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How One HubSpotter Created a Framework to Reduce Meeting Fatigue

Productivity
September 14, 2021/by
How One HubSpotter Created a Framework to Reduce Meeting Fatigue This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters. A few months ago, I came to a startling realization: My job is meetings. Maybe you can relate. From morning to night, I spend my time jumping from Zoom call to Zoom call. I race to grab a snack in the two minutes I'm afforded in-between calls, and I'm mentally exhausted by the end of the day. It's a struggle to decompress before spending time with friends and family. And, equally challenging, the amount of meetings I have takes away from my ability to get my work done. I'm Chris Saly — an Engineering Lead at HubSpot. As an engineer, my day job was code. Sure, we needed meetings to discuss things and stay updated as a team, but the main mechanism and value of my job was the quality and reliability of the code I produced. Now, the primary value of my job is talking to others. Whether it's as a mentor, being involved in tactical decisions, or helping set a strategic vision, most of these goals are communicated through meetings. However, there are some very real consequences to my role as an EL. Among other things, my meeting-heavy life was taking its toll on my mental health, relationships, and workplace productivity. I knew something had to change. Here, I'll show you...
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Online Advertising: Everything You Need to Know in 2021

Advertising, behavioral targeting
September 10, 2021/by
Online Advertising: Everything You Need to Know in 2021 Have you ever double-tapped an image on Instagram, reacted to a video on Facebook, or clicked a search result in Google, only to realize afterward that it was actually an ad? Maybe you never realized it was an ad at all — you just thought it was a cute picture of a dog. More than ever, ads can be contextual, relevant, targeted, and helpful in ways they never could before. In short, ads today are content. But the online advertising landscape is changing. New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are popping up all the time. Let's dig into everything you need to know about online advertising across ad platforms for social media, paid search, display, and native advertising. If you're only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section. How to Advertise Online 93% of all online interactions start with a search engine, and with those odds, you can catch the attention of the audience you want through online advertising. There’s plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start. Ask yourself “What target demographic am I advertising to?” and “How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?”. The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most...
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The 70 Best Chrome Extensions for 2021

Office Tools
September 10, 2021/by
The 70 Best Chrome Extensions for 2021 Google Chrome browser extensions allow you to increase productivity, reduce distractions, and source content — all in the comfort of your internet browser. The best part is that you have plenty of options. The Google Chrome web store offers a variety of different tools that help you become safer, smarter, and more productive with just one click. We’ve curated the best ones here. We can't guarantee that these extensions will make puppy YouTube videos less tempting to watch, but we recommend them for busy marketers who want to make their time online more efficient. We've broken them down into different categories if you want to jump ahead: Productivity Security Social Media SEO New Tab Content Sourcing Blogging Please note: All of these are free tools, but some of the services that they work with may have paid features or subscriptions. For all of the greatness that the internet affords — cute animal videos, GIFs, and interesting blogs — one of its biggest downsides is how distracting it can be. How many times have you sat down to work and been pulled into a pit of procrastination? Perhaps you get absorbed in updates on social media, or maybe you click through Wikipedia trying to determine what exactly Gina Rodriguez's first TV role was (it was on Law & Order). No matter where you click online, it's easy to be pulled into a...
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How to Calculate ROI in Marketing [Free Excel Templates]

Business Insights, Marketing Reporting
September 10, 2021/by
How to Calculate ROI in Marketing It's a brand new month, everyone! It's a time for new beginnings. New email campaigns, blog posts, and social media strategies are on the horizon. But, aren't we forgetting something? With last month's activities done, we need to pause for a second to examine what worked and what didn't. You can't do that just by saying last month's activities were "great" — because "great" doesn't pay the bills. If you can prove that your marketing activities actually made an impact on your business, you'll have many more opportunities at your disposal. More budget to play with, potential hires to bring on board, and more ideas to put in action. Sounds like every marketer's dream, right? So how do you go about first, finding the right metrics to use, and second, proving your marketing's ROI to your boss? Why, with a monthly marketing report template, of course. Download our completely revamped PowerPoint and Excel templates by clicking here, Keep reading to learn how you can calculate your ROI in marketing through Excel, and use them in real life. For example, if you've been running a $800 campaign for three months, and you're seeing a average sales growth of 5% per month and $10000 sales growth from the previous month, then your ROI calculation can assess that trend: (10000 - (.05*10000) - 800)/800 Additionally, if you're a HubSpot customer, you can access an ROI calculator programmed with the same formula in our...
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YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch & Optimize a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign

Youtube Advertising
September 7, 2021/by
YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch & Optimize a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign You've spent months perfecting the script, storyboarding, finding the right taazyent, shooting, and editing. The end result? A blockbuster brand or product video. With all that time invested, you can't stop at just embedding the video on a homepage or sharing it on social media and hoping someone watches. Running a series of YouTube ads is one way to make sure more of your target audience finds the video content you've produced. And with new formats and tracking capabilities, you can also use this information to report on its ROI. In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about YouTube ads and how to launch advertisements successfully as part of a fruitful YouTube marketing strategy. Let’s get started. What’s New With YouTube Advertising Advertising on YouTube is very different from running a PPC or paid social media campaign. There are specific creative constraints and a ton of options for this platform, and you need basic knowledge before you even scope out your next video project to make the most of the paid possibilities. In recent years, Google has rolled out a series of changes that makes YouTube advertising an extremely worthwhile investment. Let’s take a look. Targeting Based on Users’ Search History A few years ago, Google announced it would allow advertisers to reach more viewers on YouTube — especially across mobile devices, where 50% of YouTube...
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15 Time Management Skills, According to HubSpot Marketing Managers

Leadership
September 7, 2021/by
15 Time Management Skills, According to HubSpot Marketing Managers It's late and you're working on a project that's due soon. You feel overwhelmed by your tasks and aren't quite sure how you got here. You make a self-promise to resolve this issue but you don't know how, so the cycle continues. Consider this your WebMD diagnosis: You're likely struggling with bad time management. The good news is, time management is a learned skill. By following the tips below, written with cross-functional teams in mind, you can be on your way to getting back control of your time and working efficiently. What can time management skills help a person do? Time management is necessary for a successful personal and professional life. When you manage your time well, you can be more productive and efficient. You have a solid understanding of what each task requires and you can plan accordingly. It allows you to maximize your time and perform better. Managing your time well also helps you produce high-quality work. When we struggle with this skill, we often rush to complete our tasks and can easily feel overwhelmed. 1. Learn your pattern of productivity. Everyone has a different productivity pattern. We've long separated people into two categories: Morning people and night people. However, there are many more facets to productivity. Perhaps you're more efficient during short sprints of focus, following the Pomodoro technique. Or you might prefer knocking out your top priorities in one stretch. Find out what makes you...
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Predictive Lead Scoring: What It Is and Why It’s Important

Marketing Operations
September 7, 2021/by
Predictive Lead Scoring: What It Is and Why It's Important If your marketing team and the systems you have in place to attract leads are working properly, you’re likely seeing anywhere from 10s to 1,000s of new leads each week. If you’ve got a robust sales team, they may be able to contact every single lead within a few hours. However, if you’re like most companies, your sales team has to prioritize in order to reach out to the “best” prospects quickly, while saving the “less likely” prospects for last. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be converted, there’s just a lower chance of securing those prospects as customers. Time spent courting the wrong prospect is not only an exercise in futility, but it takes time away from your salespeople and prevents them from closing sales and making your company money. How then, do you make the job easier (and more lucrative) for your salespeople? Predictive Lead Scoring can take the guesswork out of following up on leads. Let’s take a look at what it is and how it could help your business grow. What is predictive lead scoring? Before we define predictive lead scoring, it’s important to understand traditional lead scoring and its limitations. Businesses have struggled with prioritizing lead follow-up for decades. In many cases, salespeople are left to their own devices, using their best judgment to decide who gets contacted first. Marketers and salespeople use data such as demographic info (age, marital status, industry, role),...
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Data Ingestion: What It Is Plus How And Why Your Business Should Leverage It

RevOps
September 3, 2021/by
Data Ingestion: What It Is Plus How And Why Your Business Should Leverage It A scaling business is bound to have data stored across multiple sources (e.g. databases, files, live data feeds). Even individual teams within a department — such as Content  Marketing, Brand Strategy, and SEO — likely use multiple data sources simultaneously.  It's important to ensure you have a way of viewing, visualizing, and analyzing all of that data at once. This gives you a complete picture of the health of everything related to your business, from small projects to team projections to overall business success. Data ingestion is the process that can efficiently get all of your data in one place.  Data Ingestion At a high level, data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of data ingestion in greater detail, describe its importance, review the data ingestion framework, and highlight a few tools that will make the process simple for your team. Let’s dive in. What is data ingestion? Data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. It’s the process of transporting data from a variety of sources into a single location — often to a destination like a database, data processing system, or data warehouse — where it can be stored, accessed, organized, and analyzed. This process allows businesses to get a holistic view of their data in order to leverage and apply resulting insights and findings in their strategies.  Why is data ingestion important? You may...
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30 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

SEO
September 1, 2021/by
30 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website You know you're a marketer when you're sitting in traffic on the highway, it's completely bumper to bumper, and all you can think about is "Why can't I drive traffic to my website like this?" If you've struggled with driving traffic to your website, you're not alone. According to 2020 research done by Content Marketing Institute, 63% of content professionals are challenged with finding enough staff skilled in content strategy which is one of the top drivers of website traffic. Between writing a new blog post, posting on social media, and strategizing for a new email campaign, it's hard to look back and see what's driving traffic to your site and what isn't. The list below will help you increase the traffic to your website, generate more leads, and improve ROI. 1. Content Creation Inbound marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your company. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through blogging. To come up with content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you must first understand the buyer persona you’re targeting. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will naturally attract them to your website. But how do you write a good blog post that will draw in the right audience? Follow these five steps: Identify your buyer persona: Find out more about your target market. Understand everything from job title to pain points. ...
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