Strategy

How do you make your online meetings, training or events work best for all your attendees?

It is very important to ask yourself this question before diving in and selecting this tools. If you don't give this enough consideration before you make the switch to online meetings, prepare that webcast or create that online training, you might find it very hard to satisfy your attendees and reach your goals. It could mean the difference between a temporary experiment where your efforts are only appreciated because there are no other in person alternatives and then quickly abandoned when it becomes possible to replace all of the technology by in person meetings and the chance to really embrace the possibilities that all the technologies we have access to bring and move you and your organisation forward.

I am not advocating that we should replace all our personal interactions with online events and training when you don't have to but merely to combine these ways of connecting so that you can create a diverse and comfortable set of channels to connect with people in many situations and make the best use of everyone's valuable time. 

This is part 2 of a 3 part series where we try to ask and answer the higher level questions  about how approach meetings, training and webinars using online tools.  In part 1 we had a look at what the major features of connecting online are and what there benefits are. In this part we will look into how to optimise these advantages so they enable you to be as successful as possible from the start. 

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.

Video marketing will continue to be a top performer in 2020, helping to drive more engagement and brand recall  than any other content format on social media. It is a key component of a holistic Inbound approach to your marketing. Video can help support not only awareness but also consideration and decision making campaigns as well.  Quality of course plays a key factor here and you need to ensure that you are producing top notch video content in order to succeed. 

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.

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. 

The current options for group training and collaboration for remote teams/audiences can be divided in 2 distinct approaches. You can fly your team to a central location for one or more days to collaborate and learn the skills needed or, set a date and time and use one of the many remote meeting tools with video, audio and screen sharing for self paced training and collaboration. The second approach needs far less investment but often results in less engagement. We recently found out that there will soon be a third option that could provide a better balance between these time/cost and results trade offs. You will soon be able to get your audience into a virtual room using your existing devices and VR. 

The startup world is so dynamic and different from the world of Enterprise, that it can be extremely difficult to anchor your growth with the appropriate processes. Bringing in quality leads and converting them into customers is always a top priority in business but any startup growth model is by definition very dynamic. This makes it extra difficult to build the right inbound sales team and put in place the right sales processes to support the rapid growth and flexibility needed for your startup to be successful.

You are possibly wondering what linear algebra has to do with social media. Let me explain. I listened to Dharmesh Shah introduce the concept of what he called “vector alignment” while attending the Inbound17 event. He came up with this idea based on a conversation he had previously with Elon Musk. This concept is very simple yet most organisations find it difficult to implement or worse overlook it completely as a priority.