Welcome to HubShots - APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast - where we discuss HubSpot tips & tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.
We hope you enjoy the podcast as much as HubSpot's CEO, Brian Halligan does.
This episode we discuss HubSpot’s approach to using AI in its product, plus dive into attribution reports, and then chat about paying $130 for a mug to keep your coffee warm.
Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/163-hubspot-artificial-intelligence-ai-attribution-reports-and-a-130-ceramic-mug/
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.
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Recorded: Tuesday 25 June 2019 | Published: Friday 28 June 2019
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
In basic terms, AI is an area of computer science that makes machines seem like they have human intelligence.
While it’s all the rage these days, AI isn’t new. The term “artificial intelligence” was first coined back in 1956 by Dartmouth professor John McCarthy. He called together a group of computer scientists and mathematicians to see if machines could learn like a young child does, using trial and error to develop formal reasoning. The project proposal said they’d figure out how to make machines “use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” That was more than 60 years ago.
Until the early 2000s, AI has remained mostly in the hands of experts. But during the past few years, AI has become commonplace for two reasons. First, huge amounts of data are being created every minute. In fact, more than 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. Second, our computers are faster than ever. They can make sense of that vast wealth of new information in seconds.
With that in mind, software companies like HubSpot are sprinting towards an AI-powered future, finding new ways to use AI to solve business problems.
Couple of things that we use often in HubSpot that is powered by AI:
https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/6-mundane-but-impactful-business-problems-solved-by-ai-in-hubspot
“That’s where AI comes in. It allows you to make decisions based on data that’s too broad for our human minds to process and analyze. Simply put, AI helps to scale personalization.”
Btw if you are interested in seeing how AI can generate content (and authors), check this out:
http://thismarketingblogdoesnotexist.com/
Almost everything is created by AI - the only things supplied were the blog post Titles.
https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/demystifying-the-attribution-report-in-hubspot
Q: What types of questions can I answer with attribution reports?
A: Attribution reports can give high level insight on questions such as the following:
Note, you really want to have Enterprise edition to get all the different options eg in Pro you can’t see Source attribution:
And you won’t be able to view the different Attribution models:
You’ll need to have Enterprise in order to see these options:
Key insights: you need to have good, clean, complete data in order for attribution reports to provide any additional insight.
With the documents tool, you can build a library of content for your entire team to use and share with your contacts.
This is especially useful for sales to keep things consistent and updated like brochures and price lists that may be shared by a team of people.
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/documents/use-documents
Two of the features we love is tracking and reporting.
Beware the test@test.com problem...
Reminder about using styling with HubSpot forms - it’s an option on forms in Pro and Enterprise:
This will also make sure that the form doesn’t render as an iFrame.
NeverBounce has real-time email verification and email cleaning services.
https://neverbounce.com - from HubSpot support!
Bonus: See also the AppSumo deal on ClearOut: https://appsumo.com/clearout/
Google’s ‘social network by stealth’ approach (let’s not mention Google Plus)
https://ember.com/products/ember-ceramic-mug-au
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxUDdgkcru0
Facebook One-Sheeter Guides:
https://www.jonloomer.com/2019/05/28/facebook-one-sheeter-guides/
Setting a new record for number of CTAs to include in a single post. Congratulations Jon, you’re our winner with 6 CTAs!
“The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”
― Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/
https://moz.com/blog/best-free-seo-tools
https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-bing-254332
Please leave us a simple star rating as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.
- [Ian] Welcome to HubShots episode 163. We talk about artificial intelligence and HubSpot, Attribution Reporting, and the 130 dollar ceramic mug. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focus podcast where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, marketing and service results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found, with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems, how are you Craig?
- [Craig] Oh look really good, except my coffee is a little bit cold. If only there were a solution to that problem.
- [Ian] And I will give you one as the show goes on Craig so just hold on.
- [Craig] Coming up in a short seven, okay.
- [Ian] All right, I wanna talk about our inbound thought of the week Craig, and we've spoken about artificial intelligence before in previous episodes, and how that relates to HubSpot, but I thought, let's take a step back because some of us throw this term around and we don't really get it. We don't really fully understand it, it was even revealing to me as to what it was and how it came about.
- [Craig] Well that's right because artificial intelligence, surely that's just killer robots right?
- [Ian] That's right. So I'm gonna read to you a bit about how it originated, and we're gonna just talk about some of the things that we like that HubSpot are using artificial intelligence to do to make our lives easier on a day to day basis. So, artificial intelligence was first coined back in 1956 by a Dartmouth professor called John McCarthy, where he called a group of computer scientists and mathematicians to see if machines could learn like young children do. And using trial and error they developed formal reasoning. So what I'm gonna say after this, in the early 2000s, AI was still mainly in the hands of experts, but in the last few years it's become common place for two reasons. Firstly, huge amounts of data being created every minute, in fact they're saying in more than 90% of the world's data has been generated in the past two years. And secondly, our computers are faster than than ever. They can make sense of sense of vast wealth of new information in seconds. And with that in mind, HubSpot is using artificial intelligence within it's system to do certain things. So I'm gonna highlight three things. You will see in HubSpot, it now finds duplicate contacts. So in the contacts tool under actions, you can find duplicate contacts because it's run over the data defined what could be potentially duplicated. Number two Craig.
- [Craig] Well you've actually gonna hear about loading data and matching. So importing data and how it's just, it seems to know where the data is gonna end up.
- [Ian] Correct. It actually does a pretty good job, and then understanding what type of field it is, and so on. And number three is, importing scans and this is to do with email. So when emails are imported, it scans the list for potential deliverability problems. Now you might go but why, but it's all about keeping it clean, right? And I've seen this when I've imported things in before, where it'll automatically mark an address' undeliverable or not gonna send the email to because it may be marked as spam for example. I'm like how did it know that? Anyway, it does it, so it's available. Now there is one really interesting quote that you picked out.
- [Craig] Yeah, that's right. And actually we should just mention all of what we've talked about here is coming from Ari's blog post on HubSpot blog, it's really good. He goes into this in a bunch more detail and a few more examples but he's actually talking about personalization. By the way that's the topic for our HubSpot user group tomorrow night. By the time you'll have heard this we'll have had the user group meeting, hope you're there, hope you enjoyed it. But anyway personalization, he talks about the fact that when it comes to AI, it actually allows you to make decisions that are too broad for human minds to process. And so basically, AI helps you to scale personalization. I think that's a really good way to think about it.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] And of course we know there's other barriers in, especially marketing across the stack and I'm sure HubSpot's got this in mind with just their advertising tools and all those kinds of things, so it's really stunning, but it's really just about optimizing and scaling decision making, to make smart decisions.
- [Ian] Now you pointed out a really good blog, and we'd encourage people to go have a look at this. If you go to this is marketing blog.
- [Craig] No thismarketingblogdoesnotexist.com. That's a long url, but yeah, thismarketingblogdoesnotexist.com, check it out because that is a blog that is entirely written and actually built by artificial intelligence. So not only is all the content just generated automatically by artificial intelligence, but the authors and the authors photos, they're not real people, they're not real names, it's all just made up. And it's just a good example of how, yeah.
- [Ian] How it's working.
- [Craig] The little mini robots and artificial intelligence can build all that stuff. Basically you have an army of robots at your disposal. I think this is what people don't realize as marketers, and well in a lot of professions. Think of Google, just the Google section, just this army of robots just crawling the web, just doing all of this stuff at massive scale and as marketers, we have this at our fingertips to do. Let's put those little robots to work and thanks HubSpot for implementing it in your product.
- [Ian] That's right. All right, onto our HubSpot marketing feature of the Craig, and we're gonna talk about Attribution Reports in HubSpot.
- [Craig] Yeah, and this is also based on a blog post. A good blog post I thought from HubSpot blog.
- [Ian] That's right. And this is because we often get these questions from people that we talk to and we deal with on a daily basis and they go, what does this mean? Like what does it mean that this contact was assisted? What can I make sense out of this?
- [Craig] Yeah, that's right. So Attribution Reports are really well, about providing attribution back to a point. So is it the blog post where people started? Is it the resource that they came from? Is it a refer ex cetera? Now, I'm actually gonna say two things, I'm gonna say one, it's good, and two, it's useless. Okay, so just lemme explain that, because Attribution Reports for starters, you need pro and above to access them. But really you need enterprise to get the full value out of it.
- [Ian] You do actually need data.
- [Craig] Yeah, and plus you need a lot of data, that's exactly right. However, and one of the people might say, oh I don't have enterprise, well is it worth paying enterprise to get these Attribution Reports. And I'm gonna say for most people, not it's not. And I'll tell you why, because when I analyze well we've both got enterprise portals but we're not, I analyze data for sim, and we've got a lot data in some of our brands, we analyze it and the Attribution Reports often don't give much more insight over just general reports. And I think this is something that people need to understand. For Attribution Reports to give you actionable insight, you need really clean data. So if the data is wrong, you know the referral source is wrong or you didn't tag it properly, if it came from paid adds and all that kind of stuff. If it's wrong, it's not gonna give you some magical insight into attribution that you didn't know before, in fact it'll probably confound you and the other thing is that you almost need to be saying what's the question I'm asking here, rather than, I think people often get a report and go ah, so tell me some insight, and really you've actually gotta be thinking about, well what's the question that I wanna answered here? And that's how you have to approach reporting in many ways to get any value. And we know this from Google analytics as well, which has had Attribution Reports, well for free since forever, does give you some insights, but then again it's also about the data.
- [Ian] That's right.
- [Craig] It's in place.
- [Ian] And I think it's also understanding the types of attributions that's available to you. There's time decay, there's last touch, there's first touch, there's first and last touch, when I first saw this I was like what the. And so you gotta understand what you're trying to actually get, or how it's gonna affect the results you want to see, so.
- [Craig] Yeah. And I think you're better, sometimes you're better coming in with the question such as ah, is it really worthy doing x? Well let's see what attribution highlights for us, because if you just ah I'm gonna pull up the Attribution Report and see what it magically shows you, it's possibly not gonna show you anything else then a just say a general sources report would show you. And especially if data's dirty or not particularly clean, possibly even more misleading. Anyway, good blog post around Attribution Reports if you wanna dive into it, if you do have an enterprise portal. You know the other thing I'll say, you know when you analyze data, do you feel like the HubSpot reports is slow?
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] I know they gotta crunch a lot of data, but I'll bet, you know what I'm predicting? Come at an inbound they'll say, we've increased the reporting crunch time by 1000% because fighting for these reports.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] People aint got time for that sometimes.
- [Ian] So when you say waiting for the reports you're talking about the visualization of the report.
- [Craig] Sorry the visualization, yeah.
- [Ian] Versus the data that we're actually seeing.
- [Craig] Yeah it's pretty good at collecting the data, but yeah, creating that visualization especially on those Attribution Reports, if you've got a big data set, takes a while.
- [Ian] Yes. All right Craig, onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week, and this came from talking to one of my customers, and they were like, how do I track a document if it's in a email and someone forwards it to somebody else and I wanna know if that person read that document, how do I do that? All right, I've got just the tool for you, it's called the document's tool, and what this allows you to do, is actually keep a library of content that your entire team can use. What I love about it is, it's a central location that you can store the contents of couple of clients for used things like, the brochures that they often send people, price lists, so price lists often get changed on a quarterly basis, so keeping this all in sync for sales is really important. And also when you're using them in templates, you can call the documents, and they will automatically pull in the right documents for you. But what I wanted to share was this feature about being able to track. So you can, when you share it, you can say look, I wanna share it with this person with this particular email, and if they need to actually, if for example if they pass that on, or they share that with somebody else, there is an option to require an email address to view the document. So people have to stick their email in to view the document. That's where this tracking can happen, now obviously anything can be gained like you know, so just be aware of this when using that feature, because as people get more savvy, they will decide not to do that.
- [Craig] Yeah we call this the test@test.com problem which is when everyone, when ever someone's prompted to put an email address in to access something, it's test@test.com, but look, that's an indicator in itself. If someone doesn't wanna put their email address in there, probably not high intent anyways.
- [Ian] That's right.
- [Craig] Can be a qualifier or a disqualifier in some ways.
- [Ian] That's right, and then the other thing I forgot to mention is that the reporting on the documents, understanding who's opening, how many people have opened it, what time they've spent on each of the pages, and if you're contact owner, that will get sent to you, as to which pages they spend the most time on, which I find really useful.
- [Craig] I think that's a really key feature about it, that time and page, and as we've said before on the show, if you see someone open, flick, flick, flick, flick, pricing page leave quickly.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] You know that's a bad sign. If they flick, zoom down to pricing page, linger there, ah yeah and then go back and start reading the rest, very good sign.
- [Ian] So there you have it. All right Craig, the HubSpot Gotcha of the week.
- [Craig] Just a reminder about styling Hubspot forms, I was embarrassed about this because I cloned a form for a page, and then I put it on a word press site.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] And the styling wasn't working. I was like, what's going on? I've embedded the same way, I'm calling the native styling from the site, but it's not working, what's going on? I've cloned the form, it should be working, right? So I contacted HubSpot support, they came back and very sweetly told me ah there's an option on the options page, basically to make it an unstyled form so it works on the site, right? And I knew this because I'd actually told people this, 'cause they'd asked me about this problem I think a couple of months ago and I'd said ah that's an option, just completely forgot about it. So, it's one of those things you trick yourself 'cause you duplicate, you clone a form, you're thinking I can carry over all the settings, but just a reminder that that unstyled form setting is on the options.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] Now I would like it if that was actually on the styling and preview form tab of the form, right? You're going through the form, I'd like to go oh styling and preview, no. Don't use HubSpot styling. I just wanna, it'd make sense if it's there, right? I'm just saying that so that I don't feel so dumb but anyway, if you've fallen into that trap as well.
- [Ian] It is an option Craig.
- [Craig] Remember that option, yes.
- [Ian] All right, marketing tip of the week Craig. And this marketing tip came about because I was helping a customer send out some emails, and it got flagged as having a high number of bounces. And there was this really lovely message in my portal saying, if you don't resolve this you will be banned from your account.
- [Craig] Ah you got one of those as well. We got one of those the other day.
- [Ian] All right, I contacted HubSpot support, I'm like, so firstly I'm going to find out why this has happened.
- [Craig] Yeah.
- [Ian] I then created, from all the bounces I created a list of all the bounce contacts. So I could exclude them off any future sends.
- [Craig] Right.
- [Ian] As an interim solution. I then contacted HubSpot support to figure out whether this would be sufficient to do, to which the answer was, yes it would be, obviously it's not a permanent solution, but it kinda gave me the option, actually what I ended up doing was, from that list was, assigning the contacts back to the owner as a task to actually go and find out what was wrong with it, or why it was wrong.
- [Craig] How many contacts we talking about?
- [Ian] There were probably about 20, 30 contacts per person in sales. So it wasn't huge but in the whole list it was still like 100 contacts, right? So that was one, they to told me to load an unsubscribe list in there, which I said then, asked what happens when I need to send emails when once it's been fixed? And they said, that would be rather hard, so I went, that's not a good idea. But then they came up with this solution where you can actually verify emails, and it's called NeverBounce, and it's real time verification and email cleaning where you can actually load this list in bulk, and it'll check to see that address is valid. So I think this is really a useful tool to probably use before you're importing data in to actually verify and check that it is clean, and flag those issues prior to the load.
- [Craig] I had a similar experience, I was telling you about this the other day before. We pulled a whole bunch of contacts out of one portal and imported them into another portal. So it's about 8000 contacts under one portal, imported into another portal. Now we only exported out the ones that hadn't bounced, didn't have any issues.
- [Ian] Yeah.
- [Craig] So they were fine and engaged, imported them in, and about 10% of the list bounced straight away. We're actually still tryna work out why. So we're actually going through this process with HubSpot support.
- [Ian] Okay.
- [Craig] What's going on? So we actually were wondering if there was something right, because it's in another portal maybe there's a different IP Address rank or something that's being sent from, or something weird. So, but what we'll do, is we'll use a tool like this. I think this is a good tip. We'll upload them in today and just see what it gives us back, whether the things stay clean or not.
- [Ian] And it also does connect in with HubSpot if you do need to use it. All right, onto our insight of the week Craig, you got some Google My Business updates.
- [Craig] Yeah, I just wanted to mention this because yet again, Google My Business is so important for businesses.
- [Ian] It is.
- [Craig] And a reminder to people, set up your profile or claim it and make sure you keep it updated. It's still free which is incredible, by the way, don't hold your breath, surely they're gonna be charging for premium features soon, I can't believe it. You know how you use years ago we're going ah one day HubSpot's gonna get rid of the key word tool, and finally it came, we're very sad about that. One day Google My Business is gonna start charging for their business profiles, like a premium tier and we'll be really sad when that happens, but until that does, take advantage of it. Get your Google My Business profile up to date. Anyway, some of the new features they're putting in, they're gonna have short names, they're gonna have other tools within it and the reason I wanted to raise it and it's kind of insight of the week is because you know how Google had Google+ and that's all died, right, and gone and everyone's like ah they couldn't do social.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] Google My Business is their social by stealth, I really think because now you have posts you have on your Google My Business profile, you can have videos, you have photos, you have events.
- [Ian] You have offers.
- [Craig] Offers, you can have contact us by text, they haven't got like straight messaging real time there but messaging in a sense is there. It's become their LinkedIn page and their Facebook page, company page.
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] It's Google My Business. So I call it their social by stealth, business social by stealth and I just, folks you've gotta get onto this, if you're not doing it and not updating it.
- [Ian] That's right and you know what? I saw a really interesting thing the other day that they've introduced is that if you, when you initially sign up, you can actually give a one time offer to the person that actually follows or signs up to your page which I thought was rather interesting so there's another opportunity to entice people to actually follow your business.
- [Craig] Right, that's interesting. Yeah well, the thing I said, they've added short names so at the moment you just have a short name, what do you do with it? Well not much but at some point there's gonna be your @ short naming people and talking, it's conversation going in, it's you know.
- [Ian] So that's right, it's a opportunity, I would actually get on top of that.
- [Craig] Now is it time for a coffee, ah it's a bit cold.
- [Ian] I know, it is Craig but let me share a solution with you. There is a mug called the Ember ceramic mug and it can prolong the enjoyment of your coffee and tea as it's the world's first temperature controlled mug.
- [Craig] But tell 'em the price son.
- [Ian] It's a cool 130 dollars Craig.
- [Craig] That's 130 Australian. And the travel mug is more expensive. So folks, check the, you've gotta see it because here's the mental shift I went through. When I first saw it, I thought ah this is a joke, like they've got an app connected mug.
- [Ian] It even works with the Apple Watch Craig.
- [Craig] And I thought this is a joke, someone's having a go right and then it's available at the Apple store. We were laughing about this before but here's the mental journey that you go on. You go ah this is a joke, someone's having me on and then you go ah actually it's not a joke and then you go 130 bucks, who in their right mind would pay 130 bucks for a mug and then you go, you know what, that mug could be kind of handy and then by the end your day your going oh it's only 130 bucks to keep my coffee warmer. I haven't bought one yet. I'm getting close. So listeners, check this out, would you buy a ceramic mug.
- [Ian] Well I mean this is interesting, I mean it's a very stylish mug I have to admit.
- [Craig] It's a beautiful sight, they've done really well.
- [Ian] Yes it's beautifully designed. It has one hour battery life and it has a charging coaster that you can stick it on and it will stay in the temperature range of between 50 and 62.5 degrees Celsius and you know what, it just looks really nice.
- [Craig] It looks really nice and I was reading some of the reviews of this, people are saying it's life changing. I'm not joking . They're saying it's life changing because instead of having to go over to the microwave and reheat their coffee or get another cup, they just have a nice hot cup of coffee or tea all morning and they're reading the paper and all that and I was like well you know there's worse things to spend money on I guess.
- [Ian] Correct. Well there you have it, that's our product of the week Craig.
- [Craig] If any listener has one, tell us what you think.
- [Ian] Yeah that's right, see if you're in the US, it's 79.95.
- [Craig] It's a bargain.
- [Ian] And you can get it Starbucks and Apple store.
- [Craig] You should see the video, we put a link to the YouTube video, it's like this, such an aspirational, the music and everything, it's like it's a mug. Since we're all in marketing and sales, there's a lot we can learn from this. So I encourage you to have a look.
- [Ian] All right Craig the resource of the week and this is a Facebook One-Sheeter guide from Jon Loomer.
- [Craig] Now we love Jon Loomer and this one is good as well but folks, check this out for the maximum number of CTA's he's managed to push into a blog post. He's set a new record I reckon.
- [Ian] So why I'm reading and just take a note and I love how the CTA's are prefaced by saying a message from Jon . So there you go, I mean.
- [Craig] There's actually almost more CTA content in the post than actual content.
- [Ian] You know what's interesting, it's like he's not giving up about testing new stuff, right, and that he can clearly see he's testing different things and measuring what's working.
- [Craig] Oh he's the master, I love his stuff.
- [Ian] Yeah.
- [Craig] And I will happily put up with all those CTA's 'cause his content is so good.
- [Ian] Correct, all right Craig, onto our quote of the week. And this is from a book that you have read and I'm listening to currently called Stealing Fire : How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler. So here it is. "The second is trickier, the person who knows "what to do next is the leader, "we're entirely non-hierarchal in that way "but in a combat environment when split seconds "make all the difference, "there's no time for second guessing. "When someone steps up to become the new leader, "everyone immediately automatically moves with him, "it's the only way we win."
- [Craig] I think that's a really interesting quote that the person who knows what to do next is the leader.
- [Ian] That's right and that's what I wanted to highlight with this quote because it was fascinating. I mean there's lots of examples in this book and I think we can learn a lot from just understanding how Navy SEALs operate and how they actually get into the flow of operating at that level that they do so think about in your business, in your team, what's happening.
- [Craig] Well I think if you're in a leadership position as opposed to just managerial by the way, managers and leaders are different beasts but leadership, yeah is really about knowing what to do or deciding what to do next and then leading the way. I find these books good like this is not a book you read to learn marketing tactics.
- [Ian] Correct.
- [Craig] But it is a book you learn how to go right, this is the way people think and this is how the way the world works and this is how leadership is manifested in active leads so yeah, I love these kinds of things that always kind of expand your thinking.
- [Ian] And on a happy note, we have a few bonus things for the week. We would love you to leave us a simple star rating on Apple Podcasts or any other podcast app that you listen to us on. And until next time Craig.
- [Craig] Catch you later Ian. Hey there, thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes and the latest HubSpot news and tips, please visit us at HubShots.com.