HubShots Episode 53: Inbound Tips, Content Your Audience Wants, Website Trust Elements, Gratitude

Welcome to Episode 53 of HubShots!

Recorded: Wednesday 05 October 2016 | Published: Thursday 06 October 2016

Welcome

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

http://inboundcountdown.com - 34 days left!  

A beautiful spring day in Sydney - just after a long weekend!

What speakers read:

http://www.inbound.com/blog/what-i-read-and-how-i-read-it-iliyana-stareva

http://www.inbound.com/blog/what-i-read-and-how-i-read-it-will-critchlow

http://www.inbound.com/blog/what-i-read-and-how-i-read-it-arvell-crag

Reasons to attend Inbound:

http://www.agencies2inbound.com/blog/20-reasons-all-inbound-marketing-agency-owners-should-attend-inbound-16

Our Inbound tip of the week: Get ready for Clam Chowder!

Shot 2: HubSpot Feature/Tip of the Week

Blog Author stats

http://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/see-which-authors-are-driving-conversions 

From the 'Analyze' tab of the Blog dashboard, scroll down to the Top Posts by Conversions report. After clicking-in to that report you will be able to switch the filter to Authors and see which authors are primarily driving conversions from blog posts, and even which posts specifically have driven the most new contacts.

Shot 3: Challenge of the Week

Lifting our game in AdWords

We’ve been getting advanced AdWords training and seeing big benefits especially in Display.

The challenge to go from above average to exceptional.

Shot 4: Stat of the Week

Revenue at Amazon increases by 1% for every 100ms it cuts off page load times.

Shot 5: Opinion of the Week

https://contently.com/strategist/2016/09/29/gain-lose-ungated-content/ 

By Andrew Littlefield

But lost in all this was whether the content itself was actually effective. After all, “lead generation” isn’t a measure of content quality.

“If someone gets this big promise on a landing page and converts into a subscriber, but the piece they then open is terrible, why would they want to hear from you again?” said marketing writer, speaker, and podcast host Jay Acunzo. “So many marketers lose sight of treating people like people instead of leads.”

Just because a visitor converts doesn’t mean your content delivered value (not yet, at least). Without value, is that reader likely to buy? Lead forms may drive an increase in email addresses, but they can cause a decrease in the overall quality of leads.

“You may grow your email database faster with gated content, but you’re probably getting a lot of leads that are going to churn right away,” said Luke Kintigh, global content and media strategist at Intel. “It comes down to quality versus quantity.”

Shot 6: Pro Tip of the Week

Turn on the power point when you want to charge your phone… <- a gem

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-your-audience-actually-wants 

Summary from the article:

1. Keep video content short and sweet. Ideally, it won’t require sound to be played.
2. Video content should answer a question or meet a demand that lots of people are looking for.
3. Humor (when appropriate) makes for memorable content.
4. Images and videos are key to more engaging social media posts.
5. Social proof helps beef up claims behind your content.
6. Experiment with user-generated content for greater social media engagement.
7. Use clear, grabbing headlines to draw the attention of readers.
8. Use images, bullets, and formatting to break up text in longer articles for skim-reading.
9. Make content actionable so readers can come away knowing what to do next.
10. Use graphs and infographics to display numerical data when possible.

Really smart how they include links in their final summary list! We’ve copied them straight into the show notes :-)

Shot 7: State of Inbound Item of the Week

http://www.stateofinbound.com/ 

Last week we discussed the State of Inbound item about top marketing challenges:

http://hubshots.com/episode-52/

Good to hear George and Marcus had basically the same take on it as us:

https://www.thesaleslion.com/hubcast-111-inbound16-breakout-sessions-fat-elephants-author-analytics/ 

But then Marcus goes on to discuss one item he thought was missing from the list of challenges: Getting Management Buy-in for Inbound

Two examples we’ve seen many times:

• Wanting to skip personas
• Expecting quality and quantity immediately

Shot 8: Resource of the Week

Stratechery: excellent resource for people wanting to get insight into what is happening in tech companies: https://stratechery.com/

B2B Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/09/content-marketing-research-b2b/

Sixty-two percent of B2B marketers in North America say that compared to one year ago, their organization’s overall approach to content marketing has been much more or somewhat more successful.

Shot 9: Community Item of the Week

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-b2b-vendors-can-generate-trust-with-website

#4: Buyers don’t trust websites filled with distractions

Website elements that annoy your users enough to make them leave right away include lack of contact information, intrusive live chat features, animated ads, popups, poor design or navigation, and video or audio that plays automatically. Almost half of respondents declared that they would ditch a vendor’s website simply because it fails to clearly communicate what the company does!

Shot 10: App of the Week

Skyscanner - https://www.skyscanner.com.au/mobile.html 

Hopper - https://www.hopper.com/ 

Hotels.com - https://au.hotels.com/hotel-deals/app/ 

Shot 11: Podcast of the Week

Marketing School with Neil Patel & Eric Siu

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/eric-siu/marketing-school-with-neil-patel-eric-siu 

Shot 12: Thought of the Week

Gary Vaynerchuk on Gratitude

He basically says: As long as my family and I are healthy, I’m happy and enormously grateful.

Shot 13: Quote of the Week

“Lack of money is a common excuse for not being creative.” - Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue