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The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages

Landing Pages
November 12, 2020/by
The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages As you browse and maneuver around the internet, you visit landing pages all the time. A landing page can be the designated page you’re taken to when you click on an ad. It can also be the page that follows a call-to-action button or serve as the homepage of a website. Regardless of how you "land" on a landing page, its purpose is to encourage you to convert to a lead or customer. For that reason, landing pages are uniquely powerful components of a business's digital marketing strategy. What is a landing page? A landing page is a website page with a specific purpose — the objective of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads. While there are many types of landing pages the intent the same — get more leads. Landing pages contain lead forms that ask visitors for their contact information in exchange for something of value, otherwise known as an offer. The video below will help drive that definition home. Now, think about how protective you are of your personal information. What would make a person want to give up their contact information over the internet? Well, that’s where landing page best practices come in. A targeted, well-crafted landing page with a solid format and sound copy will get almost anyone to submit their information. First, why do you need a landing page? Why would you create a special...
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Total Addressable Market (TAM): What It Is & How You Can Calculate It

Conducting Market Research
November 12, 2020/by
Total Addressable Market (TAM): What It Is & How You Can Calculate It In college, I interned at a MarTech company that sold email marketing optimization software. With their software, brands could finally gain visibility into their email program’s deliverability rate or inbox placement, which most email service providers, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, can’t do. The business’ largest revenue stream was a channel partner program that enabled email service providers to sell my old company’s software to their own customers. And one day, at an all-hands meeting, our CEO showed us a slide that listed every single email service provider we partnered with and the amount of customers they all had. He told us this was our total addressable market. Then, he showed us a slide of how much of the market we had captured — it was a single digit percentage. Even though we generated $100 million in revenue per year, we were shocked at how little of the market we had secured. But it also helped us realize that we still had plenty of room to grow, which motivated us to win as much of the market as possible. Whether you want to start a new company and gauge its industry’s profit potential or forecast a realistic revenue growth goal for your business, measuring your total addressable market is a crucial first step you must take. To help you do this, we’ve put together a guide that’ll teach you exactly what total addressable market is...
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5 Ways to Explain Inbound Marketing to Your Family This Thanksgiving

Inbound Marketing
November 11, 2020/by
5 Ways to Explain Inbound Marketing to Your Family This Thanksgiving When Thanksgiving rolls around, there are a few questions that we don't exactly look forward to hearing: "When are you getting married?" "When am I getting grandchildren?" "Have you been moisturizing?" And yet, none of those oh-so-polite questions even come close to the complexity of explaining what, as an inbound marketer, you actually do for a living. It's not that inbound marketing requires a long, drawn-out answer — after all, it can easily be described in 44 words. But explaining it requires some fundamental knowledge of how technology, marketing, and the internet work. You know, the things that your grandparents might not fully grasp in one fell swoop. Good news — all you really need are a few storytelling strategies. We found five ways you can explain inbound marketing to your family. And sure, some of these are useful, and some are just sarcastic. But hey, family is family, right? They'll still love you. 5 Ways to Explain Inbound Marketing to Your Family This Thanksgiving 1. The Food Analogy Source: Giphy In the U.S., Thanksgiving typically consists of a few staples: turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie, to name a few. And while it might sound strange, you can use that knowledge to your advantage by using food preparation as an analogy for different aspects of inbound marketing. To explain lead nurturing, you can use the pumpkin pie. Sending unnurtured leads to sales is like giving an unbaked...
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20 Tools for Creating and Delivering Amazing Presentations

Presentations
November 11, 2020/by
20 Tools for Creating and Delivering Amazing Presentations If you're in business, you need to know how to create captivating presentations. Whether you're trying to convince your boss to support a new campaign, talking with a prospect to close a deal, or building a new piece of marketing collateral, you need to know how craft a presentation that won't put people to sleep. The best (and easiest) way to do that? Use the right tools to create and deliver your presentation. If you're not sure which tools to use, look no further than this blog post. We’ve compiled our list of the top presentation tools for sales and marketing professionals. They’re listed below, in no particular order. But first ... Why You Should Use Business Presentation Templates Using a professional presentation design ensures your content is conveyed in a clear, creative, and visually appealing way. To make it stand out further, try using HubSpot’s custom-build templates rather than utilizing one of the existing templates in in your presentation software. You can download them for free here. Best Presentation Tools 1. Canva Canva makes design easy -- even for marketers and salespeople who feel like they're design-challenged. The platform gives you a bunch of presentation templates to use right away, and it's very easy to customize them to your organization and presentation objective. Plus, a variety of apps that integrate with Google Drive, Instagram, and YouTube, to name a few. Pricing: Free; Pro, $12.95/month for up to five people; Enterprise,...
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What Is a Focus Group in 100 Words or Less [+ Pros and Cons]

Conducting Market Research
November 7, 2020/by
What Is a Focus Group in 100 Words or Less In an ideal world, you'd know just how your product or business idea would be perceived before it's released. This knowledge could help you make alterations to what you're offering for the best possible reception, and better inform your sales projections and marketing strategy. Sadly, you'll never know exactly how what you're selling will be received by your target audience, which is why companies conduct market research. But, while mass data collection through surveys provides you with necessary quantitative information, it doesn't offer as much qualitative insight into your target market's view or opinion of what you're selling. This is where a focus group comes in. So, what is a focus group, and how can it help you navigate your market research? Let's explore those two questions, next. What is a focus group? In the context of market research for businesses, a focus group is a cohort of individuals participating in a guided discussion about a business, brand, product, and/or service. Typically, a focus group is facilitated by representatives from the business and is composed of individuals in the business's target market who share their thoughts and opinions on the topic or offering in question. A focus group is usually moderated by a representative or representatives of the company, who ask 5-10 questions to the participants over the course of 30-60 minutes, with another facilitator keeping notes on the focus group questionnaire. Follow Along With a Free...
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What Are YouTube Tags & Why Are They Important?

Youtube Marketing
November 6, 2020/by
What Are YouTube Tags & Why Are They Important? YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, so keyword-optimizing your videos on the platform is just as important as keyword-optimizing your blog posts for Google. Even if you’ve just created the next “Charlie bit my finger” video, you must remember that an algorithm dictates which videos YouTube will serve to its audience -- and which ones it won’t. One of the best ways to keyword-optimize your videos for YouTube is leveraging tags. Below, we’ve put together a guide that will explain exactly what YouTube tags are, why they’re important, and some best practices to follow.  What are tags for YouTube? YouTube Tags are words and phrases you can include in your YouTube videos’ description. They let your viewers, and YouTube, know what your videos are about and can help them rank higher in the platform’s search results. Why are YouTube tags important? YouTube tags function to help YouTube grasp your video’s content and context. This way, YouTube can understand your video’s topic and category, and associate it with similar content, which can amplify your video’s reach. The rise of semantic search has made YouTube tags less important over time, but they're still a strategic element you can use to your advantage. Even though YouTube sites the title, thumbnail, and description as being more important for video SEO on their platform, studies do indicate that there's a slight positive relationship between keyword-optimized tags and...
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The 7 Best Free Resume Builders We’ve Ever Discovered

Resume
November 6, 2020/by
The 7 Best Free Resume Builders We've Ever Discovered A couple weeks ago, my brother Max sent me his resume in a text message, and asked me to 'spruce it up a bit' for him. Undoubtedly, I needed to do more than copy-and-paste the text into a Word document. To truly stand out, I knew the resume needed to demonstrate a level of professionalism and effort -- something content alone can't always convey. Fortunately, with the help of Zety, I was able to input Max's resume information, choose a template, and have Zety design the piece for me, within a span of 20 minutes: Looks a little better than a text message, doesn't it? Resume builders are incredibly helpful when creating a resume, and can help you showcase your unique personality. Best of all, they look a lot sleeker than whatever you can design in a Google Doc. To ensure you can create a resume for free, we've compiled this list of the best free resume builders we've discovered. Keep reading, and then get to work designing your own -- trust me, with these tools, it's almost as easy as sending a text. Featured Resource: HubSpot Resume Templates Download these free templates and plug in your experience and information for a custom, well-crafted resume. 1. Resume Genius Resume Genius is undoubtedly one of the easiest and fastest free resume tools you have at your disposal. With a clean and easy-to-use interface, the...
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The Surround Sound Series: How We Built a Bespoke SERP Tracker and Measured the Results of Our New Content Program (Part 3 of 3)

Content Marketing
November 6, 2020/by
The Surround Sound Series: How We Built a Bespoke SERP Tracker and Measured the Results of Our New Content Program (Part 3 of 3) 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. As our three-part series comes to an end, there’s one last question (or two) we need to address: Does the surround sound strategy really work? And what results have we seen since we started using it? The TL;DR answer is yes. It’s working and we’re sharing our preliminary results in this article. So if you’re looking to use surround sound in 2021, the two of us (that’s Irina Nica and Alex Birkett) thought we’d end this short series with a handful of resources: the formula HubSpot uses to measure progress, our proprietary surround sound tracker (aka the SERP Tracker), and a sample of results to hopefully inspire your own endeavor. What is the surround sound strategy? At HubSpot, “surround sound” is the name Alex Birkett gave to a content marketing approach that aims to make HubSpot products visible every time someone searches for a product-related keyword (e.g. “best help desk software” or “best live chat software”). The goal is for potential users to see HubSpot mentioned in all or most of the pages that rank in Google top results for those keywords. Check out the first two articles in the series for a deeper-dive into what is the...
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Beyond Responsive Design: How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users

Mobile Optimization
November 5, 2020/by
Beyond Responsive Design: How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users Everyone can acknowledge the importance of a mobile-friendly website, especially after Google's Mobilegeddon algorithm update. Mobile optimization is here to stay, and it's demanding more and more of businesses and their websites. But mobile optimization is about more than just a responsive website design. In this article, we tell you why and how to adopt a mobile-first mindset for your website. Google's mobile-friendly algorithm change in 2015 (and a few more since then) was evidence that the search engine recognizes its responsibility to surface websites that painlessly get users what they need at the time that they need it. Google doesn't want to send mobile users to websites that provide a frustrating browsing experience — that would damage its promise to its users to always deliver helpful, relevant content. Moreover, this algorithm change was and is a signal of a much larger shift that’s afoot — consumer behavior is changing, and it's your job to adapt. Building a mobile-friendly website is step one, but tweaking your website will not keep you ahead of consumers’ changing behavior and expectations. In short, you have to infuse your marketing strategy with a mobile-first mindset. Here's how. 1. Map your customer journey. Imagine the experience of Sally, a young marketer who has just moved to Chicago. While out for a walk, Sally passes by a hair salon and realizes she needs a haircut. She pulls out her phone a...
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