The 6 Biggest Marketing Lessons HubSpot Learned in 2017

One of the big themes for me in 2017 was what it means for marketers to do the right thing. Outbound marketing that relies on spamming, irrelevant advertising, and other tactics that are almost as bad for the business as they are for the customer is obviously not the right thing. Better analytics has brought a lot of focus and measurability to marketing, but creates the tendency to do what’s best for the business versus what’s best for the customer.

And even well-intentioned inbound marketers who are trying to pull versus push ... well ... sometimes we just pull a little too hard.

It’s hard for goal-oriented, data-driven marketers to stop doing things that hit the numbers ... even if we know these tactics fail to create the best experience for our prospects or焦化地球for future efforts.

我们在2017年作为营销团队的目标之一是推动自己做正确的事，即使这对我们来说意味着更大的困难，甚至错过了我们的目标。It was a tough year and yes, we missed some numbers, but wow ... we also learned a ton, and I wanted to share some of our biggest lessons here. I think they have big implications for marketers in 2018.

1. We can break our email addiction and still hit our goals.

营销人员多年来一直在吹捧电子邮件的死亡，尽管我不会说该频道已经死了，但您很难找到一个营销人员，他会争辩说，五年前的订婚是五年前的互动。2017年初，HubSpot的CMO要求我们的团队看看我们是否可以打破对电子邮件的沉迷。

我们可以将对话转移到Facebook Messenger等新兴平台，并减少对电子邮件的依赖吗？答案是肯定的。

2017年，我们的团队在北美的电子邮件量减少了50％，同时将参与度提高了28％。那是疯狂的。

我们的团队用来实现这一目标的一种策略是从每周发送的两次电子邮件发送到一个，然后专注于进行一个发送计数：更好的细分，大量测试和创建更多的交互式内容（例如，网络研讨会促销电子邮件包括包括一个倒计时如下）。

2. Offsite messaging has earned its place in inbound marketing.

Another one of the reasons we have been successful at reducing our reliance on email is that we got serious about testing emerging channels. Here’s an offer email we sent earlier this year that gives people the option to access content via Facebook Messenger or a form:

If people choose Facebook Messenger, our chatbot automatically delivers the requested content to them in their Messenger app instead of their inbox.We’ve seen offers delivered via Facebook Messenger result in 2.5x lifts in open rates and 6x lifts in click rates vs. email.

This improved performance is partially a function of the channel (it’s great to get push notifications on someone’s home screen), but partially a function of it being a channel that aligns with how people want to shop and buy today, and how they want to engage with companies.

3.现场消息现在扮演着一个不可或缺的方式e in inbound sales.

For the past decade, lead forms have been the go-to way for prospects to express interest in working with your company. But just because something拥有工作，并不意味着它会继续工作。

This year HubSpot’s marketing team got very serious about testing alternatives to lead forms. We rolled outonsite messaging在我们的整个网站上。

是的，这意味着要雇用更多的销售人员来应对一对一的交流的涌入。

是的，这意味着要以个人的反应来回应许多无关紧要的询问。

Yes, it was expensive and took some internal training and systems finagling.

But …

由于添加了现场消息传递选项，我们将产生20％的合格机会。

Customers today expect to get answers to their questions right.now. For serious buyers, a lead-form is just too long of a delay. And all of the short-term costs will decrease as weget更认真地对聊天机器人。现场消息传递现在是我们入站销售剧本不可或缺的一部分，我们希望在2018年开始更多的对话。

4. B2B播客不需要无聊。

Picasso is famously credited with saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

但是他很有可能从T.S.偷走了这种格言。艾略特。

无论信誉如何，艺术家对营销人员都是正确的：复制是真正快速擅长事物的最快方法之一。

问题在于，您很快就会在每个营销人员都在做同一件事的世界中。因此，有时候，作为营销人员做正确的事意味着有意与牛群分开。

我们开始了The Growth Showback in 2013, and “boring” is probably an unfair descriptor. Actually the show has built an engaged core audience, but it never turned into the kind of massive audience builder that consumer podcasts can be. We gave ourselves a pass, it’s a B2B podcast, right?

But in 2017, our growing podcast team pushed us to get a little weird, launching a podcast called怪异的工作where we interview professional mermaids, ASMR content creators, and writers of dinosaur erotica. The reception to this little series has been so cool:

• 我们在iTunes的前100个播客列表中列入
• Achieved New & Noteworthy status in the iTunes store (this is the promised land for podcasters everywhere)
• 被Inc.评为“目前十大播客”。

It’s tough to measure the business impact of such a “brand” play, but one way to think about content like this is in terms of ad spend. You can pay to advertise on someone else’s podcast or you can create your own audience and advertise there.We calculate that the value of the Weird Work audience is equivalent to $12,000 in ad spend every month.

Sometimes not following the herd pays off in a big way.

5. The future of SEO is topic clusters.

Google一直在朝着奖励创建主题群集的创作者迈进一段时间。这意味着，它并没有将每个单独的帖子视为其自己的SEO机会，而是关注给定URL创建的内容范围，并将更多的流量发送给似乎是给定主题专家的人。

We’ve been shifting to this strategy for new content creation for a while. But 2017 was the first year where we began to tackle 10+ years of legacy content, and re-working our architecture to fit the topic cluster model.

为什么要花这么长时间？因为这项工作很难！实际上，我们启动了一个主题集群项目，该项目于2016年1月在资源站点架构上解决，这是如此复杂，我们必须对其进行介绍。今年5月，我们终于将其直播，结果令人震惊。

In the months following launch,我们资源页面的流量增加了107％。

HubSpot的博客团队还开始围绕某些主题簇进行旧帖子。这是我们所做的第一个群集之一的影响；查看该平均等级上升并向右走：

The days of throwing content at the wall to see what sticks are officially over. Doing the right thing today means creating content only when it meets a demonstrated user need. (BTW, HubSpot also released a tool earlier this year that makes it easier than ever to find and create your own主题群).

6.做得更好。

Every marketer has felt the pressure to churn out offer after offer and our team has not been exempt from that pressure. It’s hard to place bigger bets on a smaller number of activities.

我们的共同营销团队每周都会感到这一压力。在给定的季度中，该团队通常执行15-20个竞选活动。但是我们终于停下来说，如果我们可以做的少做更大的挥杆呢？因此，我们将四到五项竞选活动的努力投入了一项大型竞选活动 -4天的Facebook。

我们去大与我们的合作伙伴(Facebookbob综合博彩下载和加里·Vaynerchuck), we went big with our promotion (Facebook Messenger), and we went big across the company (getting buy-in from multiple marketing teams and regions to support the campaign).

The results? Our biggest acquisition campaign ever, in all of HubSpot’s history. It generated 10x the leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.

And it brought together so many things: new channels (Facebook Messenger), new ways of selling (acquiring users for HubSpot’s freemium funnel), live video, and amazing partnerships (Facebook!).

这是全年我最喜欢的竞选活动，这都是因为我们的共同营销团队致力于更少的事情。

Looking forward to 2018

I’m excited about these results. But most of all, I hope the results we’ve seen in 2017 encourage you to be a little bolder in your strategy, to push a little harder for the right things (even if you’re unsure about the results), and to occasionally miss some quantitative goals in order to learn some big things.

祝你好运！