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What Is Product Classification, and Why It Matters for Your Marketing Efforts

Product Marketing
August 22, 2020/by
What Is Product Classification, and Why It Matters for Your Marketing Efforts The other day, I roamed the aisles of CVS and picked up the same Crest toothpaste I've been buying for years. I didn't think twice about it. I made the purchase on auto-pilot. I didn't consider testing out a different brand, or purchasing one from another retailer. Toothpaste, as it turns out, is known as a "convenience good", which matches my buying behavior. Understanding product classification can help you understand your consumers' general buying behaviors, which will help you market your product more effectively. There are four types of product classification. Let's dive into each type, so you can determine where your product falls in the list. Consumer Product Classification There are four types of product classification — convenience goods, shopping goods, specialty products, and unsought goods. Let's dive into each one in more detail. 1. Convenience Goods Like the Crest toothpaste example, convenience goods are products that consumers' purchase repeatedly and without much thought. Once consumers choose their convenience goods' brand-of-choice, they typically stick to it unless they see a reason to switch — such as an interesting advertisement that compels them to try it, or mere convenience at the checkout aisle. These products include toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, milk, and other necessities that people buy over and over again. To market a convenience good, you want to consider that most people will impulse buy these products. Placing your products near the checkout line at...
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11 Ad Design Tips to Help Your Brand Cut Through the Noise

Advertising Best Practices
August 22, 2020/by
11 Ad Design Tips to Help Your Brand Cut Through the Noise Before your copy can persuade an audience to buy your product, your design must persuade them to buy your copy. In advertising, your design catches your audience’s eye and points their attention to your copy. Then, it’s your copy’s job to hold your audience’s attention. To help grab people’s attention in your advertisements, we’ve put together a list of seven ad tips, supported by examples, that’ll help give you ad design ideas to your brand cut through the noise.  Advertisement Design Tips Read on to learn how to craft creatively refreshing ads that will convert your audience into customers. 1. Stand out from the crowd. Image Source In a world where countless brands fight for a limited amount of attention, the only way your advertisement can grab people’s attention is by being original. As a marketer, though, it can be tempting to leap onto the latest trend that all your competitors have already pounced on. If everyone else is implementing the latest tip or trick, it must work, right? To captivate an audience, though, you must resist this urge. Cliches repel attention. They sap your advertisement's creativity and can’t activate the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for experiencing emotions. But how exactly do you create an original advertisement? Consider one of Estée Lauder’s print campaigns from the 1960s. Back then, Estée Lauder’s main competitors like L’Oréal, Revlon, and Helena Rubinstein...
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Bringing Universities and HubSpot Clients Together: An Experiment in Applied Learning

Uncategorized
August 21, 2020/by
Bringing Universities and HubSpot Clients Together: An Experiment in Applied Learning 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. At the end of 2019, the Education Partner Program team at HubSpot had the challenging opportunity of deciding our priorities for the coming year. The HubSpot Education Partner Program — or EPP — is a community of educators who teach at colleges and universities worldwide that receive free software and support from HubSpot to train the next generation of marketing, sales, and service professionals. Supporting and empowering these students and professors is crucial in maintaining a healthy HubSpot ecosystem of future clients and users. Like most teams at HubSpot, we focus maniacally on how to create a positive experience for those who rely on our program - in this case, university professors. To ensure that we were creating such experiences, we first had to identify what novel problems and pain points this audience faces. Click here to learn more about the Education Partner Program and how you can join. Identifying Our Audience’s Pain Points The EPP’s focus is on college students who need to enter the working world with the tools and methodologies they need to help a business grow. We care deeply, and invest heavily in, business education. Although HubSpot Academy serves thousands of learners across the world, the EPP focuses on education within college and universities. Our team...
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Which Format Is Right for Your Next Blog Post?

How to Write a Blog Post
August 21, 2020/by
Which Format Is Right for Your Next Blog Post? Choices are hard. And when it comes to choosing the right format for your next blog post, there's quite the smorgasbord to choose from. Perhaps how-to posts are your forte. Or maybe you just can't resist the list. But just because you have a signature format, doesn't mean it's necessarily right for the topic you're blogging about. Aah ... decisions, decisions.  It's okay though! We're here to help you through it. So in this post, I'm going to break down some of the most popular blog post types and formats to help you determine which one is right for the blog idea you've got milling around in that head of yours. That said, keep in mind that some posts may even straddle two or more formats. I've written thought leadership posts that could also probably be classified as list posts. And if I'd added a SlideShare to them? They would've straddled three!  The point is to recognize that there isn't just one type of blog post you can create -- and some formats are much more suitable for certain ideas than others. Another thing to consider is that a lot of times, it will all boil down to the angle you take on a topic. For example, if I wanted to write a post about social media, there is probably a different angle I could take that would work for each of the following formats. It will all depend on the...
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The Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity

Cyber Security
August 20, 2020/by
The Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity If asked you to list the most valuable things you own, how would you answer? I guess this would be another way of asking the infamous “What would you grab if your house was on fire?” question. For me, I’d grab an old keepsake box filled with things from my childhood, my engagement ring, my phone and computer (for pictures and writings!), and an old Iowa sweatshirt of my dad’s. But I’d also have to say that my identity, social security number, credit cards, and bank accounts are valuable to me. While these things can’t exactly burn down in a fire, they can be stolen … and if I were to ask a computer hacker what they thought my most valuable possessions were, they’d probably quote the intangible. That’s why we’ve compiled this guide on cybersecurity. Below, we’ll talk about why you should care about cybersecurity, how to secure your and your customer’s digital data, and what resources to follow to stay up-to-date with emerging tech. Personal data is incredibly valuable. Hackers know it, and businesses know it. That’s why both go to great lengths to collect it — albeit one following a much more legal and moral avenue to do so. Unfortunately, as technology and data collection practices progress, so do the methods that hackers follow to steal data. As business owners, we have a special responsibility to protect our customers’ data and be transparent with our practices. Why...
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How to Set Up Automated Email Marketing Workflows (+ Examples)

Marketing Automation
August 20, 2020/by
How to Set Up Automated Email Marketing Workflows (+ Examples) Are your contacts going with the flow, or are they just sitting dormant in your marketing database? If you don't have any automated email workflows set up, your answer is probably the latter -- which means you're missing out on some major opportunities to nurture and engage your existing contacts. Did you know that marketing automation can lead to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity? Lead nurturing campaigns aren't the only type of email marketing automation you can use to get more out of your contacts database. Think about the contacts who are already your customers. Email automation can not only help you convert leads into customers, but it can also help you delight your existing customers and encourage activity like greater product adoption, upsells, evangelism, and additional purchases.  Email marketing automation is useful because it eliminates small but time consuming tasks, such as preparing email lists, sending generic messages, or scheduling events manually. This allows marketers and salespeople more time to work on more productive projects or bigger deals. Email marketing automation is centered around the workflow, which is essentially a blueprint of actions you're directing your automation software to take. Software can' t read minds, so one of the challenges is implementing a repeatable process that takes all use cases into account. 1. Identify who you're sending to. Personalization is critical when it comes to email, and if your CRM is...
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How to Write a Press Release [Free Press Release Template + Examples]

Public Relations
August 20, 2020/by
How to Write a Press Release When it comes to content, sometimes old school can be a good thing (namely, when it comes to old-school rap or Throwback Thursday on Instagram). But when it comes to your company's public relations strategy, being old school isn't advantageous for your business or your brand. Ten years ago, people still relied on morning papers for news. Today, the vast majority of your company's customers and prospects scan headlines on Twitter or see what’s trending in their Facebook feed. People now have control over where, when, and how they consume information. As a result, public relations is no longer about feeding into a traditional news cycle; it's about providing relevant content when, where, and how your prospects, influencers, and customers will consume it. Sounds pretty hopeless, right? Wrong. While relationship-building still helps you get into popular publications, we now have the opportunity to quit playing the waiting game and generate our own buzz. By turning your PR strategy into an inbound one, you create opportunities that weren’t there before and carve out a place for your company, building meaningful mindshare with your target audiences in the process. One of the most crucial updates to make to your PR strategy is to think of opportunities to connect to the audiences you care about -- including, but not limited to, reporters. And that starts with press releases. In this post, we'll discuss: What Is a Press Release? Types of Press Releases Sample Press...
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The Top Benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation
August 19, 2020/by
The Top Benefits of Marketing Automation For some reason, whenever I hear the words "marketing automation," I think of the "Transformers" movie with Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. It makes me think of the Autobots doing all our marketing -- which would be pretty cool. But today, we're not going to be talking about the robots from Cybertron. Instead, let's focus on how marketing automation can benefit your business. Marketing automation is the process of making systems or processes occur automatically within a software. Essentially, marketing automation can help streamline your marketing efforts and make your department more efficient. In today's post, let's review the top benefits of marketing automation. 1. Efficiency. First and foremost, marketing automation makes your entire department more efficient. You can potentially reduce staffing costs while freeing up your team's time to work on more important, strategic projects. Instead of manually posting on social media every day, marketing automation software can automate that process. This means that your team can do more creative work, like planning and brainstorming for upcoming campaigns and projects. Additionally, working in an automation platform will make your team's tasks easier. Your staff can post on social media, create an email nurturing campaign, post a blog, or create a landing page all in the same software. Ultimately, this saves your team time when you're creating campaigns. 2. Marketing and sales alignment. If you combine your sales and marketing automation efforts by using the same software, you'll be able to align...
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What’s an Implementation Partner & How Do You Work With One?

Co-Marketing
August 19, 2020/by
What's an Implementation Partner & How Do You Work With One? In college, I took a class on graphic design. One requirement for the class was to have working knowledge of Adobe. Since most of us in the class had no idea how to use Adobe's expansive design suite, my school invited an implementation partner to visit and show us the ropes. Someone from the partnering agency came to our class and demonstrated how to use the tools we had for InDesign to maximize our success in the class. I loved this presentation because it was created just for our group — the presenter polled us about what we wanted to learn and delivered relevant information based on that feedback. I would've definitely struggled with using the software had it not been for the agency partner. I loved the experience, and it gave me an understanding of just how amazing implementation partners can be for the companies they support. Implementation partners work directly with your customers to ensure they're getting the most out of your product. You can think of an implementation partner in the same way you think about tech support. Often, tech support agents are certified by the company they work for to give actionable solutions for problems. The difference between tech support and implementation partners is that the latter can benefit from an increase in brand awareness and leads. If you work with them, you can offer their services to those who might need help...
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