Growth Essentials for Startups with HubSpot SVP, Kieran Flanagan

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I am a co-founder of the Founder Institute and we have a really exciting event topic and speaker here for you today. But before I get into that, I just want to make sure everyone knows that this is a 100% live event and we want this event to be interactive as well, right? We run a lot of these webinars. By far the best webinars are not the ones where people are just watching silently, right? If you wanted to do that, go fire up a YouTube. You're here, so we want to hear your questions. We want to create as much interactivity as possible. We're going to go through a presentation today, but after that, it's going to be all Q&A. So if at any time you have questions, please don't be shy. Throw them right there into the chat. We have a member of the Founders Institute team, Felicia, who's in there right now. And if you are in the chat, let us know where you are dialing in from, or I guess that's a pretty old way to say it, not dialing in from, but where are you joining from? So, hey, Luis is from Colombia. Thanks for joining us, Luis, from Colombia. We have Bulgaria, Madrid. All right, lots of Europe. Lisbon, Oakland, California, Chennai, Istanbul. Hey, Saren, how are you? It's been a while. Switzerland, Dubai, England. All right. Very international audience, which is awesome. And we also have an international speaker today as well. So Kieran, if you— I'm gonna take myself off the spotlight here. So Kieran joining from Dublin, and Kieran is an SVP at HubSpot. And yeah, Kieran, do you wanna introduce yourself for a second?

Yes, so I'm an SVP Marketing at HubSpot. I've worked there for a while. Yeah, and I'm really excited to go through some of the things that I've learned about B2B marketing.

Awesome. And I can't think of a representative from a better organization to talk about B2B marketing. For anyone who's not, I'm sure a lot of people, most people on the line have heard of HubSpot, but if you don't know kind of the history, HubSpot was at the forefront of this inbound marketing movement and really kind of putting a name to it and putting a lot of those, you know, tactics and best practices in place, you know, as the internet started started to grow and blogging started to become a real nice channel for people to acquire customers, especially in the B2B realm. So I for one am definitely excited to hear some of your insights today. So I guess I will, I will leave it off to you, Kieran. So we're going to go through a presentation and then once again, anybody in the chat, any questions that you have, you can throw them in at any time. As I said, we have a member of the Founder Institute team there that is in the chat and they're going to be kind of compiling all those questions and then And then we'll just go through those one by one when we come back. All right. So I'm gonna hide myself and mute myself so you don't hear my dog, Kieran, and I'll let you take it away, man.

Yeah, I have two dogs, so I will wear my AirPods. I will put my AirPods in if one of them starts to bark. All right, cool. So this presentation, for the most part, when I think about B2B marketing and this, the evolution of B2B marketing, I've been thinking about that a lot recently. For me, there's been, there's 4 distinct eras of like B2B marketing. The first era is that we used to market to decision makers. We used to market to the people who bought our product, kind of did that through account-based marketing. We kind of did that through field events and we, a little bit of paid marketing and through white papers. It was very kind of niche-focused tactical marketing. And then it kind of evolved. This is where really HubSpot kind of we're at the forefront, which is this bottoms-up content. And bottoms-up content is basically creating content and education for the people who would use your products. So not just the people who would buy your product and had the decision, were the decision makers, but for all of the people who would find value and actually be end users of your product. And that meant that we could actually expand the audience we could actually market to, made it much more exciting. The next era that we've seen is product-led. Growth and so product-led means that if we're attracting all of these people who use our products, not just the decision makers, why don't we make it easier for them to start using our software from day one? So we make our tools freemium, we make them easier to get started with, we make them very low touch. And that's kind of been this other era of B2B. Now again, has expanded the amount of people we can market to and we can attract. And I think the next phase is gonna be somewhat on the media and community. I think, companies are gonna become real destinations for their audience through kind of really rich media, blogs, YouTube, podcasts, like all of these kind of rich mediums that you can attract people. And then you're gonna create an ongoing connection with people, even if they are not using your software through community. And I think we're going into the fourth era of B2B and HubSpot recently bought a media company called The Hustle because we really believe in that fourth era. We think it's gonna be really important. So this is really on the first, the stage two and Stage 3, it's a lot of bottoms up, it's a lot of product-led. And so that's the kind of framing of today's discussion. I've been fortunate enough to start on bottoms up. It's kind of where I started on marketing in particular for HubSpot. And then I moved into product-led and now I'm moving actually into doing a lot of the media and community-led growth. And so this kind of speaks to that a little bit, that technology is ever-changing. You kind of go through these kind of core stages of growth and how you reach your customers. So technology changes how you reach your customer, it continues to change. And what we see is there's just more and more competition, right? HubSpot, when we started to do inbound marketing and started to talk about the benefits of inbound marketing and creating educational content for your audience and just being a publisher for your audience, we had the advantage of being a fast follower. Not a lot of other companies were doing that, so we could build up a real moat around our business through that tactic. Today, competition is fierce in every single space that you are kind of could go into. Lots of competition, most companies doing similar tactics. And this is a really good quote from Andrew Chen, and he talked about the fact that growth is getting hard just because the people who are marketing, how we do marketing, how we do growth, the tooling we have has all got better, right? We've got smarter as marketers, B2B marketers are a lot better at knowing how to do audience growth and knowing how to attract customers. The tools we have are much better than ever before. So it's just becoming more and more competitive to be differentiated. But the kind of foundation of how you grow your audience for product or service has somewhat remained consistent. The first thing is, aside from all of the tactical marketing things we could talk about, the kind of audience growth, the optimization of things, the automation of things, you really just want to start with a strong customer story, right? Like that is so core to how we differentiate ourselves from every other competitor. Like how is our story different and how are we going to tell that story differently? There's a really good deck from, or a really good post from Andy Raskin. It's pretty well known, "The Greatest Deck I've Ever Seen." And he goes through the framework of how you tell a really great customer story. And he talks a lot about, hey, what's changed in the world that makes your product important? Like, why is your product important? Or why is the thing you're doing important right now at this given point in time? You wanna paint the picture that there's gonna be winners or losers. So when we were kind of painting the picture of inbound marketing, which was really our transformational story when we were, first starting out as a company, we were talking about the transformation in the world was, or what changed in the world was, your buyers had way more power. Your buyers had the ability to tune out marketing through not accepting cold calls, through not opening their direct mail, through all of these ways that they could tune out traditional marketing. And we talked a lot about the winners and losers. The winners are the people who embrace creating value valuable assets for their customers. And the losers are the ones who hung on to the way they wish things were, which I could just bombard you with a lot of direct mess— marketing. And teasing the promised land is how do I show people like the evolution towards success? There's gonna be this entire group of winners and they're gonna grow faster than any other company because they've seen the light. I introduced my features to show you how you can go from like the before and after, that side-by-side Here's what things were like before. Here's what things are like after. Here's what each of the features helps you get to that place. And then you back that up with evidence to show actually there are some winners and here's what they say and here's what they talk about in terms of using our tools. So you, first of all, need to have that strong customer story. And then in terms of having a framework for audience growth, you really want to focus on 3 core things. And this is what we're gonna talk about in the deck. We're gonna talk a lot about customer research. You win by being a customer-first company, customer-centric company. We're gonna talk about goals and priorities. So you wanna do more with less. How do I get focused? How do I get the correct goals and how do I focus on the most impactful things? And then distribution, just audience growth. How do I invest in playbooks to grow audience to my company? So the first, in terms of being an expert in your customer, I thought this was a really great quote from Andy Johns, who's one of the best growth people in the game. Used to work at Twitter, worked at Wealthfront, and now an investor. He had this really great tweet where he says, "Who is the precise customer you're attempting to serve and how can you offer them— what can you offer them that's 10x better relative to the alternatives?" And he gives this really great example of Wealthfront where he worked. And so when you're really small, And when you're a growing company, you want to be really specific about the value that you add to your customer. And so he talked about the fact that Wealthfront were targeting customers that were engineers at pre-IPO tech companies, usually 25 to 35 years old. They were, they had about less than $1 million in net worth, and they were comfortable delegating money to comfortable delegating money management to third parties. So they were very specific on the type of customer they were targeting. And then they thought about how do we 10x the value that we add to that person? And so they would have a lower cost relative to the traditional industry. So they would do this for cheaper because it was done through automation. They could help you build an investment portfolio and they automatically rebalance that portfolio. So they got really specific about the customer and who that person was. and then they thought about how do we 10x their current experience for them. He also gave a great example from Telsa. Again, when Telsa were really small, they were really, really specific on who they were targeting, a narrow band of 2,500 people, forward-looking risk-takers, didn't care about the inferior aspects of the car in favor of having something new. So they valued the kind of notion of being in the fast followers versus the car being on par with everything else you could buy within the market. And then they thought about the 10x. Version of that, which is it's faster, cleaner, and safer than the alternative, which was a Porsche. Didn't have the same bells and whistles, but didn't matter to the first 2,500 people because they were kind of the early adopters. And so you really want to think about, as your company grows, the kind of description of your customer gets a little bit more broad because you're going after more and more people. And so how you describe your customer kind of grows and changes as the company expands. And you wanna be really great at customer research. Too many of us do not do good customer research on a continual basis. But again, if you wanna be a customer-centric company and differentiate yourself from competitors, this is one of the ways you can do it. So you wanna think about who do I ask? Who are the best customers for you to connect with? Try to find out some more information about how it can add real value to them. What do I ask? So what's the best information for you to ask for? And then how do I ask? How do I get this information from customers? And so what I would tell most teams is to work this into your monthly habits, like have a continual feedback loop for customers, 'cause it actually helps to make your marketing and all things better. In terms of who should I ask? I think this is a really good quote from Aaron Kroll, who's a SaaS consultant. And he talked a lot about identifying the top 4% of your customers who are generating the most revenue and then asking them about their experience with your customer and understanding why they find you most valuable. So instead of spending all of your time on the people who are churning and not finding you valuable, take the top 4%, try to figure out like why they love you and try to invest more in that and try to market more to those kind of people. There's also other buckets of valuable people you can talk to. So free users, if you're a product-led company and you have freemium tiers, you can speak to your free users. If you're a sales-led company and you have trials, you can talk to people who went through a trial and then didn't actually upgrade to your customer. And I mentioned that you could talk to your most valuable customers, the top 4%, but you can definitely talk to your churn customers and figure out why they churned. The thing you don't wanna get tripped up on is some people churn and it's okay, you just aren't the product for them and you don't wanna try to actually build features and try to rectify every reason someone churned because then you just don't, stay true to the true product and the true audience you're trying to go after. And I think that's why it's good to kind of look at both the top 4% of your customers in terms of why they see you're valuable, and then look at churn customers and make sure you're delivering on the core value of your product and delivering for your core audience. In terms of what should I ask? So qualitative, like the 3 best questions I think to ask, like what should I ask these people to get really good information from them? 3 of the ones that I like is, if we took the product away tomorrow, what would you miss? I love that one because it actually speaks to what is the core? Like we can give you all these things. What's the thing that actually you stick around for? And sometimes that would surprise you. How were you solving this problem before purchasing the product? We used to do that a lot when we launched some of our products, like talk to me about how you're solving that problem today. I think that's a really good one. I think I'm talking away from the mic, so I'll do a better job. And then if you had to convince a friend to use this product, how would you recommend it to them? That's actually how people think about your company and how they think about your brand. So like, you know, how do people, what do people think about when they think about my company? How do people perceive my brand? That's a really good question for that, because how people describe you to their friends and colleagues typically is how they think about your company, how they think about your brand. You can get data, I'll skip past this. So these are the ones, your quantitative feedback, this is your qualitative feedback, your GA, your CRM, your chat. Good ways to get information back from analytics. I'll skip past that. I think the qualitative are actually the kind of more interesting ones. These are kind of more standard quantitative ways to get that data. How should I ask? So in our experience, sending a triggered email after a customer completes a usage action is a really good way to get some feedback. So if they complete a high usage action, sometimes what we do is if they fill out the NPS survey, and they are high on the NPS, we might trigger an email and ask them for some feedback because they're the users who are enjoying our product. So you can build some triggered emails into customer actions and get information back. Just in general, outside of even getting customer research, the best way to get users to open an email is usually via triggered emails that they've done something, completed an action, and you send them an email there and then because it's more contextual to what they're doing. You can send a trigger survey on high-value pages, so your signup flow, your pricing page, your product page. So when they exit some of these high-value pages, you can trigger an on-exit survey. They tend to work quite well. And the main thing that you would take away from this section, we'll get into the more kind of like tactical things now, but the reason I wanted to put customer research in the first part of how do I build the model to acquire customers through marketing is too often we skip this part. We just dive into doing search and we dive into creating content and we dive into paid marketing. And I think talking to customers should be part of our continual feedback loop and should be part of how we do marketing. And I think no matter what size of company you are, this should always be part of your continual habits to talk to your customers, to stay close to your customers. Okay, the second section is really something that I'm pretty passionate about. So when you're trying to grow a company and be successful, a lot of the times we spend 80% of our time on trying to get better at the things that probably generate 20 to 10% of the actual impact in our company. If there's a core subset of things that if you excel at, you're probably gonna get a lot of growth. You're gonna be quite successful. And those things can sometimes seem quite mundane. Like they're not the really interesting things to create content about, to go to events for. And two of those things are like focus, like prioritizing things and having the correct goals. If you can just master those two things, you're going to have a lot of success when you're trying to grow your business. Um, And so you try, you always want to try to simplify things. And that's one of the things that I try to work hard on is, okay, what's the most simplistic way that I can look at my growth strategy, how I'm going to grow this business? How can I distill it down into the most simple terms in terms of understanding how we're going to be successful over the next 6 to 12 months? And so the 3 things that are a part of that is how do I get the correct goals? How do I know that I've got the correct metrics? And then how do I create these things called playbooks to be successful against those goals? And your goals should align to your company size. So a lot of times when I've talked to founders or high-growth startup companies, they have like this whole batch of goals and things that they're working on. And it's kind of, even for a big company, it would be a lot of stuff. And I think that that can really trickle down to the team in terms of their focus, in terms of their priorities, in terms of how they're going to have impact. I think it's better to have and be successful on a small subset of things than try to be successful and end up being average across a broad subset of stuff. And so, you know, you never want to have You never want to be in a kind of high-growth small company and have very complex goals and metrics. I think for the most part, you want to make sure that you have easy-to-understand goals, easy-to-understand metrics, and they get more complex as the company grows. So an example is, you know, if I want to generate 10 customers a month, so even if I'm in a company, one of the ways I would do is work back from the revenue goal. and I would say, okay, well, I need to generate 10 customers a month. So maybe marketing has to generate 100% of the revenue. Maybe marketing has to generate 50% of the revenue. So I would take the number of customers that marketing are accountable to each and every month. I would say, okay, well, for me to do that, I can need to generate 100 trials every month. And I know my free trial to customer conversion rate. And then I look at the visits to free trial conversion rate, and I know how much web traffic I need to get? If you're in a product-led company and you have a freemium product, this could be 10 customers into the number of product qualified leads. So if people know that it's similar to an MQL, but I generate it through the product, through usage events and people doing things in their product that qualify them to be a potential customer for our paid packages. And then I would go, well, how many active users do I need to have in my freemium tier? And then I would say, well, how many how many signups do I need to get to get that many active users? And then how much traffic do I need to get to get that many signups? And that way I can simplify my kind of go-to-market. I can look at the parts that marketing are accountable to, and I can look at the parts within that kind of part of, I can look at the parts in that list of things that marketing can do and say, well, if I can only increase my web traffic and increase my free trial-to-customer conversion rate over the next 6 months, if I just build out a, different playbooks around increasing those over the next 6 months, I know I'm going to be really successful. I know I'm going to get to the kind of end stage of where I want to get to. So the first thing is to understand how you're going to grow. The second thing is to stack rank the parts of that growth model that are going to make most impact. And then the next part is to really build and operate a model to make progress against that each and every week. And so for you, it may be different. You may want to look at these things every month, every week, every 2 weeks, but you kind of isolate the metrics that you want to be successful on. Here are the key metrics. If we only be successful against these things in the next couple of months, we know that's going to lead to the growth that we need to do as a company. And I would look at then a model where I would say, well, week 1, here are the things that we tried. Week 2, here are the things we tried. Here are the results. Week 3, Here are the things we tried, here are the results. Again, this changes as your company grows, right? So we don't do this in HubSpot every single week. We look at things like every month. We used to look at things weekly, but the core thing you take away from this is how do I isolate the core out of all of the metrics I could focus on? How do I isolate the ones that are gonna be most impactful? And then how do I have a view on the things that we are doing to make impact against those metrics? Each and every week. And then when I've established my goals and I've established my metrics, I think I can then get into playbooks. And so playbooks are the fun part. Like, how do I just generate mass amounts of audience to my product, to my service? And so customer acquisition isn't about how you acquire customers. It's really about how they acquire you.

right?

You really need to think about that. So it's essential to be an expert on your customer because your customer is making a choice to sign up to your newsletter, to download content from you, to sign up to your free product. And you have to know where your customer is making that choice and what is the language to use to help your customers choose you. So again, be an expert on your customer, make that part of your continual habits. Most successful companies are successful not because they excel at all the things, it's because they've mastered a couple of things, and that is the growth power law. Brian Balfour, who runs Reforge, talks a lot about this. Most successful companies get 60 to 70% of their growth from 1 or 2 channels. It's either they've mastered search or they've mastered virality, or a lot of mobile games have mastered how to accelerate through paid and have positive unit economics. And so you master a couple of things that you excel at, and that really helps you to grow to be a very large company. And when you're a very large company, then you can actually hire people and start to take on more and more things. Again, this always comes back to what I found is companies struggle with focus. Like you're in a high growth company, you get an injection of money and you want to do everything, and you're better off trying to master a couple of things and trying to do everything. And so the distribution playbooks really change as you scale, right? When you're a smaller company, you start to do things and they're probably not scalable. They're not the things that are gonna help you become a very large company, but they're the things that are gonna help you acquire customers then and then. As you scale, you need to think about how do I create repeatable channels or repeatable playbooks that will help me to grow and become a really, really big company? And so when we think about that, How do they become, how do they go from unscalable to scalable as your company actually grows? You can think about some of the most well-known examples, in-person events. So in-person events isn't a very big scalable channel for like a Pinterest, which is a network, or Etsy, which is a marketplace, but that's how they grew in early days. They ran a lot of in-person events and that's how they started to get some initial traction as a company. There's this whole group of companies that have done a really good job on making people FOMO into their product, make people feel like they're part of an exclusive club if they can get in early. Robinhood and Superhuman are a good example of that. So they use pre-launch to get into some, get some early traction. You can't pre-launch forever. That's not gonna help you be a really, really large company. Targeted outreach, so like Dropbox on Hacker News. Dropbox actually got most of its early traction from a post on Hacker News. Loom got a lot of traction from Product Hunt. Netflix, you actually read about Netflix and how they started to grow initially. It was actually in these kind of weird little communities, which is a super fascinating story. And they leveraged influencers as well. I actually don't know what that leverage influencers. Oh, Instagram, sorry. I leveraged, I don't, I've got Instagram bullets, so I don't know what I was talking. But so yeah, Instagram leveraged influencers to grow in their early days. If you think about scalable marketing tactics, so organic is scalable, like Yelp. Pinterest is fascinating. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet. They originally actually grew a lot through social and Facebook changed their algorithm and they had to pivot to Google. They did a really great job of that. Product virality, people acquire other people for you through product usage. I send my Calendly link, I send the Loom. Paid advertising, the likes of Candy Crush. Have managed to get paid to work for them at scale, get very positive unit economics for it. And then referrals, Dropbox, Robinhood, and then word of mouth, kind of Coinbase. You're just the known brand for that thing in your market. So again, you have to go from unscalable to scalable tactics as you grow. So you wanna focus, no, that's a really bad spelling mistake. Focus and prioritize, the basics will get you 80% of the way. So the thing I would do is create a scorecard to prioritize what playbooks are going to be impactful for you. So when I look across the things that I can do to be successful as a company, maybe I can grow organic traffic, product virality, I can grow through advertising, I can grow through referrals, I can grow through word of mouth. The things I ask myself, and then I start to stack rank these and what I want to actually work on. Do I possess the skills needed? That's very important. Like internally, do I have the skills to actually be Am I successful at organic growth? Do I have the skills needed to be successful at referrals, word of mouth? Word of mouth is a lot of how do I tell a great brand story? And so you have to be honest with yourself 'cause you may have to hire those people. Do I have the resources, which speaks to hiring? Will this impact the metric I care about? Going back to the slide that I had, am I gonna grow traffic? Am I gonna increase conversion rates of my trial? That's the two metrics that I truly care about. How long will it take to see the benefits? In a fast growth company and you need to figure out how do I do something this month to see some growth, then you might be better off trying to figure out better paid campaigns or to do an online webinar than to do SEO, which takes a lot more time to see real benefits from. So I can look across some sort of growth scorecard and your one may be different, but the core thing I would do is I would say, here are all the ways that I can grow against the two metrics that I talked about earlier on. Here's the way that I'm gonna stack rank these for me. Here's the things that I'm going to score, and then I'm going to prioritize the one that's at the top, 'cause that is the one I can be most successful on. In terms of some of the playbooks that help companies to scale, the first is one that we are very familiar with. It's the publisher playbook. So Dharmesh, our co-founder, had a LinkedIn post where he talked about most modern media companies have a software company embedded inside them. The next gen of software companies will have a media company embedded inside them. That's something we truly believe. I think being a publisher for your audience and being a media company for your audience is one way you can create a very scalable channel, differentiate yourself from the competitors, and build a real moat around your business. We've always taken a publisher approach. We've always thought about how do we be a publisher for our audience through blogs, tools, images, graphics, video, and slides. That's kind of the inbound marketing playbook. We're really evolving to like a media playbook. That's why we bought a media company. There will be a future deck about how we've kind of turned into a media company and bought and built like a media strategy. But for most companies, just even taking the approach of building assets, creating valuable things for your audience will actually help you to scale at a reasonable rate. You can see if you just look at SimilarWeb, which is a public tool, so I'm not exposed to any private HubSpot data 'cause I'm not allowed to do that. But I take all of the information from SimilarWeb and I just look at organic referral and direct traffic. So like web traffic, HubSpot blogs get more traffic than most media companies. And so we've always kind of taken their approach of being a publisher and growing through creating value, valuable assets for our business. And it's really helped us to create a scalable channel. So the investment in content for us has been really considerable over the past 5 years. The great thing about this investment is it's slow to it, you see benefits quite slowly to begin with, and then it kind of exponentially grows over time. You could continue to build on more traffic, more growth, more growth, and it gets exponential over time. This is actually how the chart looks for us, but this isn't our actual chart because I'm not allowed to show that. This is kind of the way that we see the future. So I'm giving you a peek into like how we kind of look at the future, which is a full media strategy for a modern-day B2B company, in my view, We'll have education publishing and stories publishing. So education is how do I publish things to educate my audience on the things that they're searching for? It's predominantly a search-driven tactic. And then the blue chart is how do I create stories for people so I can help them understand the kind of way that we see the world, how the world is changing, and how they should think about my brand. So I think a lot about media in terms of education and stories. One of them monetizes into kind of leads and demand for the company. The other one really monetizes onto creating awareness for the brand. And so that's kind of how we think about the future of media for companies. And I think certain mediums belong in certain buckets, like blogs is a very educational tool. It has a really built-in growth channel through Google. YouTube is quite, um, Similar, really great for education, really great for search. This one here is an app that we have. It's probably not relevant for most of this group. Newsletters, really great for brand awareness. You're in someone's inbox each and every day. Podcasts, really great for brand awareness and audience engagement. And then premium content, I'll leave off. If you have questions about the slide, I can answer them. The thing that I would think about, I get asked by a lot of companies, oh, like we can't compete, we don't have enough writers, we don't have enough resources, like it's really hard for us to compete on create and publish and creating valuable assets. The thing I would look at is how do I create, how do I take a topic approach? So you have one company or competitors creating lots of content, but what topics are they creating content or what topics are they underserving their audience on and they're not going in depth on? So in the same way, when you think about the kind of famous chart from Craigslist. So Craigslist, there's a famous graphic where you see the homepage of Craigslist and people have drew circles around how Craigslist has become unbundled. So like Airbnb took a portion of Craigslist, built a whole business around that. Zillow took a portion of it, built a whole business around that. So people went in and served different portions of the Craigslist audience and they went vertical. So you can go horizontal, which means you cover a wide array of things, or you can go vertical, which means you cover one of those things in depth. And so when you think about your publishing model, you can kind of do that to get some early traction. You look at your competitors, you see all of the topics that they're creating content around. What are the topics that they're underserving their audience for and that you can go deep on? You can create great content on, the great videos on, maybe a podcast on. And so you can take a topic strategy. Traditionally, we thought about this as a, what we call a topic cluster. You may have heard about this before, but it's very text-based. And it's one of the ways that actually helps you to grow through search, that you have each topic in a cluster model. So at the heart of that topic, you have something like content marketing, the best guide about content marketing. And then all around that, you have other blog posts around, you know, the best content marketing metrics, the best content marketing visuals. Like more the head tail and the long tail. So what we have done is kind of topic clustered a lot of our text-based content and we create this kind of lit— this pillar page, which has an in-depth kind of guide all about that topic. And then we create all these subsidiary pages around it and interlink them together. And that's one of the ways that you can grow really fast through search. I'll show you how we think we've evolved that since then. Our model is pretty kind of, in terms of how we create publishing through on the educational side. So in terms of how we create publishing on the orange box, we have a really kind of good model where we create an editorial calendar based upon search data. So we look at all of the things that people are searching for each and every quarter, we bundle them up into an editorial calendar. We have a great team of content creators who take that calendar and turn it into content, and then we have a way that we can flag content that is actually dropping in traffic and dropping in the Google search pages because the intent has changed. It means Google now wants more videos or more imagery, or it's changed the way it's thought about that keyword. And we get flagged that our content no longer ranks really well. We go back and we re-optimize it to match Google's intent. We do that because it actually helps and creates a better user experience. And so we have this kind of virtuous loop of how we create that publishing content, which has meant we've managed to scale that model really, really fast. The types of content in there are your how-to content, like your educational content, very search-driven. We have thought leadership, which belongs in stories. So again, I would think of the how-to as here and the thought leadership is here, blue. And then you have kind of product point of view, like that's really a product market. How do you want to describe your product to the world? And then we have some like other intersections of those. So there's like how-to and thought leadership, which is contextualizing trends for your audience. A good example is if we say, here's all of the things you need to know about Clubhouse. People might wanna know how to use Clubhouse, but there's thought leadership in that because it's a brand new platform and you can have a point of view around it as well. So there are the 3 buckets of content in terms of how we think about the stories we wanna put into the market. How-to is actually extracting demand from the market. People are searching for it. Thought leadership is talking about the things that our audience deeply care about. And then product point of view is how we want to shape the way the world thinks about our products. And so the reason we think transitioning to like really thinking about media is because by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of our consumer internet. So like video is becoming a big part of how people learn and people consume content. It's predicted by 2023, there's going to be over 164 million podcast million listeners in the US alone. Like content consumption habits are somewhat changing. Clubhouse is on fire. Like you're seeing these new ways to interact with content. And so we're really thinking about these media clusters. So topic clusters, very much built for search. How do I interlink my content to show Google I have all of the great content in my blogs for this topic? Media clusters is how do I just own the full breadth of media for a topic? How do I have the best podcast in the space? How do I have the best YouTube series? How do I have the best template, the best ebook? How do I have the best blog posts for it. That's why we bought The Hustle. So that's all to come. Okay, I'm gonna go through these. The next, so Publisher Playbook, then the Virality Playbook. The Virality Playbook is how do I just get more people to expose my product and services to other people? There's 4 core things in terms of virality, 4 core ways you can get virality. The first is word of mouth. This is the best thing to have, which is just people speak about your company because your company has a great story, your company has a great product, and your company has a great customer experience. When people ask me, "Hey, what is brand? How do you think about brand?" Brand is the thing that gives you a word of— Brand is how people think about your company, and that's what accelerates your word of mouth. And there are 3 core components, I think, which is the stories I tell, like having really great stories to tell to the market, having a great product, so your product experience, having a product that delivers on those stories, and then having a great customer experience. There's no point having great product experiences when I reach out to kind of log a ticket or when I want to renew my contract, my experience with your company is not good. And that's how you get great word of mouth. It's the kind of sum of all those things. The next one is product virality distribution, which is the product spreads through customers' contacts. So one customer exposes it to another, that's your Calendly, that's your Loom, I have a product and just by nature of someone using that product, other people will find it. Product pull is pulling people into the product. I'll give you an example of that. And the other one where you create virality is through referrals. Oh, I talked about this. Yeah. Company story, your product experience, your customer experience. That's word of mouth. That is the stuff to obsess over. If you get word of mouth, you're just going to be a world-class company for many, many years. It's not easy to do to get all three of these things correct. Your product virality distribution, I'm sure people know the coefficient. If you have a coefficient over 1, you have virality in your product, which means you'll get exponential growth. Unfortunately, the way that we've seen some of this, one of the better examples of the way that K-factor has come up recently is in COVID, right? When you hear the news, they're saying, "Oh, it's above 1 or below 1." When you have above 1, you have real virality and you start to see that curve start to trend up. So Calendly is really a great example of a company who have accelerated growth through virality, through people exposing the product through other people. One person scheduled meetings, oh, like I'm gonna send that to 4 people, those 4 people send it to 8 people, those 8 people send it to other people, and every single time they're getting more exposure for their product. And then they have a product team that optimize that thank you page, or when you book a meeting, that page, so you can get that signup link in there and you can get some great text and why you should sign up for Calendly. Product virality is one of the best things you can have. Product that exposes itself to others is one of the best things you can have. That's an example of their page. Pull virality is like, I have to pull people into this product to use it. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. Slack is a good example of pull virality, right? I can't use Slack without pulling people into it. It's by nature how you use, how your product is set up. Referrals is pretty interesting in B2B. I think Loom did a really good job where they introduced referral into their incentivized referrals, where they incentivize people to share their link with others. They give away, what was it, $5 in credits for every coworker they refer up to $50. So they would give away money if you actually got your coworkers to use Loom. It's harder to do in B2B because generally in B2B, a lot of the times the company pay for the product, not the individual, but because we're going through this revolution of product-led growth and people want to use products, the end users can get set up with the products and start using them for free themselves. This does tend to work. I don't know why I put $21K. I can tell you that it, they, that was maybe the number of users they got up. I should have actually quantified that better, but it worked really well for Loom. I haven't seen it work well for a lot of companies. This is a good example of incentivizing referrals through FOMOs. So you're trying to get people to sign up and saying that it's a closed group of people who can get access to it. So it's not freely accessible. I think this is Robinhood. and Robinhood did a really good job. They had about a million people waiting in a queue, and they had this really cool thing where you could tweet and share that link to jump the queue, and that way they got a lot of people talking about the product before it ever launched. And then the last one, I can take questions, is the tool template. How do you create free tools for your audience that can actually help you to grow? One of the best examples of this is Canva. Canva created this whole library of templates, and those templates were indexable by Google. And so they created this template library. If you search for any of these templates, you find them on Google and they go straight into their product. The cool thing about the templates is not only is a lot of people searching for that, but it actually helps you to onboard people onto your product, to the thing that they want to do. So Canva not only saw a ton of growth, you can see their search traffic, accelerate when they started to build out all of these free templates for people to use. But because they had a product that they could onboard people onto to actually get using their templates straight away, it actually improved their activation rate by 40%. That's a great way to improve both the top, how do I get more signups? And then the middle, how do I get more active users? PandaDoc are a really good example of this. Like no one searches for document management software, has 3,500 searches each and every month, but they built all of these kind of templates, this whole library of all these templates, you can use that again, map to their tool. They're a document signing tool. So there's all of these different templates that you can kind of search for when you see them on Google, you can sign up, start using that template. And when you look at their traffic, they've got a ton of organic traffic through templates and getting these side doors into their products. So not people specifically looking for document management or what was it? Document, what did I say? Document management software. So they're a document management platform, but actually side doors into there, like people looking for the actual, things that map to what their product does. TransferWise are a really good example of that. They also extended their product to create a site that helped people find Swift and BIC codes. This is a UK company, so I'm not sure if this translates to everyone who's on the call, but there's a whole ton of Google traffic for Swift and BIC codes, like people looking for those. And so they built a whole site around that and it actually got a ton of traffic and a ton of user signups for them. And then they built another site just for foreign exchange currency. So people looking at the different exchange rates. So that's two ways to build freemium things that map to your product and create these side doors into people signing up for your product. We've done the same thing. We've paired tools with education. We have these freemium tools. You sign up, you can do the thing, and then you get education on that as well. One of our more famous ones is the Website Grader, where you can grade your tool. And within that tool, you get both the grades and then you can unlock a course course here, 50-minute lesson, to actually learn how to improve all of the things that you got red marks on. All right, that's me done. So we can jump into questions. I'll stop sharing.

Awesome. All right, thank you, Kieran. That was great. And there's a couple of questions from the audience here, but keep them coming in. I'm just gonna start, two questions, and I was taking a lot of notes here, so thank you for that. You said in the beginning, I thought it was interesting, kind of looking at the evolution of marketing, right? And how you said that in your opinion, we were sort of going from this product-led freemium kind of phase into now this community phase, and you guys bought The Hustle as part of your strategy there. But who are some other companies that you think are really killing it right now that you think are sort of on the forefront of that community phase of reaching their customers?

On the community phase? So I think media and community is somewhat unpaired at the moment, I think. But in terms of great community businesses, Airtable, Notion, Superhuman have built a really great community around their business through that kind of fear of missing out and that closed, that kind of closed strategy where they got people to sign up and feel like exclusivity. So I think there are some of the ones that jump to mind. Certainly Notion has grown a lot through community. A lot of— they've— there's just so much content created around Notion from the community they have, and there's just different groups on Reddit and all of these different places about Notion.

Okay. All right, those are good places to start. And yeah, I also just want to say, I am, uh, it was music to my ears, a lot of the stuff you were saying there about focusing and being specific, right? And it's, it's so important, not just especially— I think it's even more so for, for when you're first getting started. Right.

Yeah.

But as you said, you know, in designing the product and everything around the customer, just trying to focus your features, don't just keep adding features, like just kind of double down on the ones that are working well. Right. But then it's super important to keep that focus as you go. And I actually thought that framework that you said there for, you know, sort of a management framework, right. It was working backwards on figuring out, okay, these are the key metrics that matter. Right. And let's just double down on those and the rest will take care of itself. Yourself, right?

Yeah, like understand, understand how you're gonna be successful, right? Where like taking the time to maybe instrument the data you need, get a view of the, your go-to-market and then the core parts of your go-to-market that you wanna focus on each and every kind of quarter or monthly, whatever you wanna do. And then try to forecast out like, okay, if I change this one dial by 10%, that's gonna impact my numbers by this. This is X number more customers over the next 12 months. If I change this dial, it's gonna be X number more customers over the next 12 months. It allows you to like focus on the things that actually matter.

Yep. All right, so I'm gonna get into some questions here. Keep them coming. So let's see. Harry was asking, how should you tailor your content when you're talking to clients, you know, after you've made the sale? Essentially. So I guess if I'm trying to decipher what Harry's asking here, it's sort of, you know, how would you create a content strategy or any kind of marketing strategy that's more focused on kind of the retention side of it to prevent the churn? So is content even important?

Yeah, we have an entire academy dedicated to customer success and that core metric we look at is how many people have consumed that content and what does their churn look like. So I think there's two parts to that, which is understanding the content that will help make your customers successful and then figuring out how to get it to them in a timely fashion. And so for me, if I was doing that, I'm trying to figure out where do customers— what are the sticky points in my product that I can get more customers to do, they're going to be more successful. So I look at, I could do regression analysis and say, well, my most successful customers use this part of the tool or use this part of the app where they do these things in the first X number of days or X number of weeks. And then I can tailor my content to get more of those people to do those actions. So I think that's one of the ways I would, and then it's like, how do I get that content to them? Do I get it through them through email? Do I have a weekly webinar? You have to kind of test those things because it's part and parcel of how It's dependent upon your customer's consumption habits.

Right, so it's kind of, it's the same philosophy, right? It's trying to focus on like, okay, these are the things that we want them to do because they'll probably be most successful. You know, these are the most valuable features we've seen that this will allow them maybe, you know, even from a business perspective, okay, like this could, you know, they'll just be more invested in the product, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's It's the same way you create content across the entire funnel or flywheel. It's just the inputs are different. The inputs are like, what are the actions I want my customer to take within the X first number of days, first number of weeks, and then ongoing, what are the things I want to remind my customer about? Generally triggered content works really well again for customers because you can trigger an email or trigger a piece of content through usage that they're doing within the product. So it's actually contextual and relevant to them.

Yep. And just to mirror what we're saying in the chat, because we're getting a lot of questions here— we always get a couple of these questions, but we're getting a lot of them now, so that's probably a good thing, Kieran. A lot of people are asking for the video. Yes, we will be sharing the video of this presentation. We're gonna just clean it up, you know, the beginning and the end stuff, but we usually get it to you guys in 48 hours, so no need to fear there. So Kind of, you know, a good segue here. You were talking about, you know, contextual messages. So David was asking, and I kind of mirror his concern here, you know, are you seeing open rates down as a result of the lockdowns kind of in this COVID age? And David's saying, you know, that he's at the point where he's now ignoring a lot of them because he's just, he's getting so many.

Of just email open rates?

Specifically like drip emails from different businesses.

We have, we actually have a whole microsite dedicated to just that, which is like the data from all 100. We've kind of took the data from 103,000 customers and we've looked at their open rates, the trend of their open rates pre and post COVID. Or not post-COVID, there's no post-COVID, but like before and after COVID. So if you, if I slack this in the Zoom, is that the best place to do it so people can have it? It actually—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Throw it in the Zoom here.

Yeah, it actually answers the question better than I could, 'cause you can just go look at the chart.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, so you don't think, has it gone up? Is that sort of the—

No, so if I look at it, marketing emails. So from our customers, it looks like marketing email open rates has somewhat went down over— yeah, it's so much gone down since COVID has happened. Sorry, was it David who asked that question?

Yeah.

Yeah. So like to his point, I think what happened was, like you can imagine that companies got, they're like, okay, well we need to take more action here and we need to like—

Yeah. I don't have to imagine, right? I think a lot of people, yeah, we were all there.

Yeah. And so, yeah, it makes total sense. But I think that, yeah, if David wants to go check out that link, I'm looking at the chart now. So it has the chart from March 2020 and it's been gradually trending down.

Yeah. And outside of, so obviously the more contextual the email is, the higher the open rate, right? So that could be because it's triggered, you said is one of the best ways, right? By some action that the user had, it's personalized to what they want. Is there any other of the hits there that you would just kind of where people could start to just try to increase that open rate?

So I think nothing that's groundbreaking, like the things that really matter to email are the title matters, the personalization matters. I think there's a degree of personalization that matters and then it becomes kind of diminishing returns. Like I saw companies, I talked to a company and they were just trying to segment their way down to an audience of like 100 people. And so if you increase your conversion rate by 10%, but you're sending to 100 people, 'cause you've segmented down so much, what's the— there's just like, you have to be really conscious of diminishing returns when you're in a fast growth company. It's the one thing that people start to do is they do things that are just not meaningful. And so for email, there is no hidden kind of thing. It's like personalization, but the correct amount of personalization and segmentation. The title, making the content really good. I think that, you know, investing in a copywriter to do your email is a really great investment. And then the timing of the email. So I think drip campaigns can work if they're really great, if they're the right personalization around the right thing that that user wants to learn. And triggered email works even better in my experience. But again, you can do all of those things to a degree where they start to create, um, declines for you.

You can over-optimize to a point.

Yeah, if you be a marketer, like I'm a marketer, if you be a marketer about all these things, you'll kill them all. So yeah, the other thing that we've seen a lot of benefit from is chat. Chat does fit nicely in, but it's not a replacement for anything. It's just like an additive versus a replacement for anything.

Okay, and Harry here asked the question too. How does the customer journey affect the rate of growth, and what are some of the ways to optimize growth in this regard? So I'm also not sure I understand the question, Harry, but I guess, yeah, I don't understand the question. So Harry, if you're there, throw a little bit more in there. But while we're waiting for Harry to clarify on that, I had, you know, you mentioned Clubhouse in there and just, you know, I'd love to hear just kind of your thoughts on the platform and where it's gonna kind of fit in the future and maybe what some of the trends that that platform may be exposing because it is growing like crazy.

Yeah, I think everyone's favorite thing to do in tech is talk about will Clubhouse be successful or not, but But so, yeah, look, I think that it's, I think it's one of the things that Clubhouse has shone a light on is that audio is a really interesting way. And audio is a more interesting medium to interact around than just podcasts, right? There's something more in terms of how you can create, in terms of how it belongs into your media strategy. There's a big future for audio. I think the problem with Clubhouse is it's really hard to build a network, or it's really hard to build a recommendation engine in general. Like if you look at Facebook and all the likes of those, like, Very few companies are able to do that. It's doubly hard to build a recommendation engine around live content. Like that is, that seems like a real head-scratcher. How are they gonna do that? I think it's a really nice extension of your podcast strategy. Like it fits into your pod— you have a podcast and then you have an extension where you have a live room and the audience can actually connect and talk with people. I think for brands who can afford time, it's better to be, to take a bet on Clubhouse being big. And having fast mover advantage and being wrong than not doing it at all. But coming back to being focused, a lot of companies don't even have a podcast, may not even have a blog. So it's not the right thing for them to focus on. I think Clubhouse either has a future as a standalone platform, and I think they'll have to have content on demand, similar to like a Twitch or similar to like, you know, those kinds of platforms, or it exists as part of, Facebook, Twitter, or one of these other platforms as a feature.

Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, most of the time I describe it to people as kind of social podcasting, right? Which may be an oversimplification, but I think in terms of trends, and I think this was kind of the perfect storm for a product like this to explode because people are tired of, no offense, you're a handsome man.

Oh, 100%, I agree.

People are tired of looking at a screen all day. And this was an interesting way way to still get some, connect with people in a pandemic, hear some voices live, but in an interesting and new way.

Yeah.

All right. Well, I think we're a minute over on time here, so I want to be cognizant of that. Kieran, thank you so much for joining today. Is there anything— I mean, HubSpot.com, obviously. Is there anything else you'd like to point people in a way where they can get any more content or any of the stuff that you shared today?

I think hubspot.com, and for, I think for particularly for this crew, the company we bought, the hustle.co, create a lot of great company, create content for startup entrepreneurs and business builders. And so you can check that out as well if it's something that you're interested in.

Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much, Kieran. And as we mentioned, we will be following up with the presentation video, so you'll get that shortly. And yeah, thanks again, Kieran, and hope you have a good one, man. Have a good night.

Great, thanks everyone. Bye.

Take care. Bye, everyone.