Skill Up

Marketers can’t just focus on ranking for text-based content anymore. Today, search engine results pages are more diverse than ever — from images to video to knowledge boxes and more. In our first episode of Skill Up, Jorie and Matt dig into all of the different ways Google is serving up different content types and how searcher intent should inform your SEO strategy.

Featured snippets are taking over search results and creating new competition to rank in position zero. In this episode, Jorie and Matt explain what featured snippets are, why they matter, and how to create content that’s optimized for them. They also talk about the ripple effect featured snippets have had on how the web works and what it means for the future of SEO.

There are a lot of marketers working off decade-old advice for SEO and optimization. With more competition and more distractions online, you need a new playbook to get the biggest return for your content marketing. In this episode, Jorie and Matt talk about how to update your content strategy and drive more organic traffic for the keywords that matter most to your business.

Mastering international SEO can seem like an insurmountable task. There are a lot of options to consider and the best advice is tailored to your specific site. In this episode, Matt and Jorie do some fact-checking and break down the options for creating an international site structure and marketing plan. Plus, Matt explains how to begin building authority, in whatever language or region you’re looking to break into.

When it comes to content, you can’t just set it and forget it. You need to create a system for checking on the health of your content, identifying what’s the core issue causing a dip in traffic, and figuring out how to fix the problem. In this episode, Matt and Jorie, talk about how to use your existing library of content to get better results.

The internet was built on links, and link building is still an incredibly important aspect of a successful SEO strategy. But it’s not as easy as it once was, and there are no quick wins in improving your site’s authority. In today’s episode, Matt and Jorie go through the history of backlinks in SEO and explain how you can create content people want to link to.

Marketers have gone from optimizing for desktops, mobile, and now … it’s all about voice. Matt and Jorie talk about the rise of voice search, how it will change your content strategy, and what you can expect to to come in the world of content and SEO.

This season, we’re looking at how to develop a marketing-driven sales enablement strategy for your company. And the first thing you might be asking yourself is, ‘What exactly is sales enablement?” Well, great start. Sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that helps sales teams sell efficiently and at a higher velocity. You can think of sales enablement as a cohesive unit, between your sales and marketing teams, with its own shared language and goals.

The internet has completely changed the way we sell. Buyers are more informed and now hold all the power in the sales process. Sales enablement is all about bringing marketing and sales together to keep up with today's empowered buyers. Your sales team needs processes and high-performing content, and marketing is just the department to give it to you. But first, you need to align both teams.

What’s actually involved in making a sales enablement strategy? We break out the three key elements -- a clear goal, a target buyer, and a content strategy -- to help get you on your way to implementing a successful sales enablement strategy at your company.

Look, audacious goals can inspire people and teams to accomplish things they never thought possible. Dream big! Right? But ridiculous, ludicrous goals can also crush a team's morale. We help you define your company’s vision, set achievable goals, and align your sales and marketing along the way.

We’d all like to believe that everyone’s a good fit for what we’re selling. But that type of thinking will only end up wasting countless hours and angering countless more prospects. You need to qualify which leads are a good fit and which ones are a poor fit. This episode, we walkthrough how you can align marketing and sales in pipeline creation and create an ideal customer profile.

Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are leads that are both a good fit for your offering and are ready to have a sales conversation. But what about hand-raisers, or good fit but unready sales leads, or poor fit leads?  We’ll set up a lead qualification matrix to help you sort through good fit and poor fit leads, based on sales readiness. That way, you can send the best leads to sales, and leave the rest for marketing to continue nurturing.

Marcus Sheridan was burnt out. Each day, he was waking up early, driving two to three hours, sitting at a sales appointment for two to three hours, and driving home for two to three more hours. He didn't get to see his wife. He didn't get to see my kids.  What was eating away at his time? Not getting to work with more qualified buyers. So to solve that, Marcus redefined his content strategy and starting selling at an 80 percent close rate.

Your company needs to have a clear revenue goal. But unless your teams know how to contribute to it, your goals aren’t going to do you a whole lot of good.  So you'll need to help marketing and sales each understand their role in achieving that goal. And the best way to do that? Implement a service level agreement, or an SLA, between the two teams. An SLA means Marketing promises a certain number of leads to Sales, and Sales promises to contact those leads within a certain timeframe.

Smarketing combines sales and marketing. Great. Easy etymology. But what exactly does it mean? Smarketing is a team meeting, where your sales and marketing teams come together to collaborate on a shared project and solve problems. We go inside HubSpot headquarters with Alex Girard as he sets out to put on HubSpot’s next Smarketing. Not only have we never pulled the curtain back on this type of meeting, it’s also our first attempt at a live, remote Smarketing. As such, things don’t always go as planned.

This season, we’re looking at advanced marketing techniques. And one of the most advanced ways to market, sell, and service customers involves the use of artificial intelligence. AI can learn, reason, and act for itself, and make decisions in the same way that humans can.  We break down how to correct duplicate data and clean up the rest of your data efficiently. While AI might not be our sentient overlords just yet, it can help companies serve the right content, to the right customers, at the right time, right now.

There’s one question that haunts every marketer: “What’s the ROI of this marketing campaign?” But with so much data to sift through, where should you start? Multi-touch attribution ties marketing actions to revenue. It tells you which interactions someone had with your brand on their journey to becoming a customer. Anni walks through the six different types of multi-touch attribution reporting, and she helps you decide which one is right for your company.

It can be tempting to just guess which type of content will entice visitors most and eventually convert into leads. But basing your marketing decisions off a hunch is risky business. A/B testing helps you compare two versions of something against each other to determine which one performs better. Anni lets you in on the three things you should start A/B testing right now.

If you’re running a business and you want to increase your efficiency in closing those big ticket sales, then you should practice account-based marketing. ABM is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales work together to close big, complex deals at a discrete number of target accounts. And the higher your price point, the more likely ABM will be worth your while. Anni offers up three things to focus on when starting ABM at your company.

People aren’t static. They access your content from multiple devices on a number of different channels. And as their experience with your company grows, their needs and interests change. Yet most marketing still treats all these different customers exactly the same.  Personalization helps contextualize your marketing for customers and potential customers. It helps people feel like your outreach is more personal and ultimately creates a more natural connection.

With today’s empowered buyer, you need to be in the mindset that your best marketing channel is actually going to be your existing customers. And when your customers succeed, it’s your best predictor for business growth.  The world of marketing has shifted to word of mouth, and reviews are more important than ever before. Anni takes you through how to support your customers and advocates with an inbound marketing strategy designed for them.

What makes conversational marketing great is when it’s super relevant to any given problem and gets visitors to where they want to go. The more contextual you make it, the better the experience. HubSpot’s resident bots guru Connor Cirillo joins Anni to talk about why bots are more than just a marketing priority, how to optimize for human behavior, and why advanced targeting helps put the customer first.

This season of Skill Up, we’re looking at social marketing. You want to always meet your customers where they already are. And it just so happens that over 30 billion users across all channels are on social, interacting with brands and communities. That’s a lot. So before you start trying to market to all of them, you need to create a social media strategy. Host Matthew Brown gives you five things to keep in mind as you start your social marketing.

Social media moves quickly. Trends come and go. But the question that always needs answering is simple: What makes a piece of content compelling? You need to create content that gets people talking, without losing sight of your company’s values. Kelsi Yamada joins Matt to talk about how HubSpot thinks about social content and explains why data might not always give you the answers you’re looking for.

Twitter’s audience, more than almost any platform, can feel like it’s all over the place. So how can you not only drive more meaningful conversations but also and build community with existing and potential customers? HubSpot’s Krystal Wu talks through how you can find like-minded audiences and add valuable discussion. Because it can all get overwhelming quickly. So you need to know when to keep it simple. And breathe.

Employer branding is a lot of things.It’s photos on a website. It’s what people read about you from a quick Google search. It’s Glassdoor reviews. But creating a great employer brand is all about how you position your company as an amazing place to work. Hannah Fleishman joins host Matthew Brown to talk about why LinkedIn is the best place to start investing in your employer brand, and how you can empower your employees to publish content about your company.

Instagram might be known as the food, fashion, and famous locales app. But it’s also become one of the best places to drive awareness and purchase intent. Leslie Green joins to talk about the different types of content you should prioritize, what we’re working on here at HubSpot, and why you need to consider the entire buyer’s journey.

Organic social is important. It’s how you drive engagement and get people to see your content. But if you’re looking to really scaler those efforts, then it’s time to turn your attention to Facebook ads. Josh Chang joins to talk about how to run split tests, the best way to spend your next $500, and why you should avoid the Boost Button at all costs. You’ve been warned.

So you’ve set your strategy, created compelling content, and optimized paid. Excellent. But here’s the thing: Now that you have all these new data points rolling in, what about the reporting? Henry Franco joins to talk about which metrics are worth reporting on, the difference between social reporting and social insights, and how to best spend your growing social ad budget.

The future is unwritten. But our best glimpse into the future is often through people’s current behaviors. Andrew Delaney joins to talk about why he thinks conversations and user experience will be at the core of our collective social futures.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine. Yet many companies only use YouTube to house videos for use on blogs, social media, or landing pages. In fact, only about 9% of US small businesses are using YouTube. So today, we're going to talk about why a strategic approach to YouTube matters.

What is the YouTube algorithm and how can I take advantage of it? You’ve asked yourself one or both of those questions, at some point, right? The best thing you can do is optimize for watch time. After that, treat YouTube like the SEO freight train that it is, and optimize for SEO.

So you have your YouTube channel set up and ready to go. Look at you. But how can you make sure your channel and videos are really going to knock some statistical socks off? Optimizing your YouTube channel means looking at everything forms titles to descriptions, tags to thumbnails.

Understanding YouTube analytics is crucial for any business that wants to make the most of their channel. Analytics help you decide what content is resonating with your audience, see which videos don't receive full watch time, and gain deep insight on how people are reaching your channel. The most important places to look start with your watch time report. There you'll find watch time, average percentage viewed, and average view duration.

Getting people to your page is one thing. Getting them to watch end enjoy your videos is a whole other thing. And it all starts with being consistent. Once you've built that trust with your audience, look at how you can structure your and take advantage of tools like end cards to keep viewers engaged.

If you’re managing a YouTube channel, then someone, somewhere, at some point, will ask the inevitable: How are you growing your audience? Engaging with your community is one of the best ways to grow your channel. It might not be the most direct way, but it's the best way to build loyalty and to help foster word of mouth.

How do I get more views and subscriptions on my YouTube videos? Well, that’s a literal million-dollar question. Small changes can add up to big numbers. And more subscribers means more views, more views means more shares from YouTube, which means greater reach.

YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine. So, there are two ways to think about search when it comes to YouTube. First, you need to figure out how to get your videos to rank higher in YouTube itself. Second, you need to think about how you can optimize your videos so they rank higher in Google.

Sales teams are getting access to more advanced analytics than ever before with improving technology. And what perfect timing for that tech to improve, because detailed and focused analytics are crucial for leading a remote sales team. Reliable analytics can help managers focus their weekly check-ins with reps, higher-level leaders focus on high impact opportunities, and give the C-suite visibility into the health of the sales org. Annelies Husmann, Head of Enterprise Sales over at Gong, sat down to tell us how she's managing her remote team and how she adapted to the changes in 2020. Check out the 2021 Sales Enablement Report to learn more.

Sales leadership is a difficult job in general. Especially in the middle of a pandemic. But at the end of the day, sales teams are still responsible for driving new revenue growth. So how should sales leaders approach 2021? Suzie Andrews, CEO of Stark Associates (Sandler Training licensee), talks through how sales leaders should approach thew new norm and how sales reps can grow into the best sales leaders. Check out the 2021 Sales Enablement Report to learn more.

According to Bryan Elsesser, the former Sr. Director of Sales at Aircall, 71% of salespeople are fatigued this year. Fatigue is a difficult problem to address, especially on a team where metrics are so important, but it’s not impossible. After landing in sales development, Brian now focuses on the earlier stages of the sales cycle -- identifying and connecting with leads. He talk about what he’s learned managing his sales team and how you can help your own sales team stay productive during a time of change. Check out the 2021 Sales Enablement Report to learn more.

In our recent 2021 Sales Enablement Report, we saw that 65% of sales teams that outperformed revenue targets in 2020 had a dedicated sales enablement team or function at their company. Chris Pope, Director of Sales at Crayon, also believes that sales enablement is a critical function for any business. He believes that sales teams should prioritize it at every level - from the leaders down to the reps, and, in this video, he talks through his tips to make it more effective. Check out the 2021 Sales Enablement Report to learn more.

Very few (3%) buyers find salespeople “trustworthy.” Kwesi Graves, Sales Manager at LinkedIn, wants to change the perception of people in his profession.  To do that, he champions a methodology called “buyer-first selling” for his team of reps. He prioritizes quality over quantity in his team’s outreach strategy. He also emphasizes the importance of figuring out the buyer’s context, encourages his team to spend more time researching than reaching out. Check out the 2021 Sales Enablement Report to learn more.