you to rate and leave us some feedback as it helps us improve and reach more listeners, and we'd love to hear what your thoughts are. So don't be quiet. Please do contact us, and there are many ways, through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Find Craig's happy face, and my happy face. And let us know. We'd love to talk to some of our listeners.

Craig Bailey: Love to hear from you, yes.

Ian Jacob: Yeah. So Craig, until next week.

Craig Bailey: Catch you later, Ian.