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Way back in September (seems so long ago), I had the opportunity to speak at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference (which is now the largest software conference in the world, with over 45,000 registrants). HubSpot had a remarkable presence at Dreamforce.
There are three parts to this article. The first are some key points and hilights (with convenient, inline tweet buttons). The second is the slides used in the session (some of them are pretty funny). Finally, there's a full transcript of the session at the bottom.
Hope you enjoy it. Also, you can find me on Google+ here -- +Dharmesh (hanging out there in addition to my usual twitter stuff @dharmesh)
Key Points from "Science of Inbound Marketing" Session
1. People hate outbound marketing (cold calls, spam, junk mail, etc.) This makes inbound marketing a much more effective, and cheaper way to reach people.
2. Once you start building reach, try using "second order" promotion -- help those that mention you get more attention and over time you get more mentions. 
So, if there's a blog article that mentions your company, help that article get traffic. If someone tweets something interesting about you, retweet it. To try this out, tweet out one of the bold phrases from this article using the convenient tweet-it buttons.
3. Inbound marketing consists of three parts: get found (draw people in), convert (visitors to leads/customers) and analyze (to see what's working and what's not).
4. It is entirely possible for your marketing not to suck. Too many marketers mistakenly believe that they have no choice but to pump out mediocre marketing content.
5. The Internet has shifted the balance of power. Now, mere mortals can choose what they listen to, watch and pay attention to.
6. Determine what the half-life of your marketing channels is. Do specific programs "decay" to almost nothing once you stop funding them -- or do they keep delivering value for almost forever?
7. As you SEO, so shall ye reap. Plant your search seeds early.
8. The best SEO strategy is to help Google make humans happy.
9. Your industry isn't boring, your marketing is boring. It doesn't matter how stodgey you think your industry is, it's possible to create creative, remarkable content that will engage people.
10. When creating your content, you need to "get lucky" sometimes (have a piece get spread and drive traffic that is much, much higher than your average). If you deliberately shoot for spectacular, sometimes you get lucky.
11. If your marketing is broken, marketing automation just gets you to the wrong place more reliably. 
The last thing you want to do is automate marketing that's broken. Instead, transform your marketing into something that actually works and you can be proud of.
12. Actionable metrics don't mean squat if someone, somewhere doesn't act. Just because you have a fancy analytics system that tells you a bunch of things you should do, you're not making progress until you do them.
Slides From Session
Transcript of “Science of Inbound Marketing” Session at Dreamforce 2011
The Science of Inbound Marketing
Dharmesh Shah
Hi. I'm Dharmesh, and I'm a total geek. I don't do public presenting for a living at all. I write code usually until about 2:00 in the morning, every single night including weekends except on nights like last night. I had a great day, by the way. And it was great up until the point that I got home and made the unwise decision of changing out about 80% of my slides before coming in this morning, so I was up until late, late, late. But I think it's going to be fun I think you guys will like it. I think it's better we'll see. If you have questions along the way, feel free to ask it. You will not interrupt my train of thought. I don't really have trains of thought. I'm a relatively disorganized guy. So, just raise your hand and get our attention. We'll have someone run back with the microphone. Usually we save the questions for the end but this will keep Kirsten's life more interesting, instead of just waiting.
So, this is the hashtag for the session for those of you who are Twitter leaders out there, and my name happens to have an extra h on it where you wouldn't expect.
A couple of quick things. I'm don't really do marketing for a living, but I write a lot of content and do marketing-ish stuff and I've learned things. And Brian didn't get a chance to tell you a whole lot about the inside workings of HubSpot marketing and stuff that works because he's more judicious than I am. I have no such limitations; I can say whatever the hell I want. So if you have questions about HubSpot marketing or things like that, we're going to share some of the insider tricks with you that we've used actually to kind of do our own marketing, so use them wisely.
I'll drop the first major trick because this one's kind of subtle and it's a little fun. So, everyone that's got a social media account and you're doing marketing and you have a blog, you will kind of tweet out a link to your blog post, right? Everybody does that oh yeah we've got 1000, 5000 whatever number of Twitter followers you have and you write a blog article, you'll send it out to your Twitter account, you'll send it out to your email list and say, hey, come read our blog article. Well, that's all really straightforward and obvious. What's not as obvious is the value of what I call second order promotion. And what I mean by that is - instead of just promoting your own stuff, obviously you should also promote really good content that's out there on the web, you should also make a deliberate effort to promote other people that are writing things about you.
So imagine this now: Imagine you've been reading the HubSpot blog, and every now and then you Tweet it, or every now and then you write a blog article about HubSpot. You might magically discover that the articles that you write about HubSpot tend to get a lot more traffic than just about any other thing you write about. And this could be I'm not saying this is what we do It COULD BE that we have an army of people with 600,000 collective Twitter followers watching the HubSpot brand and helping those that are writing about HubSpot get more attention. I'm not saying that happens, but I'm not saying that doesn't happen.
So, as an example, as we're going through this and you're a Twitter person and you're Tweeting, and you just happen to Tweet out one of these things, there will be HubSpot people, maybe, sitting on the sidelines. Maybe I'll get home tonight and re-Tweet my best stuff and follow all of you. It does work.
So I'm going to start with a very quick story. Most of you have been exposed to inbound marketing at this point, but I want to tell you about a short story. I'm a geek; I'm not a marketer. I didn't grow up in marketing- I've written code. So, this is my simplification of marketing and marketing history. So, once upon a time in a land far, far away, it was really easy, or easier to be a marketing magician. Because what you had was you had this magical wishing well and you threw coins into the magical wishing well and leads and prospects and customers emerged magically somehow. And this is like the kind of marketing budget thing, so you have a budget, you kind of fill it out there, you get billboards, you do advertising, you do all the crazy outbound marketing things that people did that really worked well and for the most part, it worked ok back then. And as long as you had enough of those gold coins that you continued to pour into the well, leads continued to come back with varying degrees of regularity. And then something problematic happened. The Internet came along. And bestowed this magical power on all of the people all across the land. And allowed mere mortals to actually have power and decide what they read and don't read. And decide whether they will or will not talk to marketing people. And they revolted. They were like, We're not listening to this crap anymore. I hate marketers. And they had the power to actually communicate and block all of this wonderful outbound marketing out. And so this is the fundamental thesis, right? The fundamental thing. This is about as squishy as I get. It's going to get really geeky from here so enjoy it while you can.
And so, this made the princess very sad. And, along came inbound marketing. So, the idea behind inbound marketing is that instead of taking this budget and spending this budget to kind of broadcast your message far and wide, why not use that same budget to increase the probability that those that are looking for you - that actually want what you have to sell will actually find you? That's the fundamental thesis.
And it makes marketing less of this and more of this that marketing people will actually love and it was possible. And there was much rejoicing once that happened. And that is the end of that story.
All right, so now getting into the tactics of inbound marketing. Brian and Mike have talked a lot about inbound marketing before, so I'm going to jump into some of the details. And the idea here is that there is actually two parts to inbound marketing: by the way, if I suddenly look up and make eye contact, it's because I have this little mental note that says hey Dharmesh, you're forgetting to make eye contact. Look up and make eye contact. So that's why it seems sudden.
So, the idea here is that there's two parts to inbound marketing. There's the first part, which is the top of the funnel how do I attract more people at the top of my funnel? The second part the middle of the funnel is like I've got all these web visitors and people coming to my website or my web properties or my Facebook page or whatever how do I convert them at increasing rates into qualified leads and customers? So there's two kind of primary parts that compose inbound marketing. And I'm going to attempt to talk about both, and make an attempt to convince you, if you're not already convinced, that inbound marketing is the path of truth and justice, as Mike Volpe has already told many of you outbound marketing might actually kill kittens. We'll talk about that.
Structurally, the way we think about this in terms of cycle for inbound marketing: It kind of starts with creating content, optimizing that content so that it has the widest degree of reach, essentially, promoting it because it doesn't really work that well if we have this great, awesome content and just put it out there. It does take some effort to promote it. Then, take those visitors that you're getting, convert them, measure, measure, measure, test, analyze what's going on and never repeat that cycle. So that' the overall structure. We're going to talk about pieces of this to the best of my ability, given the hour that I have. For those of you who are put off by the fact that I talk really fast - I have only one other speed, it's even faster, so this is about as slow as I talk. Sorry.
Talking about content - you guys saw some of the opening slides. Content is a very interesting thing. We think we've gotten really good at it. I'll share some secrets with you as to how we think we built up this content machine. But as an example, the presentation that you just kind of rolled through was on the front page of SlideShare as the most popular Power Point presentation for the last 48-ish hours since we've been here. It's gotten 51,000 views, which, for a B-to-B Power Point presentation that's not about a consumer-y kind of topic, that's pretty good by the way. And if you guys have presentations that have done better awesome, I'm very impressed! We've had videos I think Mike Volpe showed this one I'm not going to show you again but I think it's very cool. Look it up on YouTube. Just go You Tube Inbound marketing. It's done really well. The message here is we've done a bunch of things we have other charts, we have cartoons. One of the big lessons that we've learned around content creation in inbound marketing is that you're not really going to know what kinds of content works for your audience until you actually try it. And things that may seem counterintuitive for instance, we have a bunch of marketing cartoons that we've done a while ago. And they're just funny cartoons about marketing and social media. So, they're mostly on topic. And this turns out that they are one of the best performing types of content. You would think, Oh, marketers that are out there B to B marketers which is our target market are relatively serious people. As it turns out, you are not serious people. You really love those cartoons. And so, we've tried lots of different things videos, research articles, normal blog articles, opinion pieces, slides, audio podcasts. Everything. And the idea is if you're measuring it well enough, you will then find the patterns of what kinds of things happen to work for your market. We'll talk more about how you do some of that measurement and how you go from there.
Other things that we've done that's interesting how many people saw Dan Zarrella from HubSpot this week? You guys missed an awesome presentation. Sorry, didn't mean to make you feel bad. Dan is our resident social media scientist. He had a webinar a B-to-B webinar that targeted businesses mind you - that had 30,000+ people register, and 10,000 people attend. Online - not like, watched it after the fact 10,000 people at the same time, watching a B-to-B marketing webinar. And he got a world record for this. The Guinness people came over, gave him a certificate, took a photo, and it was cool. And it may sound like some of the stuff I'm telling you is like, bragging, and my apologies because it is, and part of it is to convince you that some of this stuff can work and we're going to get into the details around how we do it. So that's the end of my self-centered bragging.
All right, so let's look at the 3 steps that you need just from a macro level. You need to get found- we talk about that how do you pull people in? You need to convert them and then measure what matters. We're going to walk through those pieces.
The getting found part: This is going to get a little bit geeky. So, who knows what a half life is? A half life for those of you who don't know, is that if you have like a traditionally, the measure is if you have a radioactive material - the half life measures how long it takes for that material to decompose and go away. So, for instance, Twinkies might have a half-life of 24 years. It will take that long for them to completely decompose and go away. So the idea is that there's this kind of decay rate that happens in most organic things. So, over time, the Twinkie or radioactive material goes down in a half-life and keeps going down and eventually, sometimes, goes away. And the reason I'm bringing this up, is that your marketing all the channels that you use, all the sources of your marketing have a half-life. That means you will have something, it will drive some amount of traffic, and then you'll see this decay. It's like oh, we did this, we took a billboard out and you will maybe see a spike in the number of calls coming into your call center during the time the billboard runs, and then you're going to have a decay rate. I would argue with you that billboards have a very, very short half-life. Like, once the billboard goes down, the overall impact of that billboard is essentially gone and you'll have this kind of trailing value that you get other than people you've already converted as a result of the billboard.
We're going to talk more about Internet marketing, online marketing. I'm going to show you two graphs. So, the top graph this is from my personal blog shows the traffic I received from one of the social media sites. It's a hacker site that's about programming because I write about startups and programming. What you will find is that the traffic that I get from this particular social media site - think of it as being like a StumbleUpon or a Twitter. So my blog is running along, usually I'll get about 1000 -2000 visitors a day, and then all of a sudden, it will spike to like 10,000 20,000. And then it will go right back down again. So, that's the top one, where I'm getting traffic from social media sites it's very spikey and the decay rate is very, very fast.
The lower chart same time period, same blog shows the traffic that I get from Google. Now, what's interesting about the Google traffic - this is the organic Google traffic since I don't buy any traffic for my personal blog - you will see that it kind of comes in waves but there's no big spikiness. The funny thing is on any average day I might get like, say 300-400 visitors from Google, but the decay rate is essentially near zero. If we were to plot the running average of this, once I start getting rankings for an article, that article will continue to get traffic pretty much forever. It never goes to zero. The larger message here is that when you're thinking about your marketing campaigns, you think about like, Here is the spike that we expected. We're going to get this - that's great, we want some of that but then what's the decay rate going to be and what's the long tail of value that this particular piece of content gets? And you want to do both. And there's value to doing both.
You want to invest more in those things that have long-term value and lower decay rates. And Google is a very good example, right? And we have some data around lots of people search, we all know that - lots of people search not just for random pieces of information, but they are searching for a product or service. Lots of data on this as well not particularly controversial. And so, my message to you would be - if you're not doing this already, you should be investing in SEO. You should be investing in a) knowing how much traffic you're getting organically from the search engines, and b) investing in increasing that number over time. Not just because it's cheaper in the short run but also because it's longer lasting. So you invest in this asset you have this blog article or slide thing or podcast or whatever, and you accrue this authority in Google and usually your rankings will improve over time as Google starts to trust you as you're putting more of your content out there, but it really works. It takes time, but it really works. It has a very, very long tail to it.
So we're going to take just a one-minute excursion down Google because I'm super geeked out on SEO things and it wouldn't be fun for me if I didn't say anything about SEO. One thing you guys might not know is that, and a lot of you may buy Google AdWords to some degree, which is the kind of paid side. What might not be known to you is that most of the traffic that Google generates for websites people actually click on the free/organic links. So, all the traffic your particular keyword is getting, all the search volume most of that economic value is going to not the paid side of the Google page but the free which is in the middle, on the left side. So, even if you are buying Google AdWords traffic, my advice to you would be try to measure how much you're spending and make your SEO goal to drive that number down over time by creating comparable, optimized , really, really good content for those specific keywords that you're already buying anyway, because that's the easiest way to come up with an ROI analysis on your SEO content.
In order to really get traffic for those keywords, you need to rank in the top 3 results because the majority of the traffic goes to the top three. If you're ranking on page 2, 3, 4, N humans, carbon based life forms, don't actually go to those subsequent pages. Based on data, if you don't see what you're looking for in the first page or two, you just change your search terms, like oh, I must have asked Googled the wrong question. I will just rephrase my search instead of actually going through each page. So you need to rank in the top that's the key message there.
The way Google works this is a dramatic oversimplification but still accurate - there are two parts to the ranking algorithm in terms of how Google decides whether your website ranks for a given keyword or whether someone else does. The first is context. And this is something that's interesting because most of the context you can kind of control the on page SEO. What this means is to what degree does Google believe that your website happens to be about whatever this user is searching for?
So let's say you're trying to target real estate broker Boston as your search phrase, because you have a real estate brokering business. If you want to rank for that term, obviously your website has to send some signal to Google that that's' what your website is about. The degree you can help Google figure that out, the more often you will rank. And obviously, lots of people spend time (and it's not that hard) optimizing their websites and making sure that they are sending the right signals to Google. That's not that hard to do relatively straightforward.
The second part, which is probably the most important and hardest part, is building authority in Google's eyes. Authority for the most part can reduce down to a single thing, which is get more links. Get more high quality links from people that Google already trusts. So, if you have a blog and the New York Times links to that blog, here's the way it works: Google says, Oh, I already trust the New York Times. NewYorkTImes.com has very high authority; it's a very trustworthy site. The New York Times links to your blog some portion of the trust and authority that New York Times has built transfers over to you through that link. So, it's an implicit endorsement. And just like any other endorsement, the more powerful the person that's endorsing you, the more trustworthy they are, the more value you get from that endorsement. But every link counts or, most links count. So you should try to attract more links that will drive the search rankings and the best way to drive more links is essentially help Google make their users more happy.
I will summarize years and years of SEO research into 30 seconds the answer is: The best way to rank in Google is to be rank-worthy. Is for your content to be rank-worthy. What I mean by that is type in the search phrase that you'd like to rank for. Let's say it's Boston real estate broker. Look at those first few results. If you can't honestly answer, Oh, those results are crap. My content is much better. Users would be much happier if they found my article versus the stuff that's ranking right now. If that's true, you can fix that. If it's not true, your SEO goal is to make that true. Is to create the content that is better than what Google is already ranking, and Google usually will figure the rest out. There's no big trick to it it's not a technical problem it's a create great content that people actually want to consume problem.
We're going to transition into social media. This is the other half of the get found. Let's talk about building a social media following. My response to this would be great so you want to build a following what you really want is screaming, raving fans. People that are really, really passionate about what you are doing. If you look at Mark Benioff he kind of fits into that category. It's like, ok well he's kind of marketing and selling Dreamforce is about partly selling more Salesforce, right? We're all customers, right? Most of us are? The funny thing is, we all spend money to come out here to spend more money, essentially on Salesforce. So how can you get that kind of passionate, loyal following? How do you use social media to kind of awareness out there so you get that kind of attention?
Whenever I talk about social media and writing great content, one of the most popular pieces of and it sounds reasonably compelling, it's partly so the issue is that it's not that your industry is boring, it's that your marketing is boring. HubSpot has over 5,000 customers now. Most of them B to B companies, mainstream businesses that are doing normal things. We've got a heart of America kind of economy businesses, and for the most part, they are kicking butt. Even businesses that you wouldn't think, like oh my god, I can't believe social media or blogging
I'll give you one my favorite examples. So, we have a business a customer that the business is basically to produce fences for llamas. That's the business. I kid you not. They are specialists and sell worldwide they build fences for llamas. And it's a small business - less than 5 employees. What he started doing was he essentially started creating content. So, he ran around with a video camera, and started basically answering the questions his prospective customers asked. Like, here's how not to install a fence for a llama. Here are the kinds of things to look out for. Like, all things llama fence related, he blogged about. And we would think, how many people out there are really going to read content about llama fences? And the answer is, he doesn't care how many there are, as long as they are his potential customers. Like, even if it was only 50 people a month. His blog traffic, his leads, his customers have gone through the roof. And we have hundreds of those kinds of examples. If someone that's selling llama fences can do video blogging, can write a blog article like every other week and can drive traffic and grow their business 100%, I don't think you have a good enough excuse that your industry is boring. I think it's very possible to do creative, fun things, which he has done.
The other thing that comes back is, yes, Dharmesh, you are right. We should be able to be doing it, but we don't have approvals and it's hard to convince my CEO, the board, the company, my spouse, my dog that we can do this stuff and actually do it. I empathize with you. It is hard to make those changes, but we've created a bunch of content and there's lots of people out there that will help you make the compelling case why you should be producing more great content and what economic value there is. It doesn't have to be controversial, it doesn't have to be risky to be good and attract links although that works really well and we'll talk about that.
So you should be having more fun and doing more creative things to the degree that you can. If you really, really believe in your heart that there's no way ever your organizing is ever going to be able to do anything even semi risky or fun when it comes to marketing, and they are going to be outbound marketers for the rest of their lives, my advice to you would be to find an organization that does value that. It's not worth it, it really isn't. It's much more fun, and it works. We want you to do the right thing. We think it's the path to truth and justice.
The other thing we found works in terms of trying to get attention and write your blog content, or any kind of content, is polarizing works. And I'm not talking about sensationalism. What I'm talking about is your business and your content and your blog whatever it is you're creating for you to take a stand that you're passionate about. If you take an appropriate and hard enough stand, essentially, you will have some percentage of the world that will absolutely completely disagree with you. They will think you're an idiot, they will think you're wrong; they will think you're evil. They will think all manner of things. And the weird thing about polarizing is that for every one of those people that passionately hates what you represent and what you're talking about, you will get one of those rabid, passionate fans. If you go in the middle - like, Oh, yeah, we're going to write content that is not particularly controversial we kind of have an opinion and it's relatively strong but we're not going to take a hard stand. The average article, blog, anything gets average results. And average results kill companies. That's not the way to build a marketing organization anymore.
So, for example, Mike Volpe had this flyer up this week and we use it all the time and we use different kittens because the Internet supplies an infinite number of kitten photos, which is awesome. So this is one of ours, right? So when we started the company, we took a stand and said outbound marketing is bad kills kittens - bad things happen. Inbound marketing good. That's what you should be doing. Path of truth and justice. And then we would get the question, which you're probably asking yourself right now. Well, Dharmesh, that's great that you believe passionately, but don't you guys do some outbound marketing? Haven't I seen you do x or buy Google AdWords? The answer is yes! We're trying to grow a business. So we do the outbound marketing and that's fine, but the reality is that from a belief perspective from a passion perspective, you need to take a relatively firm stand on whatever it is whatever message you're trying to drive home. Otherwise, it's really hard to stand out and get traction. So don't be sensationalist. You can be humorous and still be sensationalist to some degree and it works out because nobody really takes this seriously.
So we're going to talk a little bit about Twitter. I'll give you an anecdote. My co-founder and CEO at HubSpot when he first encountered Twitter, he was like, this is a frigging waste of time. And as evidence, he presented a Tweet that one of our employees had Tweeted that said, ouch, my feet hurt. That was the entire Tweet. He said, Why would I ever want to spend time on that? What is the value? And that was a few years ago. And as it turns out, whether we agree with it or not, whether we like it or not, Twitter is here to stay. It's a mainstream phenomenon. Normal people use Twitter for lots of different things including your customers, and it's an awesome way to take great content that you produce, which you should be producing regularly, and amplifying the reach of that content. It's an awesome tool to make connections and build relationships.
So let's say you still disagree with me for whatever reason. Like, Oh, I still don't believe that our customers - our market - are on Twitter. Do me a favor. At least grab your brand and your company's name on Twitter. It's free and takes like 30 seconds, and fill out a profile, which takes another 3 minutes. And then you can ignore me, until I happen to be right, which might be tomorrow or 6 months from now or 3 years from now. But at least do that for yourself and at least get set up on Twitter if you're not already. Because it doesn't cost anything, and you don't want someone else to grab that Twitter handle - similar to domain squatting and things like that - people will do that and it's painful to try to get it out after the fact. So, go ahead and get that done and then fill out the profile. You might build some followers over time. You're not going to get that obviously without doing actual Tweeting, but at least do that.
We're going to talk about amplifying content. You create content and this is weird. People build these Facebook fan pages, they have Twitter accounts and you try to get followers and they have a blog. They don't connect the two. All the popular blogs like if you read TechCrunch or Huffington Post or whatever they have little buttons on their content that says oh, please re-tweet this or share this on Facebook or whatever and that helps spread the message and its goodness. Like, Oh, I'm taking my content and I'm making it easy for people to share it. And when I say it that way, it's going to sound blindingly obvious like, why wouldn't everybody do that?
Everybody doesn't do that. I'm not exactly sure why partly the reason why might be like, Oh, well, it's obvious that we would want this. They could just take the URL and cut and paste into Twitter or whatever. It's not that hard, and it's obvious that we want that. It turns out that's not true. When you put a Twitter button there, you're doing two things: You're making it easy for the person to share that content on Twitter, which makes them much more likely to do so. And the second one, which is more subtle, is you're sending the signal to that person that we would like for you to re-tweet this. So even though we think it's obvious, Of course I would want my content to be spread. Everybody reading my blog knows that. Not true. Make it easy and get those buttons in there.
For bonus points: Your software should do this. You should have an easy way to put all those buttons on your content, and which buttons show up should be a function of your users. So for instance, maybe your users are not on Facebook. We can figure that out. Oh you haven't gotten any traffic from your Facebook but Twitter you're awesome whatever that is. The software should be smart enough to pick that up. Should be smart enough to order the buttons like, Oh yeah well this particular button works really well in this situation. We're going to make it the first button. Very quick, automated little hacks and it's not that hard to do. SO you should be doing that kind of stuff.
In order for this stuff to really work, you need to get lucky. And I'm not talking about this kind of lucky, I'm talking about experimenting and trying somewhat crazy things, in the hopes that some small percentage of them go big. This is a little bit like the decay thing.
So, most marketing organizations we see data from lots of people, and we see research from lots of people as well, including our own customer's data. If you write a blog article every two weeks, or you're doing whatever you're doing, you can watch the graphs in terms of whether it's visitors or leads or whatever, and the graph kind of goes like this. A nice, smooth linear curve. It's going up to the right, and as you get more traffic it's increasing but nothing exciting really happens, right? It's like oh, we got 500 visitors last week and it grew to 550 and then it grew to 600 and then it grew to 650 and maybe 725 and life goes on and you visibly plod along.
I would make the argument with you that that's no way to live. That's no way to market. So what you want to do is, every now and then you don't' have to do it all the time because it's hard you should be crafting a piece of content that you think deserves to go viral. And ask yourself a question: If I lead to that particular blog article, would I forward that to my friends? Would I re-tweet it? Would I like it on Facebook? Or is it just lame? Every now and then, try and create something that you believe deserves to be spread. Like, this is content that people should be reading. Whether you wrote it or had an intern write it or whatever it is once you write that good content, magical things happen. What happens is that every now and then, it works. The funny thing is and we've looked at data 9 ways to Christmas- the weird thing is you're not going to be able to predict it. I have labored over blog articles for weeks, like this is AWESOME. This is going to be like so big and people are going to be cheering me on through the halls at HubSpot, and say Dharmesh, that was just awesome'. And it will just fall flat on its face and then I'll crank an article out in 45 minutes late one night and it will go. And in both cases, I want them to go. My point here is - I want you to do that.
So, let's say that you have one that goes you're plodding along and have 500 visitors a week or whatever the number happens to be you will get this huge, huge bump. It will go to like 20,000 or something like that in the next 24 hours. And the funny thing is, when it drops back down once the excitement wears off, your traffic will not drop back down to 500 anymore. It will drop to 900,1000, 1500 - something like that because you have this whole new bank of users and subscribers now. So the idea is that maybe one out of ten you should be putting in a concerted effort into writing the perfect title for the content. Have someone edit it and look at it. Ask 5 friends if they think it's lame or good. If you do that, it actually works. And we've done that with our customers and otherwise it's this miserable sort of plodding along existence. You want those breakthrough moments you want, at least, a chance at that. It's more fun when it does happen. We can point back in HubSpot's history individual pieces of content. Like, oh yeah, bang something happens and then we go back down again and we grow. So, it works.
By the way, this is a great time to hire content creators. The publishing industry is going through this massive, massive destruction. There has never been an oversupply of journalism majors and interns in the history of humankind. People are great at writing. You should go find them. Even if you don't have the talent in house, it's relatively cheap and you should try it. There's no reason not to. Some of them actually are good at this in terms of driving things that will go viral. Test it.
So this is one of the slides from the marketing fantasy day, which I happen to like. It's a good segue to one of the things I want to talk about. A common argument goes back on Facebook specifically and obviously all of you are on Facebook because somewhere along the way, you gave in and said ok. I give up. I'll sign up but I'm never going to look at it again. Whatever it is, you have a Facebook account. I almost guarantee you everybody in the room has a Facebook account because there are more users on Facebook than there are atoms in the universe or something at this point.
And so we get this argument - which is Oh, my leads and prospects are not on Facebook. My argument to you would be you're wrong. Your customers are on Facebook, as it turns out. And there's a way to demonstrate this. Not the fact that a bunch of people are spending lots of time on Facebook, which is also true. But there's this neat little toy. I'm going to walk you through it.
Let's say you go to Facebook and at the very, very bottom there's an advertise on Facebook link, which is like if you were trying to buy ads on Facebook this is the tool you'd come to. Some of you may have seen this; most of you likely have not. It's free you don't have to buy x to get to this point. And what this screen allows you to do is this: You fill out this demographic form. What this one is like, I want to go after people on Facebook. I'm hypothetically going to advertise to these people that live in the United States, over the age of 21, and current family status is that they are parents with children between the ages of 0 and 3 years old. You can do keyword based things or whatever. Facebook comes back and says, Oh, that's awesome. Here's how many people on Facebook that we know of that fit that exact profile. It's a nice, fun little exercise whatever nichey, boring industry that you're in that you think your customers are not on Facebook I defy you to come up with some weird combination like, oh, we're going after a woman over the age of 55 that live in this zip code or whatever' and it's like, Oh, there's 397 of them. We didn't know that. People are on Facebook. They're using it more and more. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook for a while actually has been women over the age of 55. It's not just about politics anymore. Farmville and things like that have helped a lot, too by the way.
So, we can actually limit the ad as to who is already following us and who is not following us. So if I want to advertise and say, Oh, I'm trying to create more fans for the HubSpot fan page, well I don't' want to advertise to 25,000 people that are already fans of HubSpot on Facebook. I want the other 700,000,000 whatever people.
LinkedIn is public now. But I go to lots of social media conferences and LinkedIn has historically almost always been the red headed stepchild that everybody kind of ignores. And the reality is LinkedIn works. It works for B-to-B companies. It works for real businesses. It works for real lead generation. So you should be doing things like participating in the Q&A on LinkedIn. Great way to build a reputation. There is stuff you should be doing on LinkedIn. Look at LinkedIn. It really does work. It's people with jobs and salaries and discretionary income and useful things like that.
How many people have Google+ accounts? That's awesome. So, Google+ for those that don't know, was basically another kind of social networking/identity/MadMen-y thing from Google. I'm a huge fan. And I would continue to say exactly what I'm saying, even if Google wasn't an investor in HubSpot, which they happen to be. But this is completely, although biased, how I feel.
What's cool about Google+ is that they got a bunch of things right. One of which is the ability to have discussions around a particular piece of content. You can kind of do that on Twitter but not particularly well. It's almost impossible to thread together what people are saying and put it all in one place. Google+ is great at that. Google + is great at some of the privacy controls. You can decide who does and doesn't see a piece of content that you're sharing. Those two things are awesome, and other people will be able to do similar things over time. What other people can't do- and what makes Google+ really interesting and Google hasn't been particularly subtle about this is that if you happen to have content that gets Google+ alive, like people say, Yay, I like that content! it will impact the Google search engine. It will impact the rankings. And there is a very good reason for this, right? Google is trying to decide, when it shows that someone is searching for something, trying to show matching sites and make their users happy (that's why they're a multi bazillion dollar company). And they're like Oh, well 58 people liked this and they know what the authority and trust of those people are, like, oh this person tends to like stuff that's actually good. Google looks at that like a signal. This is another great way to do essentially SEO. It's like social media meets SEO now.
A variation of this has been happening. Search engines have been looking at Facebook and Twitter for awhile. This one, Google actually owns it. The uptake has been very, very fast, so I'm excited about it. It's new, so everybody is kind of starting form ground zero and working their way up. So, spend some time on Google.
I'll take a question.
Question: I'm a fan on Google+ too, but if you're an SEO person, it actually gives you input to Google's algorithms without having to wait for spiders to crawl over your website.
Dharmesh: That's true and it's a great point. The idea there is that yes, it provides us better data and insight into Google itself.
So we talked a bunch about the kind of, get found top of the funnel stuff how do you pull more people in and the answer there is create content, get good at promoting it, run experiments, measure stuff and just do more things. And create great content to pull people in. That's the fundamental message of the first part of this session.
Now I'm going to talk about once you have those people, we'll talk about the middle if the funnel what we call mu-fu at HubSpot. What do you do once you have these web visitors? And what's changing in terms of middle of the funnel and how do we drive more conversions so we get more value out of it?
Our CMO had a session on death by marketing automation, which I think looks hilarious. I think he could take that show on the road and be a stand up comedian or something.
There's lots of discussion around marketing automation, and I'm a software geek. If I could start a business and run it out of my basement on servers and never hire people, ever I would totally do that. I'm all for computers overtaking the world. But as it turns out, if your marketing is broken, automating is not going to help you. It's just going to be more efficient at doing the wrong thing. That's not right. So, you guys have to make the decision. How good or bad, how effective or ineffective is our current marketing, and if it's broken and be honest with yourselves if it's broken, automating it does not help you. Fix it first. We sell marketing automation software as well and there are people all over the conference right now who would be happy to sell you HubSpot software. But the idea is that you should really look at your marketing and figure out is it because you're only sending emails to your list 2.7 times and the right answer was 2.83 times? That's not what you should be doing. It's not trying to get smarter about the wrong things you're doing. It's about fixing the fundamentals. Look at both the top and middle of the funnel and put the pieces together.
I'm going to tell you about B-to-B marketing. This is a non-marketers' view on B-to-B marketing and how it works. This is my perception. Once again, I'm good at oversimplifications. Here's how it works:
Let's say you were trying to market to me - and this is like a common pattern not how all B to B marketing works. I'm enticing you with something free. Oh, here's a great white paper or free eBook something here's a Seth Godin speech in webinar form that you can download and listen to on your iPhone. Something free to entice me or free-ish. And as it turns out, by the way, the word free does work. Free does entice people. And we can get into arguments about whether it's the right kinds of people or not. But anyway, it does work. And then what happens is that you send me to a landing page, to ask some questions. This is kind of how B to B, including HubSpot works. And, we ask all sorts of questions. Like if you're geeked out on conversion data, HubSpot's got this awesome deck that looks like Oh, yeah if you ask this question this way here's the impact on conversion rate in terms of how many people fill out the form.
But my argument to you would be that nobody responds viscerally this way when they see a landing page with a form on it. No human that I know, including me, responds like, awesome, I get to fill out a form! That's like the best thing ever I woke up this morning, thinking, wouldn't it be awesome if I just landed on a form that asked me a bunch of questions?'
So I think whatever it is you're offering to me for free has to have value. It's like, ok well I will subject myself to this. I will give you my email address, and I will make up some other stuff that you're asking me. Not everybody makes stuff up. I happen to make stuff up because I think it's just fun, not because I'm trying to be malicious or anything. It's a pastime of mine coming up with creative ways to make stuff up.
So, then you give me something whatever it is, like, Oh, Dharmesh, here's that eBook that you filled out the form for. And the way it works from there is you basically spam me until either I buy, your dead or until I'm dead one of those three things happens. And I fundamentally don't think that's the way B-to-B marketing has to work. Benioff talked a lot about the social enterprise, and he talked a lot about how social media impacts support and customer happiness and how you engage. And there is absolutely no reason why those same kind of influences social media has and the technology has had on things further into the relationship. You talk a lot about customers. Those same kinds of principles apply in marketing. And so I'm going to make the argument that when people wake up, they don't' wan to be a lead.
By the way old tangent. We love kittens we love them because they work. It's impossible for 100% of the audience to hate you if you have a photo of a kitten. The only thing that trumps kittens is babies. Just for the record. The only thing better than a stock photography baby is your own baby. I'm a first time dad. Works every time.
Anyway, so humans generally don't to be leads. They want a relationship. So, imagine that same B to B transaction where, Oh, you offer me something for free, I fill out a landing page, you spam me to death for the rest of my life. Imagine that changed a a little bit, and imagine it was more like a B to C relationship. Amazon, which is still a commercial company, or Netflix. What happens in those kinds of companies is that when you sign up, they give you an account. They don't say, Answer these 14 questions immediately. They don't' say, Oh, in order to sign up for Netflix and get whatever the offer is, answer these 17 questions about your movie tastes. Right? They say, Oh sign up. And you have a relationship that starts at that point. And the relationship evolves over time. It's how B to C websites work. And what ends up happening is that they learn things from you based on what you consume from that point forward. Ok, what movies did you watch? Netflix uses that data to figure out what movies they should recommend, because they want you to rent more movies because they make more money that way and because you're a long lasting customer that way. So imagine as a B-to-B marketer, instead of having that form, saying, Oh, well why don't you create an free account with us? And don't ask the 14 questions - we'll maybe get to those over time. A lot of them we'll just figure out. And then when you come back to that particular website, it's like, Oh, welcome back Dharmesh! Last time you looked at this webinar about B-to-B conversion rates in the financial services industry. Did you know that we have these two new webinars that have come out since then that are about conversion rates that you might be interested in? I think I would appreciate that. Like, when I come back to the website, I want you to recognize me, not just like send me off to fill out questions again or whatever.
So, there's nothing wrong with having this kind of transactional reciprocal relationship. That's the way the world goes around. You give me something of value, I give you something back of value. And that's how landing pages have worked for years and years. That's ok. The reality is that there is a better way now. There's a better way to recognize a relationship and you are still going to exchange economic value. That's ok, but at least let's be smarter about it instead of asking the same questions, instead of treating you like a lead. Why not treat you like, Oh, you're a member of our community. You just haven't bought yet, and that's ok.
Ok,, I'm going to go on one more rant. One of the things we talk about a lot in marketing is lead scoring and the value of a qualified lead versus an unqualified lead. I'm geeked out on data; I love that stuff. I want to like, dig deep and write algorithms that figure out if I can make the algorithm better. That's awesome that's fun. The reality is that I think we too easily discount and too easily bucketize unqualified leads. What an unqualified lead basically is, is someone that is not a perfect buyer yet. People change jobs, they change companies, they change careers. They can do things other than buy from you that actually add value. For instance, they may be a blogger and they just happen to love your stuff. And they will retweet you and write about you and all those things. They're not qualified leads, they are never going to buy from you. But should you treat them less well simply because they are not going to exchange cash value for something that you have? So why not, if it were cheap enough to do why not just have a community, let people in. It's like, Oh, build a relationship with us. You can consume our free content, you can use some of our free tools, you can come to our conference or whatever it is. And then over time, you can market to them in a more targeted way.
So imagine if you had 3 million members in your community, that were consuming content from you that you learned more about and built a rich relationship over time. I think that the future of marketing is not, how do we get smarter about spamming people 2.8 times a day versus 2.7 times a day? It's about recognizing relationships and the power that users have and recognizing the fact that there are people that we are now selling to that don't know of a pre-internet world. Five years ago, there were people that we were selling to that don't' use email at all. They grew up on SMS and Facebook messaging. The world is already changing. Well like, oh, yeah, well they don't buy anything - they're 17. That's your CTO of the future that you're selling to. Treat people like people.
So, tactically, one of the things I think you should do in order to kind of start that relationship; make it easy for people to establish that relationship. So - think community, not leads. And start building a community and letting people become a member of your community through the easiest way possible. If they want to just do an email address and password, fine. They should have a join the community by logging in with your Facebook account. The nice thing about the Facebook sign-in stuff is that the way the internet work is that if they already happen to be logged into Facebook - which lots of people are they stay logged in. They just never log out of Facebook. And they come to your website and there's this button that says, Oh, join our community using the Facebook button. They don't' have to go through the log in. They just have to approve it's like 2 clicks, and they're done. No typing in an email address, no getting it wrong, no thinking for 5 seconds what email address should I use? And if their email address changes in Facebook, you have that, because you have access.
So, marketing 10-15 years ago was somewhat artsy-craftsy. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. It's because there was very little data available. Unless you were really big, and you were a consumer brand, and you could do focus groups. Like, Oh yeah, well we took this billboard out for branding reasons and did it impact x It wasn't possible to measure stuff that well. Now, it is.
So there's no excuse not to. You should be measuring as much as you can, but at least the basics in terms of where traffic is coming from, how it converts, at what level, lifetime value, the happiness of those customers all those things. You should have marketing analytics - not just web analytics that answer the question that marketers need to know, which is, fundamentally what's working so we can do more of that? And, what's not working so we can do less of that? We should know now. You should know. It's like, oh, this customer actually came from this blog article that Joe wrote, not Susie, and Joe happens to work in customer support he's not in marketing and he's written blog articles that have equated to $20,000 in sales in the last quarter. You should be able to do that level of analysis on your marketing efforts. What kind of content worked? Who created that content? Was it on a Tuesday or a Friday? What was it that drove that particular value?
The danger sometimes is like, you measure all this stuff. People talk about actionable metrics. You can have all the actionable metrics in the world and they don't mean squat if someone somewhere doesn't act. There are two ways to do the act part of the action.
One is, you say Oh, I drew these insights from the reports in the marketing analysis or whatever and I'm going to make this change to my behavior, my website, whatever in order to make those numbers go better. The other one is what I'm personally excited about (not that that isn't good humans getting insight and doing things is awesome) is letting software do it for you. So I think long term think is that this is the kind of stuff we should be automating. Figuring out for this kind of user what kind of things do they value? Like, Oh, we've learned you've never shown the Reddit button before on our website before because we didn't' think it worked or whatever, but we notice now that we get a fair amount of traffic from Reddit (a social discovery site), why not put the Reddit button there automatically? Humans should not have to respond to that. The software should be able to figure things out and say, this is what's working automatically make the change, measure whether the change worked or didn't work, back it out and nobody has to lift a finger. That's the way software should be helping. It should be helping automate user happiness, not automate unhappiness.
So, we sell software from putting all of these kind of confusing marketing pieces together. How many people have not encountered a HubSpot person in the last 2 days? Raise your hand. My work here is done. Awesome, thank you. We have a great team, they are very good looking people. This stuff works we use it ourselves. We get 40,000+ organic leads a month.
For those of you that are interested, we are very passionate about this stuff and we brought our marketing ninjas the people that help customers. So they will walk you through your website they will tell you what you're doing right or wrong. How you're doing in social media, how you're doing in SEO and give you advice. I think they're cool people and they are relatively nice and you get a free unicorn.
Question: How do you convince people that content is more than just white papers and data sheets and case studies? Because when we define content we do have a blog and it's pretty active. We write 3 articles a week on it, so we're pretty good with the blog. But I don't know if people think of stuff on Twitter and Facebook as content.
Dharmesh: The answer really is that content is anything that will pull people in. It doesn't matter what form it is. It doesn't have to be a blog; it is everything. There's increasing evidence out there We at HubSpot have made this argument 10's and 100's of times trying to convince people why this works. There's research on it.
Question: My name is Jimmy. Can you speak a little bit about how you at HubSpot protect assets? Which assets do you protect, which you don't and why?
Dharmesh: Do you mean content assets?
Question: Right
Dharmesh: So, it's interesting. We've had some debates early on around people could just copy a blog article from HubSpot and repost it to their blog. And that happens. We don't really worry about that, and the reason we don't worry about it it is because after all is said and done, it doesn't really matter. The reason it doesn't matter is that Google is now smart enough. Google crawls the web all the time and does this massive index of all these web pages and Google knows where the content came from first. And if someone copies it, they know. Like, Well, this is a HubSpot blog article, and so and so essentially just copied that same content. And they know who the original source was. So, two things happen: They will continue to get credit for that original content, and the second thing is that other company websites continue to do that and they get penalized because Google figures out that they are nothing but content scrapers. So we don't worry about it. It's out there and it's never really bothered us. We see it all the time.
Question: Thanks for the great talk. Can you talk about how you take a customer who just signed up from the sign up phase to the conversion phase? That journey needs to be relevant to the customer and making that emotional connection.
Dharmesh: So, a couple things. This is something that folks are not sophisticated about enough yet. One is around the post sign up page. The thank you page. You should be spending a fair amount of time on that doing two things: One is testing the messaging on that. Once they sign up, instead of saying thank you for signing up, share this on social media sites (that's a super, super simple one). And then maybe test like a secondary call to action. Run a test that says Oh, we had 1000 people sign up last month. We showed 20% of them this message on the thank you page, 20% of them we showed that message. This is the one that worked the best based on what we wanted them to do next. And you should be testing all of that stuff. There's great software for this now. You should be testing all of that stuff. You should be figuring out what works to drive the behavior you want.
Question: You talked about content scraping. Kind of in addition to that is it good or bad to repeat the same content through all of your social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter?
Dharmesh: Yeah, so I think it's ok to post to multiple sites. HubSpot does this, in terms of our practice. And, one thing I would caution you is that don't feel like you need to take every piece of content that you write and have it go to every one of those social networking sites that you're a part of. Because what happens is you get this kind of dilution. SO there's this tradeoff, right? When you do it, let's say you have 1000 Twitter followers as an example. And the way you get from 1000 Twitter followers to 5000, 50,000 100,000 followers is you build this reputation for sharing great content that's not always self-promotional. So, it's ok to be self promotional, but if all you ever Tweet is links to your own stuff, people figure that out, and what ends up happening is that stuff will get additional traffic because you have 1000 followers and some people probably got exposed to it. But then you don't grow your followers as fast. SO, I think the trick is doing the balance. Which is, Oh, I'm going to a) Tweet out other people's stuff and b) be selective in terms of which pieces of my content I share. If it's a necessary blog article that you don't think really is going to spread in social media, you don't have to Tweet it. There's no law that says that everything you publish has to go out on all the social network sites. Our advice is to just use good judgment. Ask yourself, Is it useful to your market?
Question: I've seen a lot of presentations where the guidelines and principles seem very biased toward an audience that's in the US and speak English as their first language. And most of our clients and prospects don't. They are very global; they consume our research data - they consume that in English. But, I'm just wondering if the guidelines here and the approaches and the channels if all of those findings hold true globally.
Dharmesh: Yes, there's no universal answer to that. I'll give you what we think, based on stuff we've looked at at HubSpot, and our own experiences. It's always hard to draw stereotypes or general patterns, but this kind of software inbound marketing stuff versus the cold marketing that we've been doing, actually resonates even better in non-US markets. That's one thing we've found particularly Europe. They don't like being beaten over the head - even less so than we do here in the US. So they are pickier about whom they do marketing business with. But other than that, my message to you would be to test it because it's going to vary from country to country. Just like your software should be able to detect when a mobile user comes to your website and creates a mobile experience, you should be able to do that across regions as well and say, Oh, maybe people that come from Germany happen to like these kinds of articles versus those kinds of articles.
Thanks everyone for your time. This has been awesome.
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