INBOUND 2016: Susannah Morris "How To Run Marketing As A Team of One (and Still Crush Your Goals)

Hi everyone. I'm so excited to be here today to speak with you about how to run marketing as a team of one, but more importantly, still crush your goals before we get started. All of the both my slides and all of the resources I'm mentioning throughout my presentation will be at this link after the talk. So if you're trying to find a specific HubSpot tool or resource, they will all be there. Just to get a sense of the room, could everyone who's the only marketer on their team raise their hand? Oh, that's a lot of you. Now if you're part of a small team, could you also raise your hand? Okay, so having taken a look around the room, while you may feel like you're alone as the only marketer on your team, you're actually in a room full of marketers just like you. Because of that, you can work together and learn about best practices that I'm sure these other folks are willing to share with you. And also they might be facing some of the same challenges as you and you'll be able to learn to overcome them together. So a Little bit more About Me I'm Susannah Morris. I moved over to HubSpot's business development team last month, but before that I spent a little bit over two years on HubSpot's marketing team. The running joke at HubSpot is that HubSpot years are sort of like dog years. So everything moves so quickly that even though I may have only spent two years on HubSpot's marketing team, I actually spent about 16 dog years on HubSpot's marketing team. And you may also be wondering why as a member of HubSpot, our marketing team is more than 150 people. Why I'm here talking about how to run marketing as a team of one. So first let me explain to you what an industry's marketing manager at HubSpot does. So as an industry's marketing manager, I was responsible for the entire funnel that I worked with and I was directly aligned with the sales team. So that meant that I did everything from brand building to lead generation and sales enablement. And when I started, I actually did that for four different sales teams. Thankfully, after about nine months I was joined on the team by Juliana, so shout out to her and I had the opportunity to take a deep dive on one specific funnel, E commerce. Before HubSpot, I also had a background working with nonprofits in schools, so I really understand what it's like to work in a resource scarce environment. I have literally made the choice instead of paying the $100 for expedited shipping to know something would be there at the deadline that I needed it to instead chase the UPS truck down the street feels pretty ridiculous, I can assure you. So throughout this presentation, I'll be distilling a lot of the lessons that I learned from the past couple of years into 10 fundamental steps to help you run marketing as a team of one and also crush your goals. Throughout the presentation, I'll also be highlighting specific HubSpot resources and ways that you can use HubSpot to help you do that. So let's get started. When you're marketing as a team of one, it's critical to make the investment up front to put time into your plan and strategy. Because if you don't know what your benchmark is, you can't tell how far you've come. For that reason, whether you're starting out a new kind of company or you may be or reassessing your current process, the first thing you need to do is an audit. So an audit will help you understand where you are and set those benchmarks. You have to ask yourself questions like what is currently driving demand for sales? So quite simply, how are your salespeople finding folks to sell to? And this is also your opportunity to take a look and deep dive into the existing assets that you have. So you may have a blog or your website, or even it's possible that either you or a predecessor has created some content, everything. This is an example of a dashboard in HubSpot that can help you do just that. So fully understanding your funnel and your conversion rates will help you be more successful in the long term. And when you're starting, it's possible that other people have run campaigns in the past and you need to do a deep dive on those assets, whether it's some email marketing or the expected reach of a blog post. And all of these opportunities are ways for you to fully understand where you are so you can understand where you can go. So you may think you're off the hook once you've done your audit, but your research is actually just beginning. The next step is to develop your Personas for the unfamiliar. A Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer as a single marketing team member. You can't spend time trying to reach the wrong person. You don't have the resources to do that. At HubSpot, you'll often hear people talk about Mary, and Mary isn't the new puppy down the hall or someone's new teammate. Mary's actually the Persona that we've been working with over the past decade. Having a Persona that's this well developed and feels that real to you will help you in the long term. Because marketing that's personalized is more effective than marketing that isn't. And While these only 5 percentage points might not seem that significant, if you're working with a small list, it's even more critical for you to get every single open. So once you fully understand your Persona, there are so many options for personalization. You can deliver an individualized experience to all of your prospective customers, both to do with their interests and where they are in the buying cycle. So in this example from HubSpot's marketing team, the Snapchat for business offer looks different whether you access it on a desktop or on mobile. With the increase in mobile devices, your website can't look the same in both places. You need it to work for you across all different devices. Here's another example where you can personalize by lifecycle stage. So this is actually from our agency blog. This first CTA is shown to visitors. It's encouraging them to subscribe. Once you've subscribed, you get a different CTA to become a lead. And if you're already a customer, you get shown exclusive customer content. And you can also promote different kinds of product trainings, et cetera. So this is a way to help you move people down the funnel and help them wherever they are in the their buying cycle. And here this is new this year at Inbound, it's actually you can personalize your subject lines so as a single marketer, you can't be sending, you know, creating separate lists and sending, you know, tens of hundreds of specific emails. In this case, you can do it right in the HubSpot tool and personalize the subject line. And so in this case, the lead has shown a discount off their first order. A customer is shown a loyalty discount. It's the same 20% discount. Regardless, if you're trying to create a Persona, HubSpot's actually put together Make My Persona, which is a Persona generator, and it walks you through, step by step, all the questions you need to answer to fully understand your Persona. And it also helpfully provides a word document, a Word Doc at the end, so you can share it with your team. So now that you've done your background research, you might be raring to go and run your first campaign. Unfortunately, it's not quite time for that yet. I personally am an optimist with what I can do with my time, I think I can do it all. And I also think that I can help out everyone who asks me for something. Unfortunately, success as a single marketing team member isn't determined by your best intentions. Instead, it's measured by how you do relative to your goals. Because of that, you need to create goals that are both clear and realistic. So the big question here is, what can you actually accomplish? And you need to be really, really honest with yourself about that because there's always something else that comes up or, or someone who just needs this thing and is really time sensitive. And because of that, you get pulled in a lot of different directions. And so being really brutally honest here will help you be more successful in the long term. So this is actually from HubSpot's new productivity tools. It's called Projects and they. It's a really awesome resource. It actually came over from HubSpot's academy and it has a variety of projects that you would want to do and it breaks those down into individual steps. But more importantly, while you're trying to set your goals, it also separates the. It gives suggested amounts of time that those activities may take you. So if you're, you know, you think that you could actually set up a lead nurturing workflow in like an hour, well, you might want to use this as a metric to look and say, like, okay, they say, it says it's gonna take me seven hours over two weeks. I probably am being a little bit over ambitious. Setting goals is also an opportunity for you to advocate for more resources. So one of the big things that we talk about a lot at HubSpot is setting stretch goals. And stretch goals are essentially what you with say like 10 or 15% more resources. And also if the stars just align quite right, you could achieve. So they're both aggressive, but also ambitious. And once you've sold everyone on this idea of what you could do with more resources, that's your opportunity to ask for an intern or a copywriter or even more people to join your team. So once you've set your goals, you need to figure out how you're going to get there. This is your time to set your strategy. You have to break down your strategy into individual pieces. So for example, when I did my 2016 planning for E Commerce, I actually broke it down to every content offer I was going to create. And then for my promotion strategy for my content offers, I broke it down into how many leads I could expect from an email, how many leads could I expect from a social post, and how many leads could I expect from a blog post. And this is where your audit and the benchmarks that you've developed will help you. If you don't have benchmarks because you're working at a new organization and you just don't have those existing assets, you can actually use industry averages to help you figure out figure out where you should be. So you can work backwards from say, the size of your list and then expected opening click rates and then come up with an approximation of how many leads that you could expect to generate from a specific piece of content. Because if you can't break it down to this granular level, honestly, your goals might not be realistic and that's not setting yourself up for success. Another thing to keep in mind here is don't forget your long term goals. One of the challenges I frequently faced was I could do something right now or I could think about what was going to help me in six months. Somehow the thing right now seemed way more important. So by planting seeds to help you optimize your funnel in the long term, whether that's setting up a lead, nurturing flow, or changing your reporting system, or even doing something as simple as setting up an internal notification for your sales reps, all of those things will pay off down the line. And it'll help you manage both hitting your number, keeping everything running smoothly, and continuing to optimize your funnel as you continue to grow. Because if you don't plant those seeds now, they're never going to grow and your job honestly won't get easier because you're not continuing to optimize your funnel again. Back to projects. Oops. If you can't tell, I love the projects tool. I'm so excited about this. But this is another place that you can go back because it breaks down some of these longer term projects into individual components. So in this example, like setting up life cycle stages, it will actually break that down piece by piece with check marks. So you can go through, you can copy this over to your own portal and you can just get started and I'll tell you exactly what you need to do. So the big thing here, now that you have your goals and strategy, is to get buy in. And before you get buy in, the critical thing that you need to do is make sure that everything is packaged up really tightly and should be ready with a bow for all your decision makers. The big thing here is to lay your foundation early. Whether you need buy in from your CEO, a VP of Sales, or even a VP of Customer Service, ultimately your plan needs to be approved by them for you to succeed. Because people are happiest when the difference between expectations and reality is the smallest. If you aren't clear with what you're going to do, people might expect you're going to do something else. Or quite frankly, they might expect that you can do a lot more than you actually can. So you need to manage those expectations. This is the good kind of surprise. And let's also face it, I tried way too hard to get a dog in a party hat into my presentation. But one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever gotten was that nothing in any of these large meetings should be a surprise. So whether it's your CEO or your annual kickoff, everyone should know what's coming before you get to that room. You need to both communicate with your team and you also need to identify the people who need to be on board. Shopping your plan around before will both help you refine it and and it will also help highlight potential challenges that can come up so you're ready to address those concerns in a larger format when it does happen. So the part you've all been waiting for Working your plan as a single marketing team member, you need the life cycle of your content to be really long. And that's where the three Rs come in. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Because buyers actually view three to five pieces of content before they engage with the sales rep. As an individual, you probably don't have the bandwidth to create the volume of high quality content that can really move the needle on your marketing efforts. Because of that, you need to be very thoughtful with how you create content. So this isn't just to be clear, posting the same thing to every social channel that you have, or even saving a couple of blog posts into PDF and eBook. It's actually thinking about your Persona, thinking about how they consume content, and finally finding a way to bring those two together on the channels that they use to educate themselves and create your content there. So an example from my time as an E commerce Marketing manager here was last year I actually created a webinar on holiday preparedness for e commerce companies and it was a live webinar. I've now subsequently relaunched that webinar this year as an ebook, and I've also turned the deck from the webinar into a slideshare to promote the ebook. The reason that I didn't just re promote the recorded webinar was because I know my Persona well enough that I know they don't really respond well to recorded content. They're much more engaged with live. So resending that webinar wouldn't be effective. Instead, I reformatted the content that I had spent so long developing, and it means that I've been able to produce some high quality content this month while preparing for inbound that wasn't super intensive and time consuming for me. One of the other challenges you face as an individual marketer is trying to develop your content strategy. You know, here at HubSpot we have dozens of people dedicated to that and we know that. And so because of that, we've actually changed and developed some new products to help you do just that. Unfortunately, I am before our VP of Product, Christopher o', Donnell, and I am not allowed to tell you about them yet, but I do want to pitch that you should absolutely attend his product launch session. We have some really exciting updates coming and it will definitely help you as individual marketers and small teams, be more thoughtful with your content strategy. We also recently launched a content marketing certification course from HubSpot Academy. Who here has a certification from HubSpot Academy. So it's a great resource to help you be a better marketer and also.