The Surround Sound Series: A Behind-the-Scenes Look into HubSpot's Newest Content Marketing Strategy (Part 1 of 3)

这篇文章是Made @ Hubspot的一部分，这是一个内部思想领导力系列，通过它从我们自己的HubSpotter进行的实验中提取课程。

当今客户如何发现新产品？尽管有很多方法可以意识到产品，但考虑购买它的简单途径。

If you’re like me, you do it every time you’re looking to buy or try something new:

You turn to your friends (and in many cases, Google) and ask, “What are the best X products?”

如果您使用的是Google，则查询看起来像这样：

• “最佳形式建筑商”
• “最佳健身追踪器”
• “Best business scanner app”
• “都柏林最好的餐厅”
• “波士顿最好的酒吧”

Although sometimes, you drop the qualifier (the “best” of) and simply search for a broad transactional category:

• “Marketing automation software”
• “Hotels in Tallinn”
• “Language learning apps”

Sometimes, these exploratory keywords exist in relation to an existing solution:

• “帆布替代品”
• “Mailchimp competitors”
• “Ahrefs vs SEMRush”

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As marketers, we know search queries like these are important for two main reasons.

1. The customer journey —我们在Hubspot上写的那个— includes a Consideration stage, where customers attempt to educate themselves about the available solutions on the market, and perhaps the pros and cons of each.
2. We have some good ol’ quantitative data about how much search volume these keywords get and what the estimated CPC is for bottom funnel search terms.

Take, for example, a term like “form builder.”

它具有大容量和高CPC。This means it’s both a high trafficandhigh intent keyword.那是相对罕见的，但肯定是一个最佳选择。

Same goes for a term like “best red wine.” I Googled it and took the top ranking URL and put it intoAhrefs。这是数据：

可以假设此博客文章的投资回报率很高。

Without even looking at any data, you know how you can tell these keywords are high value? Just look at any website that monetizes via affiliate partnerships.

例如adamenfroy.com,ryrob.comandGrowthMarketingProt来o mind, where the majority of their content follows this format.

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Now, I’m not breaking any news to marketers with more than a few years experience — of course it’s important to find business critical keywords like this. It’s important to build out product pages for decision-level keywords, architect a支柱和簇内容策略, build some links, and try to rank for these terms.

What I am saying is that just rankingyourpage isn’t enough.Rather, you want to appear到处a customer is searching when they seek out products like yours.您希望您的品牌打开surround sound。

How People Discover (and Buy) New Stuff

Imagine you’re at a proverbial cocktail party, and you want to know what your fellow companions have been reading lately. You ask the group, “What have you been reading? What should I read next?”

几年前，该小组中至少有一个人会说：“Sapiens。You have to readSapiens。”

Now, if only one friend out of your whole group recommends that you readSapiens，它可能不会在噪音之上脱颖而出（取决于您喜欢您的朋友的程度）。这本书现在在您的雷达上，但这并不是您听说过的任何其他书籍。

Now, imagine everybody else in the group suddenly chimes in and agrees, “Yes! You need to readSapiens。Best book I’ve ever read.” It’d be like a chorus effect (one might even say a “surround sound” effect).

In this case, if you’re not at least a little bit curious about readingSapiens, then you’re insane. It’s highly probable, if you respect your friends, trust their suggestions, and have the money to buy it, you’ll buySapiensand check it out.

Our proverbial cocktail party represents a myriad of different influences in the real world. These include podcasts, newspaper articles, book bibliographies, and, yes, friend suggestions as well.

考虑到这一点，我们可以说“包围声音”策略的意思是：

“The more frequently someone hears about your product from multiple sources, the more likely they are to buy your product.”

注意：我从中借用这个想法Tim Ferriss when he talks about product launches: “Especially on the first few days of your launch, you want people to see your project everywhere – on blogs, Facebook, Twitter…everywhere.”

This is not a new idea in marketing —get lots of people to talk about you favorably, preferably around the same time。在下一部分中，我将介绍更多的理论，以及搜索为什么有效的理论（以及它如何适用于许多不同的渠道和公司）。

I eventually boughtSapiens，顺便说一句，因为这CRO guruand fellow Austinite raved about it on Facebook and at happy hours enough times:

Think about the last book you read, TV series you watched, or new piece of consumer tech you purchased. I bet it followed a similar trajectory (recent examples that come to mind areSapiens,Tiger King,权力的游戏，和Oura Ring— at least in the circles I run in.)

People Comparison Shop (and Frequency Matters)

我们走过了我的轶事旅程，以购买和享受Sapiens。Now, here’s the data that backs this up on a broader spectrum.

首先，在广告中，重复是一个可预测广告系列成功的变量，这是一个普遍的智慧。媒体购买者传统上看起来两件事:

• Reach (who you are targeting)
• 频率(多久他们看到/听到你的广告)

As it turns out, frequency of messaging leads to higher levels of awareness and purchase intent.The more you hear or see an ad, the more likely it is to be effective.

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Clearly there are nuances here; it’s not always the case that the effectiveness of a campaign increases linearly with each additional exposure (it’s almost never that case, actually). But it’s a good rule of thumb and a simple heuristic when thinking about capturing your target audience’s attention.

我想指出的另一个事实是比较购物。有趣的是，您知道您在购买之前访问多个网站。因此，有数据可以支持这一点，这绝对不足为奇。

Research says that, on average,消费者在购买之前访问三个网站。The same study tells us that the more websites a consumer visits, the more money they are likely to spend.

Google is also putting out some cool research on the customer journey nowadays, and again, it’s unsurprising in its winding and comparative shape:

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So, we’ve got three pieces of data:

1. Product or service-related keywords with high traffic and high intent exist (at least for most categories)
2. 人们在购买或尝试产品之前查看许多不同的网站
3. The more frequently someone hears about a product from multiple sources, the more likely they are to buy it.

将所有这些放在一起，论文很清楚：appear on all of the search results for one of these keywords.

搜索引擎优化的环绕声策略

If you’re selling a consumer product, like a book, maybe your potential customers read a few magazines and a few podcasts. You can easily find this data usingGoogle调查(or analyzing your own personas’ preferences like I在这里概述) and finding predictive clusters of different publications people consume.

When you find which publications people consume, you craft a plan of attack, and near your launch, you find a way to appear in all of them. This creates a surround sound effect.

The search keywords that correspond to HubSpot products tend to have pretty good search volume, and content marketing is a pretty big channel for us.

环绕音效,对我们来说,意味着当someone searches a product-related keyword (e.g. “best help desk software” or “best live chat software”), they see this:

There are two reasons for this:

1. 我们可以为相同数量的搜索流量捕获更多的点击率和转换。
2. Being on multiple lists has second order conversion rate effects because comparison shoppers trust that we are a top solution.（这是环绕声效果！）

对于第一个，这是在给定搜索引擎结果页面（SERP）上单击第一个，第二或第三个（或更多）URL的搜索者百分比的问题。如果我们可以出现更多的结果，我们可以将更多的流量返回我们的产品页面，我们可以将更多的搜索器转换为产品用户。

I’m not the only person to have noticed this cumulative effect of owning multiple search results.Nick Eubanks wrote about the “SERP Monopoly” strategyand explains that the more spots you can occupy on page #1 of a given SERP, the more clicks you get, the more traffic you get, and the more revenue you get:

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This means that, with each additional mention, we get a linear average increase in click-through rate to our site (which translates directly to portal signups, and thus, revenue). Keep in mind these numbers are averages, and if you have good brand recognition, titles, or meta description, you can increase your click-through rate from the SERP.

如果出现在所有结果上的目标似乎并不可行或吸引人，请想象一下：What if you appear on none of the results? You’re not in the conversation.

Appearing on one result is like one friend piping up and saying you should readSapienswhen you ask a group of people what to read next. Appearing on all results is like everyone in the group telling you to readSapiensbecause it's the best book ever.

在定性上，SERP的统治似乎是一个值得的目标。

如何构建自己的环绕声策略

遵循这种方法来创建自己的环绕声策略：

1. 研究您的买家的旅程。
2. 地图有影响力的接触点。
3. 找到一种出现在所有人上的方法。

当我以这样的步骤写出它时，它似乎有些平庸，也许是模糊的。研究买家的旅程？你是怎样做的？

First, get to know your target customers and how they make purchasing decisions. Then, tactically figure out how to appear in those places (could be ads, could be SEO, PR, guest blogging, affiliate, influencer marketing, etc. — it all depends on the specific situation).

To illustrate this in action, in our case, we want to appear on all the URLs that rank for high intent product keywords (again, things like “form builder”). Virtually all of these SERPs have some combination of three page types:

• Product pages
• Listicles
• 审查网站/论坛

So, the playbook is to rank the product page (not easy to do, obviously), get mentioned on all the listicles that rank, and get featured (prominently) on all review sites.

It’s important to track this over time, as well. We always keep an eye on our SERP real estate (doing so through a cool toolwe built in Rand host via Shiny). We can pull any keyword and see how much of the SERP we occupy, and then we can see a table for which URLs rank and if we appear on that page:

As you can see, the strategy is simple;the executionis where you break a sweat.

Conclusion

考虑到我们的参数，环绕声策略是可预测且明显的游戏：

• We understand our customer and where they seek advice or influence on product purchase decisions
• 我们绘制了这一客户的旅程，并找到了最具影响力和最高影响力的接触点
• We seek to appear favorably in all of these places.

Where some of your marketing activities will fall into a more experimental bucket, the Surround Sound approach can be likened to the金融投资组合中的低波动性资产。执行强劲，投资回报率将在整个时间内保持稳定且可预测。

This article walked through the theory of the surround sound strategy. To learn more about the execution of this strategy,阅读该系列的下一篇文章。