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Now that the world is moving largely online as a temporary replacement for in person contact during the Covid19 pandemic, there are questions popping up about how to adopt the tools needed and how to use this way of connecting effectively. I noticed that there is a large amount of practical content being written about how to use online tools at the moment but its harder to find information about what makes an effective strategy is to conduct high quality meetings or training online. Information on how to minimise the disadvantages of online training and meetings versus in person  meetings is also a lot harder to come by. In this  3 part series about online meetings, training's and events, I will try to address some of these deeper questions. We'll start with the defining the key features and look at their advantages in this post. In the second post we will look at how you can make the best use out of the advantages so you can get the maximum value possible out of moving  your events online and in the final post I will discuss some of the disadvantages and how to deal with them

How do you build up your business brand and create more leads? How do you make sure your organisation can keep growing in a sustained way? These are big questions going through many a CMO and marketing managers' head. In the previous parts of this series, we addressed how to put in place methodologies, pick you're appropriate tool stack and ensure your growth marketing team acquires the skills needed to drive success through training. Now it's time to have a look on how to create and implement objectives and goals in a growth marketing plan so that you can work towards that success on a daily basis. We are going to explore how to create objectives and set goals to stimulate your organisations growth. 

How do you educate your team to drive growth marketing success?

In the last post about Centralised vs Decentralised marketing stacks, I ended with a series of questions to ask yourself about which type of marketing stack might be best for you and if it is worth considering to make changes to your marketing growth stack. But regardless of what stack you choose, one of the most important things is that the people in your organisation are aware of why they use the processes and tools, what they are trying to achieve by their actions and how it will impact them.

You can have the right intention, the right goals, the right tools and even the right procedures, but if the people using them don't understand the context and reasons for doing what they do, most of your efforts will end up wasted. This often leads to frustrations, lack of productivity and/or a lot of hard work that ends up not driving any results. Educating your team through different forms of learning is your only way to address this. In the following paragraph, we will have a look at how identify your training needs and create appropriate workshops to address them. 

Welcome to part 2 of this  multi-part series about the ins and outs of successful growth marketing. In part one we discussed the big picture and how methodologies underpin everything we do in growth marketing.In this part, we are going to have a deeper look into the different tools you can use to build a successful growth marketing stack and their pro's and cons. 

Unengaged contacts have always been an issue for marketers. However, understanding what they are and dealing with them is becoming ever more important. In this blogpost, we are going to look at what unengaged contacts are; How unengaged contacts are defined in Hubspot; Why it is important to know about them and what you should do with them in Hubspot.

The yearly marketing spectacle that is Hubspot's Inbound19 conference has just concluded. Every year there are keynotes by Hubspot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan as well as many interesting product announcements and inspiring sessions by other business leaders and inspirational speakers. We always watch as many of these speeches as possible because they are full of interesting information and insights into the current and future business and marketing landscapes. Luckily Hubspot kindly records and uploads at least the keynotes to their youtube channel so they are easy to check out, even if you can't make it to the event.  I tend to summarise these talks while watching them to ensure I get the full message. Since it't a lot easier to read a 3 minute summary than to watch a 50 minute video I decided to publish these summaries for those of you who want to recap what they saw or simply don't have time to watch the full videos. 

Why it's good to be aware about methodologies and concepts?

It can be very hard for me to keep a clear grasp of how all the different Methodologies, concepts, tasks and buzzwords relate to each other and where to focus my attention. This a big problem for me as it affects the balance of my marketing and also service delivery related activities.  At times, I get a sort of vertigo and get very confused about where I should focus my attention. 

If I loose sight of our goals and principles I am likely to fail in the long term. If I focus too much on the long term and miss out on the daily activities that keep our marketing machine running, I fail immediately . To ensure I find a balance between these two ways of thinking and working I have to be able to see the bigger picture. The framework  that I can place all these principles,  tasks etc. into so that I can actually use them to reach our goals.

At About Inbound, we focus heavily on knowledge and communication. Our clients depend on us to give them clarity, quality and peace of mind, so in short, if I am not clear about what I am doing or about how to apply the concepts we sell, I am kind off.. well... useless. 

To combat these moments of marketing research "vertigo" I often try to order my learning on paper or chat it through with Vourneen who is About Inbound's founder and ultimate super expert. This ordering of thoughts helps me make sense of it all and has over time allowed me to quickly grasp new concepts and approaches because I can visualize where they "sit" in the jungle that is modern growth marketing. I also noticed that many of our clients run into similar issues. They know many of the buzzwords and definitions but can't quite connect them together, or they are unable to apply them because they are too snowed under in their day-to-day tasks..

To help define some of the workings of a modern Growth strategy I decided to create a series of posts around it. I hope they can help you in your quest to keep your marketing growth stars aligned and making them work for you.

So, you are thinking about running an inbound marketing workshop. This means that you likely feel that your team is not getting the most out of your Inbound tools and processes. There might be several challenges to address. If you find a good training and strategy consultant, they should be able to help you define your need further and find the training solution that is the best fit for your business. At About Inbound, we always ask you to consider a number of questions (listed below) to help you flesh out your training and consulting needs. This will make sure you end up with the best advise so you can get the most value out of your investment of time and resources. In the interest of transparency and to help you define your need whomever you may choose, we listed out some of our qualification steps for your benefit. We address these during our free scoping consultancy calls. Read on to get started!

Hubspot announced some exciting new native video functionality across its marketing, sales and service hub tools recently. The announcement got us very excited at About Inbound, so we spent some time to see what the new video features do and how they can be utilised. The three main new capabilities in Hubspots' new video arsenal are interactivity, tracking and the ability for sales and service  to record and send videos to your customers using Hubspot native tools. We spent a few afternoons of reading, configuring and testing the new video marketing tools,  and this is what we found. 

Disclaimer: Just to let you know, both I and About Inbound have no affiliation to the INBOUND event. This is an independent guide with helpful information based on our experiences  and is meant for those travelling to INBOUND this year. Particularly first timers that are travelling internationally.  If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear them. For official information visit inbound.com

We're well into summer and many of our clients are starting to plan their trips to  Inbound 2018., the annual event that is held from the 4th until the 7th of September. This is the time of year that the questions about planning and preparation for Inbound crop up again. To make life as easy as possible for everyone, we decided to write down some of the most asked travel and preparation tips for the Inbound conference in 2018 for easy reference.