Skill Up

This season of Skill Up, we’re looking at social marketing. You want to always meet your customers where they already are. And it just so happens that over 30 billion users across all channels are on social, interacting with brands and communities. That’s a lot. So before you start trying to market to all of them, you need to create a social media strategy. Host Matthew Brown gives you five things to keep in mind as you start your social marketing.

What makes conversational marketing great is when it’s super relevant to any given problem and gets visitors to where they want to go. The more contextual you make it, the better the experience. HubSpot’s resident bots guru Connor Cirillo joins Anni to talk about why bots are more than just a marketing priority, how to optimize for human behavior, and why advanced targeting helps put the customer first.

With today’s empowered buyer, your best marketing channel is your existing customers. And when your customers succeed, it’s your best predictor for business growth. The world of marketing has shifted to word of mouth, and reviews are more important than ever before. Anni takes you through how to support your customers and advocates with an inbound marketing strategy designed for them.

People aren’t static. They access your content from multiple devices on a number of different channels. And as their experience with your company grows, their needs and interests change. Yet most marketing still treats all these different customers exactly the same. Personalization helps contextualize your marketing for customers and potential customers. It helps people feel like your outreach is more personal and ultimately creates a more natural connection.

If you’re running a business and you want to increase your efficiency in closing those big ticket sales, then you should practice account-based marketing. ABM is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales work together to close big, complex deals at a discrete number of target accounts. And the higher your price point, the more likely ABM will be worth your while. Anni offers up three things to focus on when starting ABM at your company.

It can be tempting to just guess which type of content will entice visitors most and eventually convert into leads. But basing your marketing decisions off a hunch is risky business. A/B testing helps you compare two versions of something against each other to determine which one performs better. And Anni lets you in on the three things you should start A/B testing right now.

There’s one question that haunts every marketer: “What’s the ROI of this marketing campaign?” But with so much data to sift through, where should you start? Multi-touch attribution ties marketing actions to revenue. It tells you which interactions someone had with your brand on their journey to becoming a customer. Anni walks through the six different types of multi-touch attribution reporting and helps you decide which one is right for your company.

This season, we’re looking at advanced marketing techniques. And one of the most advanced ways to market, sell, and service customers involves the use of artificial intelligence. We break down how to correct duplicate data and clean up the rest of your data efficiently using AI and machine learning. While AI might not be our sentient overlords just yet, it can help companies serve the right content, to the right customers, at the right time, right now.

Smarketing combines sales and marketing. Great. Easy etymology. But what exactly does it mean? Smarketing is a team meeting, where your sales and marketing teams come together to collaborate on a shared project and solve problems. We go inside HubSpot headquarters with Alex Girard as he sets out to put on HubSpot’s next Smarketing. Not only have we never pulled the curtain back on this type of meeting, it’s also our first attempt at a live, remote Smarketing. As such, things don’t always go as plan

Your company needs to have a clear revenue goal. But unless your teams know how to contribute to it, your goals aren’t going to do you a whole lot of good. So you'll need to help marketing and sales each understand their role in achieving that goal. And the best way to do that? Implement a service level agreement, or an SLA, between the two teams. An SLA means Marketing promises a certain number of leads to Sales, and Sales promises to contact those leads within a certain timeframe.

Marcus Sheridan was burnt out. Each day, he was waking up early, driving two to three hours, sitting at a sales appointment for two to three hours, and driving home for two to three more hours. He didn't get to see his wife. He didn't get to see my kids. What was eating away at his time? Not getting to work with more qualified buyers. So to solve that, Marcus redefined his content strategy and starting selling at an 80 percent close rate.

Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are leads that are both a good fit for your offering and are ready to have a sales conversation. But what about hand-raisers, or good fit but unready sales leads, or poor fit leads? We’ll set up a lead qualification matrix to help you sort through good fit and poor fit leads, based on sales readiness. That way, you can send the best leads to sales, and leave the rest for marketing to continue nurturing.

We’d all like to believe that everyone’s a good fit for what we’re selling. But that type of thinking will only end up wasting countless hours and angering countless more prospects. You need to qualify which leads are a good fit and which ones are a poor fit. This episode, we walkthrough how you can align marketing and sales in pipeline creation and create an ideal customer profile.

Look, audacious goals can inspire people and teams to accomplish things they never thought possible. Dream big! Right? But ridiculous, ludicrous goals can also crush a team's morale. We help you define your company’s vision, set achievable goals, and align your sales and marketing along the way.

What’s actually involved in making a sales enablement strategy? We break out the three key elements -- a clear goal, a target buyer, and a content strategy -- to help get you on your way to implementing a successful sales enablement strategy at your company.