Episode 105: HubSpot Gotchas and Holiday Reading

Written by HubShots | 21 December 2017

Welcome to Episode 105 of HubShots!

This episode we chat about how inbound is changing, some nice little HubSpot features that have been released, a few HubSpot gotchas, plus a ton of resources to read and reflect on over the holiday break.

Welcome to HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers who use HubSpot hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

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Recorded: Thursday 14 Dec 2017 | Published: Friday 22 Dec 2017

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

Inbound is dying….

http://www.agencies2inbound.com/blog/the-death-of-the-inbound-marketing-agency

Mike’s post is referring to this article:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-demand-generation-faqs-ht

Early, Missed and the Future

Reflecting on what we foresaw, what we missed, and what we should be pushing now.

We jumped on Facebook ads early.

We were late with chatbots and chat tools.

Now pushing hard into Instagram for B2B.

Also, SEO is making a comeback :-) Log file analysis is Craig’s next focus.

The Value of the Timeline

How viewing interactions in the timeline can direct your focus.

The HubSpot Ads add-on adds enormous insight into the timeline.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Content Strategy Tool

Revisiting the Content Strategy tool (a follow up to Craig's comments in episode 103) - which really should be renamed to the Topic Cluster tool.

Thanks to Varun for opening my eyes to how to properly use this tool.

Quick takeaways: this is a fantastic way to get everyone understanding the terms that are relevant. Compare the user experience with the typical sending around of spreadsheets etc.

Further reading: https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/content-strategy-framework

New Form Tool Design

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/new-forms-editor

Love the help option: Learn More

Eg it shows help in the tool:

Shot 3: HubSpot Gotchas of the Week

Collected Form submits are empty

If you use Collected Forms and find that some form submits aren’t getting recorded properly.

Summary: the person is probably using an ad blocker which is blocking the HubSpot script from firing.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/collected-forms/how-do-i-use-collected-forms

Multiple Email Address fields

Collected forms can add new fields into the database, often with identical names to existing fields eg Email, First Name, etc.

Craig created some smart lists based on Email field, but was getting empty results. Turned out to be due to using the wrong Email field.

Shot 4: Marketing Tip of the Week

Making full use of your About page:

http://getuplift.co/optimize-about-us-page/

Make it about the Customer, chat to them, tell a story and show it.

Workflows

A great actionable blog post from the HubSpot marketing team. If you can take 1 of these scenarios a week and implement them we believe your business will be in a very different place.

https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/marketing/16-automated-lead-nurturing-scenarios

Shot 5: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

HubSpot Documents

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/getting-started-with-hubspot-sales/an-overview-of-documents

We use it to send estimates, design concepts etc and even share ebooks/checklists that are of importance.

Best feature is the tracking of it and understanding what is resonating with people.

Shot 6: Opinion of the Week

Maker versus Manager

https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/12/maker-vs-manager/

“A manager’s day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager’s schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant.”

“A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.”

Take some time out over the holiday break to work out how much of each you want to be. And compare it to where you are currently.