Lessons Learned from Building a Growth Team for Inbound Marketing.

Kieran Flanagan VP Marketing @ HubSpot @searchbrat kflanagan@hubspot.com

Ponencia en inglés - Ponte los #theinbounder

“There is a disproportionate value in being the first mover into a new space” - Gary Vaynerchuck

When it comes to marketing, it certainly pays to be a fast follower.

Examples?

Advertising has been around for a long time.

The first American magazine is published in Philadelphia.

This is what an Ad looked like.

Then,

A scholar named Samuel Johnson writes:

Whatever is common is despised.

A scholar named Samuel Johnson writes:

Whatever is common is despised.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very

negligently perused.

A scholar named Samuel Johnson writes:

Whatever is common is despised.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very

negligently perused.

It has become necessary to gain attention by

magnificence of promises.

Ads moved online in 1994

The following banner appeared from AT&T in

Hotwired magazine in 1994.

It had a CTR of 44% …

Consider this CTR versus that of Facebook Ads

c

44% Hotwired ’94

1.8% Facebook ‘14

In 1996 Gary Vaynerchuk took over his dad’s wine business. It had $3 million in revenue.

By 2005 that number was $50 million

His weekly newsletter was a big part of that growth.

Those emails regularly got open rates of +80%.

Mass adoption of Email for marketing has lead to a steady decline in open

rates.

That decline is set to continue

AirBnB grew by automatically posting your listing to Craigslist.

And is now being disrupted by vertical markets like AirBnB.

This is a common cycle in marketing

ADOPTION OF NEW MARKETING TACTICS

Neil Patel (Yes/No) Pop up

Fast Followers Adopt

Lots of Tools helps Mass adoption

CTR normalize for all users

“It works for a while, until your customers get used to the effect, and start ignoring it”

Andrew Chen, Entrepreneur

A growth team helps you foster a culture of validated learnings, help find points of leverage and will innovative on existing channels.

@Searchbrat

Here are some of our learnings ..

Growth Lessons

1

2

Goals for Experiments

Approach to Experiments

3 Types of Experiments

1 Goals for Experiments

Experiments can help change the world.

An additional $60 million in campaign funds.

All good marketers focused on growth should have an obsessive focus on a singular goal.

They know how to measure and prioritize the right metrics.

This will change how you measure the success or failure of your experiments.

CRM Active Users

Would video increase active users of our CRM?

@rexg312

One version of the sign up page had video explaining the product.

Version A Version B

Version A Version B

Generated 30% more sign ups

Version A Version B

Generated 10% more active users

* WINNER *

Active Users > Sign ups

Having a culture of shared learnings means other team members can benefit.

LeadIn Active Users

Would video increase active users of LeadIn?

@ratner

One version of the sign up page had video explaining the product.

Version A Version B

Version A Version B

Increased sign ups by 13%

Version A Version B

Increased active users by 130%

The PIE model will mean you work on experiments with highest impact.

The PIE Model is based on 3 simple scores. Potential – The potential ceiling for this experiment Importance – The importance to the business Ease– Ease of implementation

We want to run an experiment on the home page.

Potential is high. Home page gets a lot of good traffic from direct and branded organic.

Importance is high. We can influence two of the companies most important metrics.

Ease is low. There are a lot of stakeholders involved in changing the home page.

Our PIE Score is:

(P) + (I) + (E) / 3 = PIE Score

Our PIE Score is:

3 (P) + 4 (I) + 2 (E) / 3 = 3

Hat Tip to WiderFunnel for

PIE

>> widerfunnel.com <<

@WiderFunnel

2 Approach to Experiments

Each marketer has their own experiment funnel.

IDEAS

EVALUATION

PIE SCORED

RUNNING

ANALYSIS

OUTCOME

All experiment ideas

Gather all information for PIE

PIE Score

Active experiments

Analysis of run experiments

What we learned

Shared experiment board on Trello

Shared experiment board on Trello

In a given week we have 20 to 30 experiments running.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

- Thomas Edison

3 Types of Experiments

Our experiments fall into the following categories.

ANALYSIS

Prove a hypothesis about the way something works.

Featured Snippets

Why does content appear in Google’s answer box?

@matthewbarby

Featured Snippets

Look for commonalties in the content that ranks for featured snippets.

From a sample of just under 5,000 queries, I found that the CTR to our website for high volume keywords increased by over 114%, even when we ranked #1.

@matthewbarby

What we found

Search query should appear as header with clear steps directly after it.

In general the “answers” were between 54 to 58 words.

Google will often show the “Steps” listed in chronological order.

What did we do with these findings? I’ll show you in a couple of slides.

HubSpot Blogs

What makes content successful?

@matthewbarby

Longer content on our blog gets more organic traffic.

It also attracts more inbound links and social shares.

We can use this information to run experiments around content formats.

Helped us undercover new topics we could experiment more in.

Results from analysis help determine future experiments in our next two categories.

TESTS

HubSpot Blogs

How can we increase leads from our blogs?

@pamelump

How much of a difference does user intent make?

Before: “how to write a press release”

After: “how to write a press release”

How to overcome the effects of “CTA blindness”

End-of-post banner CTAs historically had generated a lot of leads but their impact had declined.

Track performance of CTAs so we can spot downward trends.

We tested against CTAs that looked less like Ads.

Anchor text CTAs increased our leads generated on that post by 121%.

Always look for that fast follower advantage.

Would making the design of our blog a lot ‘cleaner’ increase CTR on those CTAs?

Good for content discovery but could be very distracting.

We removed it and monitored our results over 4 weeks.

Clicks on our anchor text CTAs only improved by 5% L

But load time of our blog posts improved by 50% and organic traffic is trending upwards.

PILOTS

Experiments in this category are about finding points of leverage.

Remember this chart showing the decline of email.

Could a large Slack audience be a point of leverage?

Could push notifications provide better results than email?

Performance to date only slightly better than email with 6% CTR.

Could push notifications provide better results than email?

Could push notifications provide better results than email?

Ok, back to the analysis we did on Featured Snippets.

Based on learnings, we updated 80 blog posts that ranked on the first page of Google for 199 keywords.

Over 10% of keywords moved into Featured Snippet box.

Organic traffic to these posts increased by 23%.

An experimental approach to marketing helps you build a plan based on future trends.

@Searchbrat

Remember when surviving a bear attack ….

Get in Contact. Twitter: @searchbrat LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kieranjflanagan Google: Search for “Kieran Flanagan

#theinbounder