INBOUND 2016: Amanda Sibley "Actionable Tips to Increase Lead Gen by 100% in 8 Months"

Thank you. Hey, everyone. How's it going? Wow. Quiet room. Are you all still eating? So this is the first year I heard there weren't crazy lines for the food trucks. Is that accurate? I hope so because my team's running social media and they report back to me as for what they hear. So they might be lying. Welcome, everyone. I'm sorry. So excited for you all to be here today, looking out in this room. We have a lot of people in this room and before I get started, I just want to talk a little bit about that. The size of this room is bigger than the first inbound I ever worked at. So there are more people in this room right now than there were at the first inbound I was at five years ago. And I think that has a lot to do with this entire movement of inbound marketing. We're all here to learn about inbound marketing, about inbound sales. We're here to learn a lot more. And it just goes to show that we are really growing as a movement and as a community. And I'm just so excited to be a part of that. And I really want to thank you all for being here today, listening to my presentation and hopefully meeting me afterwards. So in the next 40 minutes or so, I'm going to talk all about lead generation. So my name is Amanda Sibley. I run acquisition at HubSpot. That includes lead generation, generation of free users, and our free tools. I have a pretty good presentation. I hope it has a lot of out of the box thinking things that our team has done over the last year. If you want to learn about a basic campaign promotion, so how to promote on email and social, I'm happy to chat about that, but that's not what this presentation is. I did that last year. You can look on SlideShare. This is all going to be outside of the box ideas that I hope you can take some of these away after this event and take those to your teams and really grow. So today we're going to cover a couple things. We're going to talk first about the problem that my team was facing about a year, year and a half ago. Some cool SEO fixes, a new partner program we launched, some content optimization, an educational spin we put on our content, and then a bunch of smaller bets here. So we're going to cover a lot of different things that my team has done that have been successful. That isn't to say that there weren't things we did that were not successful. I'm just going to cover the successful ones and hope to Save you guys some time. So the first thing I want to talk about is this problem of lead generation. 68% of B2B companies are actually struggling with this thing called lead generation. That means that almost 7 out of 10 of every single person in this room is struggling to generate leads for your sales team. I wish that I didn't have this problem because if my sales team came to me and said, I have enough leads, we're good for now, you can go on vacation, I'd be really happy. I'd be on the first flight to a warm island. Unfortunately, I'm not. And we all have this problem as we grow. So I bet a lot of you have a graph that looks like this for your team. My team had this. It's a typical lead gen graph. Over 12 months. There's some highs, there's some lows. Maybe one of those bumps is because you got more budget from your CEO. Maybe you had a really good campaign on social media one month, but you're not really seeing that up into the right growth that you're looking for. So my team sat down after several years of pretty good growth, and we said, you know what? We're just not up and to the right the way we want to be. We're growing as a global company. We really want to see this lead graph going up. So we did a little bit of this, then a little bit of this, and then a whole lot of this. We had many brainstorm meetings, we talked a lot. And then we realized we were looking for something that was magic, this magic bullet that really got us the answer that helped us get double the leads or at the very least, more leads each month. And after a lot of meetings and head scratching and late nights, we realized that there really isn't a magic answer. Magic is actually something you make. So we sat down and we brainstormed and we got an entire list and we said, we are just going to try these things. We are going to throw some stuff at the wall and hope to see if something sticks. So today I'm going to go through four really big bets that did work, and then a handful of smaller ones that did work as well. So first, let's talk about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Whether you're a company that's three months old or 10 years old or 50 years old, you need to make sure your content and your website is optimized to be found for search. Why? Because 93% of B2B buying processes begin with an Internet search. Think about if you ever Have a problem. You need to get somewhere. You want to buy a new tool, you want to buy anything. You're going to go to Google and look for reviews about it. You're going to look to learn more on Google. So you as a business and a marketer need to make sure that your website is optimized to be found so for what your audience is looking for. So HubSpot's been around a long time and we have a lot of pages on our website. And so that causes a lot of potential problems, right? We might have done something incorrectly or we did something correct, but Google changed its algorithm and now it's no longer working. So about a year and a half ago we sat down, we decided to do a full website audit. It's manual, it takes a long time. And we found that we had hundreds if not thousands of links to nowhere. These were either content that was redirected improperly, it just disappeared. We got rid of it. If you haven't done this in a while, I highly suggest looking into your website to see if you too have links to nowhere, because it's a relatively easy fix. Does take a lot of time if you have a lot. But it can really improve your lead generation if you solve for this. It tells Google where to spend time while crawling your site. It tells Google where to spend its time so that you have more authority. So the longer Google takes searching your site and finding broken links, the lower your authority is and the more wasted time Google has and no one wants to waste time. Second, and maybe even more importantly, depending on what mindset you're in, the people that are on your site are actually getting the content they're searching for. You're keeping your brand awareness high and you're keeping your potential customers or customers, if they are in fact customers, happy. So we did this audit, we found all of these broken links and we spent a good deal of time fixing them. And we were able to generate a lot more leads from organic organic search just by doing this. We didn't have to re promote these pages over time. They were recrawled by Google and we were able to just attract more qualified leads to our site through it. So the second thing here I'm going to talk about is blog pagination. And yes, that is a word. I had to text a friend of mine on the blog team and ask if this was in fact a word though I'm not making things up at Inbound. Does anyone raise of hands who has heard this before? Oh, okay, good. So I'm not That crazy. Some of you raised your hand. I'm going to go through pretty much what this is and then at the end you'll hopefully understand. For those who don't. So HubSpot has a pretty robust blog. Over the years, we've posted anywhere from two to five times a day. So we have a lot of blog posts. And if anyone's been to our blog and for some reason decided to, instead of searching, actually going next, next, next to find more content, you'll notice that our old navigation so said previous and next as a user, this is fine. You're probably going to search on Google, you're going to search in the blog to find the piece of content you're looking for. But it's not great for Google and here's why. Every time Google has to click next, Google's getting one step further away from your main homepage, from your main domain. And your main domain has the most authority in Google's eyes. So every time you take one step away from that, you're getting less and less authority on those blog posts. Doesn't seem like a big deal if you have two, maybe three blog posts, but hopefully over time we all have more than two or three blog posts. So we completely changed the way we did our blog. We changed it to have numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. This kept our blog posts significantly closer to our original domain, HubSpot.com and allowed Google to rank our pieces of content much higher. So again, we're not re promoting these in any way, but just by these small SEO changes, we were able to rank much higher in search terms. This helped us generate even more leads. So now let's move on to my second big bet. Now this one took a lot of resources and I'm going to preface this by saying if you have a small team but you're not doing anything in co marketing, you can put a few hours into it a week and see a difference. Obviously, the more hours you put in, the more people you put on this, the bigger it's going to be. But it actually is something that's well within your reach regardless of the size of your team. So who in this room has heard of co marketing? Yes, I love when people don't know about it because it used to be my job at HubSpot, so I get to teach a lot of people what it is. So quick, pop quiz. Is co marketing launching a co branded product with two or more brands like Monopoly and Minions? Is it launching a co branded project with mutual goals but no Money is exchanged, like this ebook with HubSpot and Shopify or is a fake term that marketers make up to sound really cool in meetings with their CEO. B. I heard a lot of B's. She said B. You're correct. I also kind of gave it away because I said it's an e book with HubSpot, why else would I be talking about it? So co marketing is a concept where two companies come together and they work on a co branded project. It's not necessarily something that exchanges hands, money exchanges hands, but it's something that adds value to both partners. So I'm going to go through this very briefly if you want to talk about this more after. I'm happy to, but I don't want to get into too much of the weeds here. So there's a lot of different types of co marketing as a B2B company or as a B2C company as well. You can do something that's very lightweight. Guest blogging on a company's blog and they guest blog on yours. A social media chat where you have two partners from two different companies coming together to create some awesome content. Something a little bit more robust. An ebook, a webinar, a tool, or something really robust, like an event where you have two parties coming together. So working on co marketing is really beneficial for you because you're probably going to put in a little bit less work. Think about it. If you're writing an ebook, it takes about 40 hours to write an E book from start to finish and get it out there. If your partner is writing half the ebook, you're only taking 20 hours out of your day. It doubles your leads because you're promoting this piece of content in front of both audiences. So let's go into that in a little bit more detail. So let's say you decide you know, what my audience really wants to know about Facebook Live. So I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write this ebook and I have an email database, a social database, some paid budget, and a blog. And I'm going to promote it to this audience and I'm going to get 1,000 submissions of this ebook. That's 1,000 leads. Well, great. I feel really good about those 40 hours that generated 1,000 leads. But what if you decided, you know what? I know the marketing manager at this agency, friend of mine down the street and they create Facebook ads for their clients. So their clients probably want to know about Facebook Live too. This is a really good topic for both of our audiences. So I'm going to call them up. I'm going to see if they're interested in working on this with me. So they say yes, they are, thank God, and they decide to promote it to their audience as well. They have an email database, social, a budget as well, and a blog. So now you're generating 1000 from your database, but they're generating 1000 from their database as well. Now you have 2000 leads for the price of only a few hours of your time. So really briefly, the co marketing process. You want to evaluate a partner, make sure that they're valuable for you to work with. You want to look to see if they have a similar audience as you do, because then you're going to get similar qualified leads. You want to see if they're fun to work with or easy to work with. At least that's a new one I added a couple years ago because I worked with a lot of people that made my life difficult and that's not a fun way to go about life. And you want to make sure that they have a good brand so that you keep your brand high. Once you've decided to work with someone, you come up with an agreement. You want to make sure that you're both working towards mutual goals and you're both going to get value out of this. Then you go create the content. Like I said, it only takes half as much time to create the content because you have two parties working on it. Once the content is created and you're ready to go, the fun part comes in the promotion. Promote it on social, promote it in video Facebook lives, promote it to your email database, write some blog posts, get it written out there in other places. Once you've promoted it for a few weeks or a few months, depending on how long you want to promote, analyze that project. Did it work as well as your other projects? The projects you didn't work with a partner on, did you get as many customers from it as other projects? What was the roi? Once you've decided whether or not you want to work with this partner again, follow up with them. If you don't want to work with them again, be nice. If you do want to work with them again, I suggest working with them no more than two to three times a year just to not exhaust your audience. All right, so that was a lot of details. Let's talk about how I specifically was able to scale up co marketing at HubSpot so that we could generate double the leads. First, I hired a lot of resources. For many years, there was only one person Doing this, and it was fine. But that person did everything from partner analysis, through content creation, through promotion and analysis, and then following up with a partner did a lot of work. And we realized that that person's time was very valuable. And every hour they were putting in, they were getting a lot of value out. So we added resources. We added a designer and a writer as well as a project manager. Now, again, I'm going to pull it back to what I said at the beginning of this presentation. This is the bulk of where all my resources went. That doesn't mean that you need to go out and hire three additional people to do this. Even if you spend a few hours a week working on these projects, you're going to see a lot of results because it's something you've never probably done before. The second thing we did, you might all laugh when you hear this, is we actually figured out how to run global campaigns. So we have offices in a lot of different regions in a lot of different languages now. And previously, each marketing manager was creating an entire campaign. So in Brazil, the marketing manager was spending 40 hours on an e book, as was the marketer. In Spain, as was a marketer writing in English. So in 120 hours, we got three ebooks. Let's pretend we get 2,000 downloads per ebook. That's 6,000 leads or 6,000 downloads in 120 hours. We realized this was silly and it was a waste of time. So we streamlined the process. We found partners that can work in all of our different languages, or a handful of them. We still spent 40 hours creating that first piece of content, but then translating it into other languages took much less time. Whether we freelanced it or did it in house, it takes much less time to localize that content. So now in 80 hours, we were able to get five ebooks out there. Let's say they each get 2,000 downloads. That's 10,000 leads. That was. Math was hard. So this was something that we did on top of adding more resources in order to be much more efficient in the way our co marketing department ran, allowing us to generate a lot more leads over the course of a year. All right, moving on to our third big bet, content optimization. Who here has some hand in content creation at their company? I am not surprised you're all here at inbound. Up until a few years ago, content marketing and inbound marketing, a lot of people thought were synonyms. They thought it was the same thing. And the heart of inbound marketing really still is content. And creating content that attracts the Right, people? To your website. So at HubSpot, we do have a lot of content we've been creating for a while. But we were really concerned because we found out after reading CMO.com, that 79% of businesses have not been able to actually prove the ROI of content marketing to their teams. So if all of us have some hand in content marketing, but 79% of us can't prove the ROI, that means that a lot of us are out of a job soon. It means we need to figure out how to prove that roi. So my team and I sat down, we started to do some thinking, and we did an analysis of all of our content. We were shocked and horrified to find the next few stats. The first one, 92% of the leads that are generated by our blog. So someone comes to the blog for a piece of content from Google, they convert on a CTA, a call to action somewhere on the blog. 92% of those people are coming from blog posts that weren't created this month. Yet we have an entire team of bloggers spending their entire day blogging. What's worse, 95% of all of our leads. So not just from the blog, but through all of our content was from offers, ebooks, webinars, templates, et cetera, created in previous months. Okay, then why do I have four different content teams creating content all the time? Next, we also discovered that our top 30 pieces of content were generating 55% of all of our leads, and the other 2,000 or so, these numbers are rough, were generating 45%. So not only did we need to figure out how to generate more from the content being created, we needed to figure out how to get this content that's not getting a lot of leads that may or may not be old to get up into one of those pieces of content that's generating hundreds or thousands of leads a month. So there's two ways we can do this. We can optimize for conversion, and we can optimize for search. We're going to go through both of these to optimize for conversion. This is your content that's getting a ton of views, so lots of people are finding it on Google. Maybe you're promoting it a lot to your database. Tons of people are seeing it, but no one is converting into a lead. No one is taking that next step to become part of your database. The other thing optimizing for search is that the piece of content that people happen to stumble upon gets a lot of people to convert into a lead. However, no One's finding this piece of content. So first let's talk about optimizing for conversion. So first determine what keywords people are searching for in order to find your post. Make sure those are incorporated into your calls to Action or CTAs. You might not have content for those blog posts or those pieces of content that have a lot of views. Maybe you have never thought about creating an ebook or a webinar about a topic. Maybe you don't have a coupon specific for something. The example I always make up, and it's because I'm adopting a dog and it's in my head, is you're searching for dog food, for organic dog food. Let's say you really want your dog to make sure he's healthy. So you search for organic dog food brands and the first option on Google is a blog post about organic dog food. And you think, perfect. So you read through this blog post. You love the company, you really trust them, they give you some awesome information. You get to the end of the post and that's it, you're done. So you leave the page. What that organic dog food company is missing is a call to action with a coupon or additional information. Something to keep me invested because now I really like this brand. I trust them. They gave me some good information that I was looking for, but they didn't give me that next step. So I was not able to go convert on their website. So if you don't have that piece of content for those pieces, those blog posts that have a lot of views, make sure you spend some time creating it. So to put CTAs in the right place to make sure that you're optimizing conversion, one thing that we started doing was these inline CTAs that aren't really annoying. People can just skim by them if they just really don't want to convert. But in the first few paragraphs, maybe they already trust us, they like us and they're ready to take that next step. So we put in a text call to action to download a piece of content. These helped us generate significantly more leads from people on these pages. Let's say someone doesn't realize this is a call to action, that's fine. They're not ready to convert yet. So we put a slide in CTA at the bottom. They're done with the post. So it's not as annoying as it might be if it's a pop up in order to read everything. But they trust us. Hopefully at this point they might want to convert so now let's talk about optimizing for search. So look at this blog post for a minute. Did anyone read Brian Haligan's blog post from 2006 ever? Okay, I don't see any hands. Maybe one or two. This blog post still lives on our HubSpot blog and if you see the date up there, which is a little hard to see, it's from 2006. Tomorrow it is exactly 10 years old. This is the 10th birthday of this blog post. But the people who actually end up on this blog post, which is very few, Convert almost at 100% on this call to action because they're probably searching for something about basic blogging. They come to this blog post that's a paragraph long, but they see this ebook and they think, this is exactly what I want. So they convert. So my team looks at this and doesn't say let's kill it because it might have some inbound links. And then we have broken links and that's not good. But we decide to update it. So we're finding this content that needs updating but has a high conversion rate. So when we update it, we're going to put in more content. Of course, we're going to republish it with the new date and we're going to make sure it's SEO optimized. So we're going to make sure those keywords people are searching for to get to this blog post are still here. So it's still it can rank high on Google. So not only are we trying to get this post to be seen more on Google for certain keywords, we know that the people who get here are going to convert at a high rate because we already have that proof. And this is good for a lot of reasons. The first reason is Google rewards you for up to date, fresh content. Big win number two, you have a new piece of content to publish. And we all know the importance of continuously publishing. And finally, hopefully depending on how old the piece of content was, it didn't take you as long as it would if you had to start from scratch. So all in all, updating this content is going to be very valuable. A woman that I work with named Pamela Vaughn goes into a lot more detail on this in a couple blog posts she's written, as well as several ebooks if you want to know more intricate details. But that's the overview of our content optimization project and it helped us generate a lot more leads and we're continuing to do it. We do it every month. You and it's Continuously helping us generate more leads. So now let's talk about our fourth and final big bet that my team took. It's all about educational content. We are all here because we want to continue to learn. We are lifelong learners. We're learning every minute. We are at inbound quote from Albert Einstein. Because I have to have a quote in most of my presentations. Intellectual growth should commence at birth and only cease at death. I think we all believe in this. We all think that educational content is very valuable. We all want to learn for the rest of our lives. So I played up that emotion there and I created a content library and I positioned our content as educational. We all know it is, but I literally called it out and said, here's a library of all of our educational content. I took content that already existed, or my team did, and we put it into a library format. Step one. Step two is we took our content and we changed up the positioning of it and we created a certification. Some of you might have heard of it. It's called the HubSpot Academy or the Inbound Academy or Inbound Certification. My apologies. Is anyone inbound certified in here? Really good number of people. If you're not, go to academy.HubSpot.com and get certified. You put it on your LinkedIn as a patch. So we took all of our content, we had the original Academy, we created a lot more certifications. So instead of people just getting HubSpot or Inbound certified, you can get video certified, sales certified, etc. So we ask people, what do you want to learn today? Not what content do you need to do your job better, but what do you want to learn today? They can pick whatever they want to learn. They can pick a marketing, they can pick sales, and then once they click one, they go to content that we already have, that we repositioned to seem like classes. So this is content that already exists that we were able to reposition as educational. And people are now getting this educational spin of feeling really good about themselves in getting certified helped us generate a lot more leads. All right, so now let's go into the smaller bets, the ones that might seem a little bit more attainable. First thing I'm going to bring up is a stat about social media. Social media is not dying. We all know and love it. You're at a conference where we're asking you to tweet a million times a day. I'm going to ask you to tweet because my team is in charge of social media right now, and I want to make sure, we hit our inbound social media goals, but there's 2.3 billion the number of active social media users in the world. A lot of people, your audience is probably on social media. My team was posting in English during eastern standard business hours because that's where we all work. And we were doing a little bit later in the night and a little bit earlier in the morning. And that was good. It was getting us leads. We had the brilliant idea of posting around the clock. And not only posting around the clock, but posting content in different languages that was localized for every region. Seems silly. Like we all should know to do this. We mostly all know about the global world. Most of us have a global audience, but for some reason a lot of us just aren't doing it. We're not optimizing for those global regions. So our team started to do this and in one month, the number of leads we generated from social media increased by 100%. This helped us generate a lot more leads for the entire company. Next, I want to talk about updating content. So earlier I talked about a big content optimization project, optimizing for conversion, optimizing for search, redoing content, this big thing that takes a lot of time. Now I want to talk about a little bit. There's this offer that we have called how to easily create infographics in PowerPoint. Some of you have probably downloaded it because it's downloaded. About 10% of all of our leads come from this offer, 5 to 10%. But we've had it for many years. And our social teams and our email team were starting to get bored of promoting it because we had run out of images. It was getting old, it was losing steam. But the content itself was still up to date. It didn't have stats in it, it didn't have anything that would become extinct. It was just an infographic. So instead of redoing this whole thing, we simply gave it a facelift and we relaunched it. We made it look a little bit more modern. We did add in a few more templates that were easy to create. And then we created a bunch more blog posts and social posts and videos, and we relaunched it into all of our social and email channels. This allowed us to keep a piece of content that doesn't take much time to give a facelift to, to re promote it across all of our channels and continue to generate more leads, helping us generate a little bit more leads every month. So if we did that to a handful of pieces of content, even better. Now I'm going to talk about My final small bet, my team did. And it seems like something we all should do from the start, but some of us don't. We have very busy jobs and busy lives. And we were talking about landing page positioning. So we were sitting in this room and we were all talking about the content we were going to create in Q1 or Q2 of this year. And we were all really thinking about this hot topic called Croatia. Who knows what CRO stands for? Someone shout it out. Conversion Rate Optimization. Conversion Rate Optimization. So you would have got it if I had this up right? You would be excited for this webinar. So we decided to get six CRO experts in a room. We all got on the phone, we were like, we're going to do this live hangout. So it wasn't even a webinar. It was a live hangout on Google. And we're all going to talk about conversion rate optimization. We're going to get so excited. It's a buzzword. Everyone on the team loved it. My team loved it. HubSpot loved it. And so we launched this page. We put a ton of effort into it. And there were crickets, our email, our database didn't care about it. Our social audiences didn't care about it. We were baffled. We continued promoting it for a couple weeks with really bad conversion rates. So we're doing a webinar, a hangout on conversion rates. Yet we couldn't get people to convert on this offer. So someone on the team is like, you know what, maybe it's because CRO, that kind of sounds like CRM. Maybe people don't know. And we're like, that can't be it. So we went to Twitter and we put a poll up and we said, what does CRO stand for? The first answer was correct, the second two sounded about right. And then D was, what the heck is CRO? Over 50% of people selected D. So we were very humbled and we realized we need to do our research before we launch something that we're excited for. But what's more is we need to take action right now and change this. So we took the page down real fast and we redid the whole thing. We made a very easy to understand title. Everyone wants to increase their lead conversion. We did explain what CRO was and bonus, we asked people to join in. We got them part of the project. We had them upvote what were the questions we were going to ask. And people really loved that part. So what exactly did all of these activities do for my team? We were able to double the number of leads we generated in one year. Not because we took little risks, we took big bets. We failed a lot. But a lot of these things were successful. We put a lot of time and resources into them. And I know it sounds very daunting, all these different things I said. I mean, hell, I hired three additional people just to do co marketing. That seems like a lot of. A lot of resources, but each one of these is very attainable. If you take just one or two of these away and you go back to your teams and your companies and you launch them in some way, shape or form, whether it's some of the smaller bets or a big one, I guarantee you that next year when you were here at Inbound, you can come up to me and say 2017 was the best year for my lead generation because I tried different things, I took big risks, and I was really happy to do that. And I learned what worked and I learned what didn't. And I would love to know what works for you and what doesn't work for you. So to recap real fast, before I open it up for questions, everyone wants more leads. My team did some really great, successful things. I hope that you try some of these. Fix any broken SEO links. If you don't have any, good for you. You want to make sure Google can crawl your site. You want to partner with other companies in any way, shape or form. Something small like a blog post, something big, like an event. Get in front of audiences you don't know through partners. Optimize your content for search and conversion. Try out playing up to people's emotions, putting an educational spin on content, and then don't forget the small bets. They definitely do add up. So this is a really, really massive room. So instead of opening it up to questions, I'm actually going to stay up here because I got done relatively quickly. Feel free to come up and ask me questions. If not, go. Have fun watching Anna Kendrick. She's a lot funnier than I am. And I can't wait to see you all there. Thank you.