HubShots Episode 156: All about Marketing and HubSpot
Welcome to Episode 156 of HubShots! Welcome to HubShots, APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips and tricks, new...
17 min read
Welcome to Episode 171 of HubShots!
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 chat about HubSpot’s new Go Action in Workflows, the trauma of having a contact list get quarantined, plus a look at how Seth Godin is using Instagram.
Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/171-workflow-go-action-the-pain-of-hubspot-quarantine/
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 27 August 2019 | Published: Friday 6 September 2019
Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week
Plant based KFC
KFC is about to offer Beyond Meat chicken:
I learnt a new word: flexitarian : a person who consumes mainly vegetarian food but occasionally eats meat or fish
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/flexitarian.html
Btw Seeing the word ‘fried’ coming back - turns out that wasn’t the reason they rebranded to KFC in the 90s:
https://www.rd.com/food/fun/kfc-kentucky-fried-chicken-name-change/
HUGcast - September 2019
The Sydney HubSpot User Group (HUG) is coming up on Wednesday 25 September 2019.
At the event we’ll be recording a podcast about how to get started recording a podcast.
It will also be our post Inbound event with takeaways from the conference.
Look for details here:
https://events.hubspotusergroups.com/sydneyhug
Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week
Workflow branch joins
Using Go in workflows to connect branches
Currently in Company, Deal and Ticket workflows.
Can’t wait for this to be added to Contact workflows as well.
Influenced revenue report - thanks Justin
Reports > Analytics Tools > Campaign Analytics:
#reportbetter
Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week
A really good and simple reminder about manual lead scoring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ8P7C4k_As
Shot 4: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week
Where are all the new releases?
===> waiting for Inbound19
Shot 5: Marketing Tip of the Week
Using smart content:
https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/five-considerations-before-using-smart-content
Shot 6: Insight of the Week
There are Google Ads, and then there are More Ads:
https://twitter.com/vorticoncmdr/status/1165530166816325632?s=12
Interesting use of Instagram by Seth Godin:
https://www.instagram.com/sethgodin/?hl=en
Eg he ran an Instagram Live and Facebook Live event:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B1grfO0AxwD/
Shot 7: App Integration of the Week
NeverBounce
Ran into some issues with email delivery this week and had to use NeverBounce. Here are some of the results as we connected it to HubSpot to do the validation and then pushed the data back.
But how do you check it? They will attempt to create a HubSpot property named “neverbouncevalidationresult” to store the NeverBounce validation result (valid, invalid, disposable, catchall, and unknown).
Shot 8: Resource of the Week
https://databox.com/the-44-most-destructive-seo-myths-according-to-120-seos
https://www.craigbailey.net/seo-myths/
Shot 9: Quote of the Week
“Different’ and ‘new’ is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.”
- Sir Jony Ive
Shot 10: Bonus Links of the Week
Yet another post about doing a simple SEO audit:
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/08/helpful-seo-audit/
Interesting link experiment going on by Dejan SEO (after their main site was penalised):
https://dejanmarketing.com/link/
Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.
- [Ian Jacob] Hi everyone. Welcome to HubShots, Episode 171. In this episode we talk about workflow go-actions and the pain of HubSpot quarantine. You're listening to Asia-Pacific's number one HubSpot focused podcast. Where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and features and strategies for growing your marketing and sales results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are ya Craig?
- [Craig] Oh look, really good and you know what I'm looking forward to? I'm looking forward to some of that plant-based KFC. Did you see this, the news come out recently?
- [Ian] What is the this about? That's our inbound thought of the week.
- [Craig] Well I'll get to why it's our inbound thought of the week, but yeah, so KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, by the way they've been using--
- [Ian] Fried!
- [Craig] Fried a fair bit lately, anyway, the health, I guess, problems have gone away. But anyway Beyond Meat has gone huge and everyone's offering vegan and vegetarian options now. So KFC, they're gonna have vegetarian chicken based on Beyond Meat. Anyway I just thought, oh, what better way to start a show than talk about KFC you know.
- [Ian] But this is marketing right?
- [Craig] And why I'm bringing this around. I'm gonna tenuously try and relate this back to marketing but how things were changed. First the word fried, I saw an ad for them the other day and it said "Fried Gold" like they're just, it's almost front and center, fried. So that's changed so it just shows how marketing's changed there, someone said "Oh, let's just embrace this." You know? And also that whole Beyond Meat craze. Like everyone, and there's a whole list of these companies rushing to put Beyond Meat in there. So just this kind of branding that Beyond Meat has got and the marketing behind it, everyone's jumping on board. So really interesting times.
- [Ian] Yeah that's right and you even look at the packaging it looks really green and I thought that was rather interesting, I mean, I guess what next?
- [Craig] Oh by the way I learnt a new word.
- [Ian] Well you taught me a new word today.
- [Craig] Okay the word is flexitarian. Had you heard this word before?
- [Ian] No I had not.
- [Craig] Well apparently it's been around since the 90s, I didn't know this, but flexitarian it's a combination between flexible and vegetarian and it's basically people that have kinda more trying to avoid eating meat and more a plant-based diet but they're flexible about it. So yeah anyway, there you go. Word of the week. We should have a shot at word of the week anyway.
- [Ian] All right now Craig we have got the HUGcast coming in September 2019.
- [Craig] The Hug Cast. What is the Hug Cast?
- [Ian] So this is the Sydney HubSpot user group and it's on the 25th of September and at this event we will be recording the podcast on how to start and record a podcast.
- [Craig] It's very meta, so folks, by the way, we're recording this on the 27th of August just before Inbound. You're going to Inbound aren't you Ian? Yep, flying out so, by the time listeners you hear this he'll be back and would have heard about all the goodness that's been announced at Inbound. So when we have our HubSpot user group in late September it will actually be a bit of a recap of Inbound. And you know what we're doing different this time? It's not just going to be a trotting out of the news, 'cause I think HubSpot does a pretty good job of pushing that out. But it's actually going to be a panel which we are going to be recording as part of a podcast. A panel talking about how to apply all our new releases and features into your marketing. So it's not just about oh here's this new feature. It's like here's how we can apply it. So it's going to be a user group event I think.
- [Ian] That's right. And I wonder whether they've done one of those anywhere else in the world. Okay Craig, onto our HubSpot marketing feature of the week. And this is about workflow branch joins.
- [Craig] Right. So you know one of the big problems with HubSpot, I'm gonna say problem, HubSpot workflows is that you can't join branches so you branch and then they each have their own path and you can't bring them back together. So we're almost there. HubSpot have released the go-action. And it's quite nice actually because it's more powerful than just joining a branch at the end where, you know, we've used active campaign. Others which do a good job of joining branches at the end. But it's a go-action so you can push it off to another event. Now they've only got it in company deal and ticket work flows. It's not in contact workflows yet but I'm assuming that's coming soon. So, looking forward to that. We're going to link in the show notes plus a screenshot, just of an example we've got in place.
- [Ian] Now Craig, why would anyone care about this go-action and joining?
- [Craig] So do you use branching much in workflows?
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] Right, so I tend to avoid it. I avoid using branches, yeah.
- Oh. And I'll tell you why: because I don't like having all these branches heading off and then I can't pull them together, because you often get a lot of these repeated actions, branches.
- [Ian] Actions, yes.
- [Craig] Then you almost see like 90% of each branch is the same, it's just for a few. And that's often because those things come after the initial action that happens after a branch so you really want to be able to bring it back so you can kind of say branch do this or that then bring them back so they're on a common thread. Now we tend to use child workflows for that.
- [Ian] Yes, which I think is what I did one of these massive workflows for a customer, and I was showing it to you the other day and you said, oh I think we need to split that up and pull out some of that in to a child workflow, which I did. So that actually worked really well. And I think it's a good philosophy.
- [Craig] Well that's really good, but this go action is going to
- Going to change things. mean we can avoid doing that. So I'm really looking forward to this, ahhh, so.
- [Ian] It is actually very good now that I'm thinking about it contextually in one of my things that I've done for a customer, I think this is excellent. All right, now Craig, we spoke about a influenced revenue report a while back and we're just gonna touch back on this again.
- [Craig] Well this is a really good thing and by the way thanks, Justin, for this, go the extra. He alerted us or reminded us of the influenced revenue report. Now I'm not actually sure if I did know about this influenced revenue, or certainly not in my own portal. Had you actually used this report before?
- [Ian] No I haven't, I didn't but now I do after having this discussion. I went last week and implemented in a couple of portals where we've got data. So you obviously need DL data in there to make this happen. So be aware of that: if you don't have DL data you're not going to see anything on there. And you find this report under reports > analytics tools > campaign analytics. And then you've got to make sure you choose the influence contacts by revenue.
- [Craig] Well actually there's an influence contacts and an influence revenue
- Correct. and they're both actually quite good. Now there is a little bit of a well it's not really a "gotcha" but you've just got to remember that there can be double-ups because if something is coming through; a deal has come through multiple, say, campaigns they both get counted. But it's influenced revenue so it's where these campaigns have influenced revenue. So it's actually exactly how you would expect.
- [Ian] All right, on to HubSpot's sales feature of the week! Now, Craig, I wanted to highlight this because lead scoring, and we've spoke about this a few times, people tend to get confused. Now even if you have a marketing enterprise, you will have predictive lead scoring which works on data that's within the system and from the machine learning and artificial intelligence that's going on. But if you don't have marketing enterprise and you've just got marketing professional, there is this lead scoring ability but it's a manual ability so you've actually got to set up what score to give certain aspects of behavior or maybe certain fields of data that you're collecting. And I wanted to highlight this is a one minute, forty-five video from HubSpot Academy about how to use lead scoring in HubSpot. And I think it's a good and simple reminder about setting this up in your portal. As a start, it doesn't have to be perfect but at least get used to setting something up. You could even use this, really simple things, like one of the examples they use is that in the position field it's "vice" like they're looking for a vice president or vice or VC president. So one of the criteria was like I want to give it 10 points if you see this in the position field. So it's just really simple. But I want you to have a look at the video and go and set that up. That's the action from this.
- [Craig] And just one question: should they be watching this video with the sound on or off, Ian?
- [Ian] Well, Craig, what can I say. I would recommend sound off.
- [Craig] Okay, listen, so a big, yeah, a special bonus there if you listen with the sound on, my goodness!
- [Ian] All right, Craig, on to HubSpot gotcha of the week.
- [Craig] And you know what's got me?
- [Ian] There ain't no releases.
- [Craig] Where's all the product releases? And I guess everyone saying we're holding those for Inbound. So, yeah it's been a pretty lean month in the product releases, I guess, yeah. Really looking forward to when it gets announced next week.
- [Ian] That's right. I'm sure you'll be able to watch it live on HubSpot.com. Or if you listen to this episode after you probably go to HubSpot.com/new will be the new product releases.
- [Craig] That's it.
- [Ian] All right, Craig, on to our marketing tip of the week: using a smart content.
- [Craig] Look we've started talking about this lately but this is just a blog post on considerations around smart content. Worth going through, they give kind of five points around how to think about smart content. Things to consider before you jump into it. Well worth a read.
- [Ian] So let's just pull one thing out of there, Craig. So I think this is a good one: determine who you are creating smart content for. That's a really good one. And then determine where you want to add smart content. And then determine what should be your default content. So I'll give you a little example. We use smart call-to-actions based on certain behaviors: maybe people belong to certain lists, maybe they've downloaded certain offers and now they need to be moved along on to the next offer. So this is a really simple way we use smart-CTAs to actually deliver that to people in a manner that is efficient.
- [Craig] Yeah look I think the thing with smart content is you do have to think about it carefully especially if it's actual content within a page as opposed to say a form or a CTA because you can often get yourself into over-complexity in areas if you haven't thought about it. Getting the default content right is important. But yeah I've seen people like, oh smart content-- they lose track of it or they try and do multiple smart content items on a page and it all gets out of hand. So yeah this is just a good reminder to plan it out and think about how it's done.
- [Ian] All right. On to our insight of the week, Craig. Now there are Google ads, and then there are more ads.
- [Craig] Actually this should just be a "LOL of the week" So, this is linked through to Twitter and someone's done a screenshot where they've typed in a search term and basically the Google result has had a bunch of ads and it's got another section called "more ads" and it's like you know it's breaking out the categories or the sections of ads sorry. I don't know, when I, I tried to reproduce this it's like, have they doctored this? Have they made this up? I don't know. It's pretty funny thought. But it's true; that's the way Google is becoming.
- [Ian] Now, just to-- I just want to take a little step back. I've been reviewing a lot about accounts lately. And Google's releasing new updates and features all the time and obviously you can test new things, right? What you tend to find is all these new features take up more space in the ad. So, you know, you could-- I was, I think I was talking to a customer the other day and I think if you used all the features that were available in the Google ad tool you could pretty much take up the entire mobile screen almost.
- [Craig] That's kind of funny. Do you remember The Onion years ago when they were, you know how men's shavers
- [Ian] Yes you know, they're--
- [Ian] The dollar-shave club.
- [Craig] Well, yeah but, you know, they're like, "Mine's got two blades." And, "Oh mine's got three blades!" "No, mine's got four blades!" And then The Onion did this joke article I think, I forget how many, it was like "Mine's got five!" or "seven blades!" or something It's like, just like this HUGE-- It's kind of like, you know, over the top. And Gillette have actually come down and that, like it's-- It just cracks me up. Anyway, it's kind of like Google Ads are doing the same it's like well you can have your nice two-line ad No, no, we're adding a third line. Oh no, four-line! You've got five! oh! And there's ad extensions: you've got six! Mine's got seven lines of ads! These ads are just a huge thing it's almost like your entire phone is taken up with one ad and then you just scroll through the ad.
- [Ian] There is because you
- It's out of control! can have a site link extension, you can have a call extension, you can have a message extension, you can have price extension. They're really good because you kind of get a scrolling carousel of pricing. When I use these for customers it's really impressive the amount of space you can take up. Anyway,
- Anyway.,
- [Craig] So it's kind of just a bit of a joke, aside. On to the actual insight of the week. And this is around Seth Godin; do you follow him on Instagram?
- [Ian] I do but I don't look at his stuff that often.
- [Craig] Right, so you should check it out. And listeners, check out how he's embracing Instagram with his Instagram updates and he's got videos and then he's got the carousels. When you see how he's doing it it's like ah this is so obvious! Anyway, we should do this for HubShots.
- [Ian] Exactly.
- [Craig] Anyway, take a look at Seth Godin. And I just think it's interesting. I mean, it's not that it hasn't been done before I know there's some cartoonists and things like that do the carousel panel quite well. But he's taken it from first time I've come and seen it done well like that and of course HubSpot's doing that kind of thing as well but yeah, take inspiration from that.
- [Ian] And also have a look here at our Instagram Live and Facebook Live event. I think the one thing we can learn out of this is that look at what he's doing and see what can be applicable to your business. And test and measure like we always say. All right, Craig, on to our app integration of the week.
- [Craig] All right, so when we say app integration we're also going to go "uh oh, quarantining items." So explain the setup to this.
- [Ian] All right so I came across this app probably a couple of months ago from HubSpot Support when I was talking about, I think I was trying to do some list cleaning and they said "Oh you should check this out." It's called NeverBounce. It integrates with HubSpot now. And this is because a customer gave me a list this week of resellers that they sell stuff to. I don't think they've have actually communicated with them recently I guess because they're constantly selling them stuff or they're buying stuff. You know, accounts are billing them, emailing them. And so they thought, "OK well we've got these specials on. Can we email them?" Sure thing. Anyway, what do you know there's about 400 on that list. The first 50 sent out and there's a bounce rate of about 15%. Everything gets quarantined. Right so this entire list. So I'm thinking to myself this is not very good. You know, I get emails flown everywhere. My account manager's notified HubSpot. Like it's just alarm bells ringing. Anyway so I thought okay let's take a step back. Let me go and claim these lists. So I used NeverBounce. So I actually initially just loaded the list. I think they run a free verification. So I think one list came up at about 13% I thought Okay, well that's okay. I can get that clean. Another one came up at 20, right. And this is the one that I, I can't remember whether this is the one I learned, one of the two. Anyway, so I thought, okay well I'm gonna clean these. So I paid, I got them cleaned and then I pushed the data back into HubSpot because there is, once it gets the list, you can clean it and you can say import it back in to HubSpot, which it does. And then I was like, Okay now what do I do? Anyway I still don't get over this quarantining problem, right? Because now I've got to explain to support where I got the list from, how I communicated with them.
- [Craig] You are feeling the pain.
- [Ian] I am really feeling the pain.
- [Craig] You are feeling the HubSpot quarantine pain.
- [Ian] That's right, it's like I'm in jail!
- [Craig] You are in jail.
- [Ian] So anyways I'm talking to HubSpot support and just trying to understand this whole process. If I had done this process before I sent the email there probably wouldn't have been a problem. But because I attempted to send the email not understanding how clean this list was I ran into this problem. So here's lesson number one: make sure you ask the right questions and make sure you actually do a check and clean your list, and use a service. There are many services out there but NeverBounce is one of them, hooks in with HubSpot. The second thing is, when you're cleaning this list and they came from HubSpot, you'll probably log in and you'll go, "How do I tell that the data's actually gone back?" And I had no idea and I've talked to HubSpot Support and they're probably on their way to telling me. But here it is: what it says in their support documentation is that they will attempt to create a HubSpot property named NeverBounce Validation Result, right? To store the NeverBounce validation result of valid, invalid, disposable, catch all and unknown. And I could not find that. So it's a little gotcha in a sense because it's hidden somewhere which you won't necessarily know. I actually thought it might have gone into another seperate list that was created saying that these were cleaned and these were not cleaned. Anyway that's where it is. And I'll put a link to the support article. And for my trouble, I've had to respond to HubSpot Support answering those questions to get out of jail.
- [Craig] Yes. A few comments on this: Well first of all, if you're ever wondering how an integration pushes back results there's a fair chance that if you go and look in custom properties on the contact you'll find something named "related to the product". So that's the first place to look in case you're wondering, you know, how do I find something, push back to a contact in HubSpot. But the second is the quarantining: like is this actually fair? And do you remember a few episodes ago we were talking, you know, HubSpot released their up to a thousand email sends, and free, and all that kind of thing? And we were like "Oh man, this is going to get spammed to death." you know, spam this playground. Well here's the thing One: when you do send out a broadcast they only send a subset first to check the quality of it. So that's a good sign. So it's not like "Oh yeah we're going to load up 10,000 spam things and just hammer it out." No, they're going to send out 50 or so and test and then quarantine you if you're against it. I reckon they've tightened up their rules significantly. I'd like to know whether this is true or if this is just my kind of--
- [Ian] Deduction?
- [Craig] deduction on it. But they've tightened up their rules and they're not going to let any people go in and just start even and you're kind of collateral damage in a way. I wouldn't say you're 100% clean--
- [Ian] No.
- [Craig] because it's an older list, right?
- [Ian] Yes.
- [Craig] And the client has said, "Oh we want to send it to them." We do have permission but it's a bit older. But it's caught you out. And you've said, right, well after some churn, we're going to catch that and flag it. So I actually think it's good, possibly the get-out-of-jail process is a little bit onerous although again you've got to put these hurdles in place otherwise HubSpot will just become known as "Oh yep, Spammer's Paradise." So I actually think it's a good thing on balance.
- [Ian] Yes, I want to say thank you to Kershin from HubSpot Support for helping us out. Thanks buddy! All right, Craig, on to our resource of the week and there's a link to Databox. But the 44 most destructive SEO myths according to 120 SEOs. That sounds like a real mouthful.
- [Craig] Actually it's quite good article, they go through all the SEO myths that kind of get trotted out. So good reading. I only quibbled with one of them.
- [Ian] Which was?
- [Craig] Well one of them said this myth that between subdomain vs subfolder and they were saying Uh no you definitely should use a subfolder. I was like uh, no I don't think that's actually a problem. And well, as evidence, exhibit A: I'll give you the HubSpot blog--
- [Ian] Blog.HubSpot.com! Blog.HubSpot.com, yeah that's right.
- [Ian] And you've actually got something on your site about SEO myths as well.
- [Craig] Well that's my blog post where I talk about the DataBox blog post and I highlight my quibble with it.
- [Ian] Fantastic! Now on to our quote of the week, Craig. And I thought this was very aptly put from Sir Jony Ive. It says, "Different and new is relatively easy. Doing something that's genuinely better is very hard."
- [Craig] Good quote. Just checking, you said Jony Iv-ee. Is it Iv-ee, or Jony Ive?
- [Ian] Oh!
- [Craig] I'm not sure about 'cause I've heard it said both ways.
- [Ian] Yes!
- [Craig] I thought it was Ive. Do you think it's Iv-ee?
- [Ian] I don't know, we should find a video of him talking about himself.
- [Craig] I don't know. Oh look, I've got him on speed-dial I'll just call him now.
- [Craig] No.
- [Ian] Aright listeners, we've got a couple of bonus things in the week about doing simple SEO audits. And also we would love if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and hit us up on Instagram. We'd love to hear from you. We love getting emails from people. Now, somebody did email us, Craig?
- [Craig] Oh yeah, you're talking about Chad?
- [Ian] Yes!
- [Craig] Thanks Chad, it was great. We loved your email, thankyou for that.
- [Ian] Alright everybody, I hope you have a great week. And Craig, until next week?
- [Craig] Catch 'ya later, Ian.
- Hey there. Thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes on the latest HubSpot news and tips, please visit us at HubShots.com.