Episode 221: HubSpot Report Builder Beta

Welcome to HubShots Episode 221: HubSpot Report Builder Beta

This episode we discuss:

• HubSpot’s new Report Builder BETA (it’s awesome)
• HubSpot Meetings Team Round Robin meetings
• Gotchas with using Zoom in HubSpot Meetings
• Creating Facebook Audiences of people engaged on your website
• Shoshin
• Are you overcomplicating your buyer personas?

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

Recorded: Wednesday 30 September 2020 | Published: Friday 02 October 2020

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Never forget that some people just started their journey as a marketing professional just this week.

They don’t know anything about marketing yet - be patient with them and help them to learn.

We all need to keep learning - with a beginner’s mindset.

Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• HubSpot Tasks Today view: HubSpot is rolling out a nice today view in the Tasks tool, giving you an overview of what you have planned for the day. Currently in Beta.
• HubSpot Inbox Comments can now include attachments: a nice little enhancement to leaving comments on Inbox threads - you can now upload attachments as well.
• HubSpot Product updates blog - keep up to date with all the latest product updates via the HubSpot product updates blog.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

HubSpot Report Builder Beta

The new HubSpot Report Builder is a big step forward in terms of flexibility and power.

You can read the KB for details on how to use it, but here’s a few tips from my perspective:

• The interface can be a little daunting at first, but push through
• The place to start is the dropdown at the top (ie don’t get distracted by the tickboxes initially):

• The primary data source is where the power lies
• Once you’ve selected your primary data source, then select the other objects you want to join across

Things I really like:

• You can select across lots of objects including things like form submits, web activities, ad metrics, ad keywords, CTAs as well as the usual contacts, companies, deals, tickets, etc
• You can select 5 sources to join across eg a join across the pages that cause form submission broken down by source type
• Custom filter rules - you can include multiple filtering rules but then describe the AND and OR logic to apply them
• Export out results to Excel - eg create a report on keywords in ads and export it out
• Seems like a good framework for adding other ‘objects’ later eg I’d imagine custom objects will be available here in future

Things I don’t like:

• Limits on time frames for some objects eg max of 30 days to report across web activity events
• Can be slow to recalculate (but I do like that it doesn’t freeze the screen, you can continue working while it is calculating)
• Simply Saving the report causes the whole report to recalculate
• Some key objects still aren’t available eg Campaigns (I’d love to group around campaigns) and social engagement

Some examples:

Filtering rules: simple, standard filtering rule (ie ALL)

But you can change these by adding brackets and using AND/OR operators:

Multiple sources:

You can report across web activities - here’s an example of filtering web activities to report on what Searches are conducted on the HubShots site:

Summary:

• This is really powerful and simple (pick two!)
• Lots of potential, exciting times ahead

Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

HubSpot Team Round Robin Meetings

This isn’t a new feature (it’s been around for a while now), but it is something we’ve started using recently, and really like.

In a nutshell you can create a HubSpot Meeting link that includes the calendars of multiple team members, and allows a visitor to book in with whoever is available.

The benefit is that the available slots are a combination of everyone’s availability.

See our Gotcha of the Week below though for a few quirks related to automatically including Zoom links in the meeting invites.

Shot 4: HubSpot Extra of the Week

Email setting for showing single column on mobile

One of our customers created a 2 column email (contrary to our advice last show!) in the drag and drop email editor. Then I went looking for a way to make this mobile friendly and this is what you need to do to maximise the width on mobile:

On desktop it looks like this:

And on mobile it looks like this:

Shot 5: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Can’t share other user Zoom links in HubSpot Meetings links

Thanks to Chris Higgins for noting this one.

He noted that whilst you can create HubSpot Meeting links for other users, you can’t get their meeting links to use their zoom accounts (even if the other user has zoom connected to their account).

Seems to be a limitation in zoom permissions.

Since you don’t have permissions for the other person’s zoom account, you can have it as part of the Meetings link.

Personally, I can see how this makes sense, but it would be nice if this kind of permission could be enabled (e.g. if the other user could have a profile permission setting that allowed sharing of their zoom account for meetings links).

Team Round Robin Meetings

I haven’t had that specific issue, but I have a similar thing happen with Team Round Robin meeting links. If a visitor books a meeting from a Round Robin meeting link they are assigned the meeting with one of our team - depending on who is available.

However, even if the meeting is with someone else on the team, it still creates the zoom link from my account, since I was the user who set up the initial HubSpot Meeting link.

Which can be confusing to the meeting attendees.

Shot 6: Marketing Tip of the Week

Create Facebook Audience of people who spend time engaged on your site

Jon Loomer has a good post on how to create Facebook audiences that are engaged on your site. It’s simple to create:

Shot 7: Insight of the Week

The importance of focusing on results

A reminder to marketing managers and agency teams to always define what the goals are for a client (either external or internal client) and regularly review them.

Usually the goals are leads and revenue. This isn’t a surprise to anyone.

However, it is very easy to get distracted doing lots of marketing ‘stuff’ that doesn’t directly tie to leads (and thus revenue).

We’ve had a recent experience with a client where we’ve been distracted by lots of poor fit tasks - we’ve tried to be helpful and accommodate them, but it has ultimately been a huge opportunity cost for them and us, because it lead to us taking our eye off the prize: leads and revenue.

We’ve been doing all sorts of marketing coordination and low value marketing tasks (things like coordinating email signatures, managing store front signage, redesigning quote forms) and this has meant we’ve had less time to focus on high value tasks (things like new campaign landing pages, new campaigns, retargeting campaigns, etc).

It’s my own fault for allowing us to get off course - luckily for us, my team has caught this before it got too out of control, but it means we’re on the back foot for the next few weeks while we get things back on track.

Learn from my mistake! Define and confirm your marketing goals, and stay focussed. Only let those other items creep in if they are additional pieces that expand your delivery - not dilute it.

Shot 8: Resource of the Week

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs have released an entry level free version of their tools that provides a site audit, plus backlink profile. They’ve called it (perhaps confusingly) ahrefs webmaster tools.

Simple to setup and they have a nice import from Google Search Console option - we simply imported all our client accounts from Google Search Console and instantly had ahrefs projects setup for all of them.

Shot 9: Quote of the Week

“Seven Steps to Success

1) Make a commitment to grow daily.

2) Value the process more than events.

3) Don't wait for inspiration.

4) Be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity.

5) Dream big.

6) Plan your priorities.

7) Give up to go up.”

― John C Maxwell

Shot 10: Word of the Week

Shoshin - the beginner’s mind

Always be learning - be a learn-it-all (not a know-it-all) - with a beginner’s mindset.

Shot 11: Big Shots of the Week

Buyer Personas can over-complicate your marketing

Wonderful reminder from David C Baker on the trap of over-complicating personas.

In his post he suggests we only really need a few key criteria related to:

• their pain points,
• their understanding of the cost and the authority to make a purchase,
• along with the confidence they need to have in the supplier.

I found this such a relief to read - because so many persona articles talk about lots of extraneous stuff such as their marital status, how many kids, pets, cars they drive, etc and it has always confused me.

I can understand wanting to gain insight into interests that buyers have - so that we can use it for targeting advertising to them, but a lot of persona articles go overboard in an attempt to know everything about a prospective buyer.

Facebook using the Tobacco Playbook

Facebook Manager talks about using the Tobacco playbook to make Facebook as addictive as possible:

"The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war."

Frightening stuff. But not a surprise (see our Episode 151 topic).

Shot 12: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel
• HubShots Spotify channel
• HubShots iTunes
• HubShots Facebook group
• HubShots Twitter
• HubShots Instagram
• HubShots LinkedIn

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

Please share this with colleagues - it helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of HubShots Episode 221

- Hi everyone. Welcome to HubShots episode 221. In this episode, we talk about HubSpot's new Report Builder, that's Beta and how awesome it is. HubSpot Meetings using Team Round Robin. I've got you with using Zoom with HubSpot Meetings, creating Facebook Audiences of the most engaged people on your website. Shoshin and are you over complicating your buyer personas? You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focus podcast where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, marketing and search results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found. And with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you Craig?

- I'm really well. And we'll explain what shoshin is at the end of the show and watch how we wrap this episode together. Cause we're gonna start by talking about treating people with respect as they start their journey as a marketing professional. Aren't we Ian?

- That's right. And that's our growth thought of the week, Craig. And I think this is really important for us and many of our listeners who have been on this journey and understanding that there are people who are constantly learning and starting and to be mindful of that and be patient with them, give them the right resources. And I'll give you a little tip here. HubSpot Academy has so many great resources and I generally tell people hey, have a look at this lesson or look at this course and educate yourself and get more up to speed. It's a great place to start.

- And worth mentioning that it's not only beginners who need to have a beginner's mindset. It's all of us. We need to learn it all, Brian Halligan would say.

- I know, I felt like that looking at the new report builder, Craig.

- Which we'll come to in a second because it is awesome, isn't it?

- That's right. Onto our quick shots of the week, Craig. And here are a few quick things that might interest our listeners and this is the HubSpot task today view.

- Hey, have you got this yet? It's in Beta.

- Yes.

- How do you get these things and I don't get them?

- Are you talking about the email that you get as well? With the roll up of the tasks that you've got for today.

- No.

- Yeah, says the email that I get which says here are all the tasks that are in for today.

- That's funny. I wonder how they allocate who gets the betas. Cause I get some of them and then I don't get others. I'm chatting with you and you've got them and I don't. So I keep sending emails to Jess. Thanks Jess. My account manager at HubSpot and she enables them for me. But yeah, I wonder what the algorithm is for allocating beta. But anyway, it looks really good. I'm looking forward to that.

- And what's the next one, Craig? HubSpot inbox comments can now include attachments.

- Comments are good. Do you use comments in inbox? We did this, cause we get the support things come into the inbox and we just all chat amongst ourselves if there's a support request, it's really good.

- And the final one is the HubSpot product update blog. And this is where you can learn about the latest updates by the HubSpot product blog. And this is a great one. They have lots of, on the monthly they have the videos, which I love watching over a cup of tea or coffee as they say but there are things constantly rolling out. And I think this is a real key thing I wanna highlight is that there is this constant improvement to be better. It's all about growing better, Craig.

- It is all about growing better, Ian. And by the way, just a quick sidetrack. Do you know I've given up caffeine?

- Have you really?

- Yeah. I'm on a 10-day challenge to just not have coffee or tea or, well not caffeinated. I tell you what, I'm getting through. I'm looking forward to returning to coffee I've got to say. But after about three or four days, the headaches actually finally stopped and it's actually quite good. So I'm not sure why I mentioned that. I guess I don't have anything to enjoy my product updates with.

- Maybe a cold beverage, Craig. Now onto our HubSpot marketing feature the week, Craig, and this is the HubSpot report builder and this is in beta. So you'll see a big beta sign inside it when you're going through the report builder. Now, listeners, we're gonna walk through it. The show notes are detailed. It has screenshots. I encourage you to look at it if you wanna learn more but we're gonna take you through some of the things that we've learned from looking at it.

- Yeah, look it is a bit daunting at first. My first comment is I wanna say, don't be overwhelmed by it when you first go into it, it's like, oh, well I've put a screenshot in the show notes right at the top, your primary data source. That's what you need to start with. And I've made that clear. So if you haven't yet actually looked at the beta one, the one I'm talking about, but once you see it you'll know. It's kind of hidden up the top. And I think you've both missed this originally cause we just saw those tick boxes and we went crazy ticking things, but that's where you start the primary data source. That could be clear, but once you get that, you're gonna riot. So that's my primary data source. Then I'm gonna join it with all these other data sources. And the great thing is, you can report on just about anything now. So before it was like contacts, companies, deals and tickets. They're the four things you'd report across. Now, they've got all these other objects, things like form submits, web activities, add metrics, add keywords, CTAs, and you can join across them all. It's really good. How far have you gone into this so far?

- Very shallow, Craig. I was playing around with it today and I got a little bit frustrated until I spoke to you.

- What were you frustrated with?

- That screen. I was getting crazy clicking things and trying to understand. And then, actually I worked at a few things and then I got to the next screen and then I had to do the X and the Y axis and place the data points. And then I just kind of left it there.

- This is more of an advanced user tool than just a simple click. so they've got a library of reports that are premade. So you can just, if you've got on a dashboard, by the way, we're not even talking about dashboards this episode, but gee, the dashboards are much better now as well.

- I love the dashboards.

- So they've got all these pre-prepared reports just drag them or plunk them on your dashboard. But here with this new custom report builder, you can get very sophisticated about the reports you build joining across things. And we've got a few examples in here. Like I joined across web activities with form submits, with contacts, joining across them all to produce reports. I've got some screenshots where I actually wanted to drill into web activities to see the kinds of terms people were searching on HubShots. You know, we added the HubShots search thing. So I've got an example of that. And look, plenty more notes in the show notes. But the other thing that I will just call out, is that there's custom filter roles. So this is really good. Previously with reports you'd filter down. So you'd kind of filter down and down. They were almost like always an and. This and this and this and this. Whereas now you can see them on the screenshots of what they, you can actually put your own parentheses in. You can say this or this or this and this and you can do that kind of ordering of parenthesis for how it's filtered. It's really powerful and simple pick two in--

- Deeply Craig.

- And the other thing I like, is that you can export stuff out. So that's good.

- Tell us, Craig, what are the things that you don't like?

- So the thing that disappointed me is that on some of them, the timeframes. For example, the web activities events, you're limited to 30 days, maximum of 30 days. I actually wanted to run it for the whole year but couldn't. Can be a bit slow to recalculate. It must be doing some massive number crunching behind the scenes, but I'm sure that'll get better. And even just things like saving the report, saving the name, causes it all to recalculate. But I will say when it recalculates it doesn't freeze the screen. You can keep working and there's actually a tick box. So you can say, look, don't update the reporters who go. So it's quiet. It's not hostile at all. It's quite user friendly there. But there's some objects. The one I'd like to report across is campaigns and also social engagements. They're not yet available. Maybe they are on the road map. And also I'm gonna assume that their new custom objects that just launched. I'm gonna assume that they will be available in the report builder in the future as well. But look, this is such a powerful tool. To think a couple of years ago, when they were trying to charge a fortune for this really lame reporting add-on to come to where it is now with all this functionality and their dashboards and everything, they've come a long way. This is really good. This is a really good tool. I'm very impressed with this.

- And I think one of the key things here Craig, is that people get to a stage where for example, they've utilized all of the prebuilt reports and then they start delving into something more specific. And this is where this is gonna be deeply powerful to deliver that data. Now, Craig onto our sales feature of the week. And this is about HubSpot Team Round Robin meetings. And this is not a new feature.

- It's not new. It's been around for ages. And you use this with some of your clients as well, don't you?

- Correct. I have set up for some of our clients and I loved how it works. And we just wanna make you aware of it that this is a really key aspect. One of the features, I think that makes the meeting tool stand out, especially when we're talking about teams and the beta do that. So you can put the people in the team and essentially the system will pick out who's available at the time and give the person the ability to book the meeting. Now, so that's one part. What's the next part? There is a gotcha with this. And we're coming to that in our gotcha of the week, but--

- I really liked this Team Round Robin. I've only just started using it recently, I have to say. And so that's why I wanted to put it in the show notes. As I said, it's been around for a while. It's not new, but I hadn't used it until a week or two ago. And it's really good. I just really like it. And as you said, it just means whoever's available, there's only one meeting thing that you can sign up for and it allocates it out to whoever's available. So really flexible and good user experience as well.

- Now, one thing you can do within that and that is gonna be a gotcha of the week. But you can put ability to have a Zoom link. That'll automatically get put in there and we're gonna come to that. But before we talk about that, the sales feature of the week. Sorry, I meant the HubSpot extra of the week, Craig.

- Extra of the week. Cause there's so much. And you told me about this one, you were like, ah, did you know you can do this with emails? I was like, no, show me this. And you've got some nice screenshots as well.

- After discussion about emails in the last episode about having a single column. I had a customer of ours, kindly put together a three-column email, which may be modified. Anyway to do them the justice, I kept it as version A, I made version B with two columns. And in the process of doing that, I was testing it on a mobile. And I said, well, how do I make this look better on mobile? And what I found was in the builder for the image, what happens to me for the image part of this, is a slider that says show us maximum width on mobile devices. And I thought, oh, okay, I'll try to test this out. And sure enough, what did I get? I got the image spanning the full width for mobile. Now, when I first did this because of the image sizes it didn't work 100%, but then once I fixed it up, it worked better. And I've put a screenshot in the show notes of what it looked like on a desktop device when you preview the email and what it looks like on a mobile. And it turned out really great. And you'll see the same part of the email in the show notes. I encourage you to use that and use that feature to make it better for mobile.

- This is really good. By the way, I'll just tell listeners if they go and see the screenshots, you have deliberately pixelated the photos. That's because it's one of your clients. You wanted to protect them, 'cause they might not like to see their own images in the show notes. So you've deliberately pixelated them. That's not how it actually looks. So I don't want listeners going, is this the kind of emails Ian sends out? I can't even read them. So you've deliberately pixelated them just for the show notes, but this is a great tool.

- It's my new way of increasing criteria, Craig.

- Because they can't see what they take in.

- It's like when people make deliberate typos so that they get a response.

- That's right. Anyway, onto our HubShots gotcha of the week, Craig. And this is into what we were talking about before. It's about Zoom links within HubSpot meeting links.

- By the way shout out to Chris Higgins for this first one. So we're gonna talk about two separate instances of gotchas with Zoom links. Here's a letter to us that the issue is around permissions. So let's say you and I, and we're both set up, we've got portals in HubSpot portal, user accounts in HubSpot portal. You've connected your Zoom account to your profile. I've connected my Zoom account to my profile. Then I go and create a meeting. But because I'm an admin, I can create a meeting for you as well. So that's fine, allows me to create a meeting, but it won't allow me in that meeting to have your Zoom link, possibly some permission there. So this is what Chris has identified. There's no real workaround at the moment. So that's a bit of a gotcha. I haven't actually tested that myself personally, but I've had a similar occurrence. I will just mention it here, but when you and I were chatting about it before you were saying, no, I might not have set it up correctly. So we've gotta double check this. But when I set up the Team Round Robin meeting links, so I've got myself in there and Kylie from our team in there, we tested it and someone booked a meeting with Kylie, but because I had set up the Team Round Robin meeting link, the notification came from me and also my Zoom link was used to create the meeting, even though the meeting was for her and went into her calendar. So I was a bit confused around that. So possibly it's a gotcha or possibly I've just stuffed something up and you said to me, oh, let's check that out and test it. So listeners, I might have to come back next week and say I got it wrong, which would be good because then the gotcha is I did something wrong and we can tell the listeners what it was. But just be aware of that. Send us a note or send us an email if you've actually had gotchas as well, specifically around using Zoom in HubSpot with multiple users in trying to make that work.

- Our marketing tip of the week, Craig.

- Well, John Lim has done it again, hasn't he?

- He sure has, I love his stuff.

- Good little reminder, like this is a simple stuff, but a good reminder, just how to set up custom audiences in Facebook for your most engaged website users. So this is retargetings or a pixel on your site. So people are coming, you're creating an audience of the people that visited your site for the most time and that's a simple setting, you can say visitors by time spending, just choose top 25%, pretty easy to find. I've got a screenshot in the notes from one of our Facebook accounts on how to set that up.

- And listeners, this sounds like something you would possibly do in HubSpot in the ads tool. Now you could, based on just visitors to your site, but the key difference using it in the Facebook Ads tool here, is you're doing visitors by time spent. And you're choosing the top 25%. And that is the winning formula right there. Actually, before I continue on Craig, I do wanna tell people, if you are setting all of this up and we've spoken about this before, even if you don't intend on using Facebook or Google, please set up your pixels and please collect the data because there will come a point when you've got enough data or you might decide, hey, I wanna go and market to these people that have visited our site or looked at particular pages, it becomes really useful. So for example, I had a customer the other day, they were trying to market a particular product and it's a low value product compared to the rest of their products in their business. But they've got a lot of stock. And they had a very small list of people that had previously purchased the product. What was really interesting, I was able to go and create a list of people who'd visited the pages on that product who might not necessarily have bought the product, but they looked at it at some point in time. And then what I did was I was able to push that list into Facebook to then target them which I thought was fantastic in even email market terms. So here's one of the things that the power of it is. You've just got to have your pieces in place and then you can utilize them at the right time.

- Good advice, Ian.

- All right, insight of the week, Craig.

- So I've called this the importance of focusing on results, which will sound obvious but let me explain a situation or a trap really that I fell into with a client. Quite a big client, actually. A sizable retainer working with him, bunch of our team working with him. So the goal, as you can imagine is leads and revenue. Of course, this is a client, so that's pretty common. However, we got drawn into all these discussions about marketing stuff that doesn't really tie into leads that we just got trapped on. So things like, oh, we need new email signatures that keep the corporate brand. We need to update our quoting template. We wanna improve, like all these general things that a marketing manager would probably, or marketing coordinator would look after. So they're not bad things, but they're just not high value. And they're certainly not noticeably contributing to the outcome that the client's paying us for. So we're doing all these things. We're even doing mockups of storefront, signage, all these kinds of things. And then the client said, well, where's the leads? And we're like, we're running some campaigns but we've been spending so much time on all this other stuff that we hadn't devoted as much time as we should have been to campaigns, driving traffic, leads and converting into customers. So pretty basic stuff. Luckily we caught it, we're on very good terms with the client and they had a bit of a dummy spit at me and rightly so, kind of led us to fall into this trap. We're back on track now. That's probably when we're starting to wind down all those other pieces that we're doing, but there is the one I mentioned in the show, is like, don't make the mistake I did. It's so easy. I've been doing this for years, Ian. And yet I got caught in this trap and there were signs like oh, that's great. You did all these bits. And then it's like, they're not high value pieces. They're little. So this applies both to agencies listening to this and also marketing managers, because as an agency, you know, that you've got an external client. If you're a marketing manager, you've got an internal client which might be well, your boss or your company. So make sure you're focusing on the high value things. Agree with whoever your stakeholder is about what the most important item is, leads, whatever it is, make sure that's your focus. And yeah, don't make the mistake I did. Have you ever fallen in this trap, Ian? I hope you haven't, but I don't know.

- I certainly have Craig. That's all I can relate to this. And you know, one of the things that we have done is be really clear when we're talking to people, be really clear on the goal. Write that at the top of that piece of paper really big. And then if they're asking you for all of this stuff or you are being required to deliver all of this, is write it all down and then measure it against, hey, what have I got to achieve? We've actually got a big blackboard in the office. Now we write stuff on so we can see it every day.

- It's a good idea, Ian.

- And you don't understand. It's great having HubSpot and it's great having reporting and getting stuff emailed to you. But when you have something, when you walk into your workspace that you see in front of you, or you're constantly, when you scan the room you see that, it has a whole different effect. It really refocuses you from what am I doing here and brings you back. So yes, those things might be important, so write them down and then measure it against what you wanna achieve. And you can put that in, now we need to do that or on the later pile or I need to delegate this to somebody else to get it done. But it's not your main focus. But that's the way to manage it really well. And I mean, encouraging people, be visual about, I've been telling people to write sticky notes and stick it on their vanity mirrors or in the bathroom or wherever it is, wherever you see stuff a lot. Do it because it keeps you focused. And listeners, this is not just for marketing. This is even for something you wanna achieve for that week or even in your life, what are you believing for and do that. You'll be surprised what you will achieve and what the outcome will be. Alright, resource of the week, Craig. And this is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Entry free level version.

- Yeah, it's a free version. It's pretty good to get a site audit and backlink profile and they've called it Ahrefs, by the way, is it Ahrefs or Ahrefs.

- No, I think we talked about this before.

- What did we decide? Ahrefs, yeah. They've called it Ahrefs Webmaster Tools which is a confusing name, but I guess it's like, I bet everybody you should sign up. And when you do, you can just import straight from Google Search console. So if you've already got your website set up there, imports them all, creates the projects, it's great.

- And what does it give you, Craig?

- Gives you site audit and a backlink profile for each website that you import. Now this site audit's pretty good, highlights a few things. Now we use SEMrush for most of our stuff. We've got a big paid plan with SEMrush that we use. And it's got a site audit. And so we're kind of comparing it to this, to check what's good and bad. And actually the Ahrefs one does have actually some nice things on it. So one of the things that jumps out, it'll highlight large images on pages. So you can quickly go, oh, here's a, and so we had one of our client's sites. They'd set up this little resources page with tiny thumbnails. Each of the thumbnails, you guessed it, was some massive three or four-meg image that they'd just resized within the CMS. So yeah, immediately then we're cleaning up and making pages more performant. Is that the word? Performant, Ian? Now more performant. And then there's also a backlink profile as well. So I think it's just a no brainer. Go and set them up, they're really good.

- Now onto our quote of the week, Craig. And this is from John Maxwell, one of my favorites, and it says the seven steps to success. Number one, make a commitment to grow daily.

- There, learn it all, right there.

- That's right. Number two, value the process more than events. Number three, don't wait for inspiration. Number four, be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity. Number five, dream big. Six, plan your priorities.

- There we go, insight of the week right there.

- That's right. And number seven, give up and go up.

- What does that last one mean? Give up to go up, what's does that mean?

- So you've got to give up certain things to move up, Craig. So I saw a really good, I don't know whether it is a meme or a picture, of someone was saying, that you can't carry a really heavy suitcase up a mountain, would you? If you're climbing somewhere or you're going places, you're moving up, you can't carry really heavy stuff. You've gotta let go of stuff so you can climb the mountain. And there you go, there you have it. Now Craig, the word of the week, shoshin. Tell me.

- It means the beginner's mind. So see how we've very neatly top and tailed this episode around that. And we've got a link to the Wikipedia link, but yeah, I think it's more of a Zen term and it's around just this idea of approaching everything as a beginner, even if you're advanced. And I remember when I did karate, for many years as you know, and the people that were probably the most open were the black belts and the higher dans when we got there. Just this idea that you're always a beginner. So it's a very martial arts mindset as well. You're always a beginner. You've never kind of arrived. You've never reached it.

- Very well said, Craig. All right, listen. Now we talked about buyer personas can overcomplicate your marketing.

- Oh, I just see this from friend of the show, David C. Baker, we love his stuff. He's got such a good post, just talking about, and we've all seen those buyer persona, how to create a buyer persona. And it's like this massive list of characteristics, married, and whether they got kids and pets and what do they drive? And what coffee do they drink? And all this, I'm like what? You and I have discussed this on the show. It's like, what is this? It's so like specific and bizarre. He's just come along and it's such a relief to read this. He's like, you only need to know a few things. Pain points, their understanding of the cost and their authority to make a purchase. Along with the confidence we knew as a supplier, it's like, that's your buyer persona. How do you find those people, kind of thing? I do get it though, knowing interests of people is important. Particularly for targeting. You and I have had a chat about things like, how do you target tradies? Well, do they have an interest in four-wheel drives? Oh, that's a good way to target tradies, that kind of stuff. So I get that. But a lot of the other stuff, it's just overkill, isn't it?

- And listeners, I think this is a really common thing. And I think we discussed this in the last episode is bringing it all back and reviewing your personas and understanding who you're marketing to. Because everything you create from your content to your videos, to how you speak to them. When you speak to them is really key. And it's a really key aspect that people often miss when they're doing this. So here's a good reminder to us. A, not to overcomplicate things and B, to constantly review it. Now, Craig, what's the next one? Facebook using tobacco playbook. We love tobacco around here.

- You've gotta read this link. It's just a form of Facebook manager talking, cause he was called before the congressional committee to talk about it and just how they've so focused on making Facebook addictive. And he actually used the term they used the big tobacco playbook and I just thought, yeah, that's it, addictive for all social media channels or platforms trying to do that. But he fears we're pushing ourselves. He actually said this to the brink of a civil war, possibly at worst. So frightening stuff, but just reminds us of episode 151 when we likened advertising on Facebook to advertising on cigarette packets.

- That's right.

- It brings back memories. Doesn't it, Ian?

- It sure does. Now listeners, we'd love you to connect with us on LinkedIn, please send us a message. And if you do need help, Craig and myself are here to help you. No matter where you are, how big or small you are, don't ever feel you're not worthy to reach out to us. We would love to hear from you. And we'd love to thank Chris Mottram from Podcastily, that produces our podcast.

- Thanks Chris.

- Keeps this show on the run and Craig, you know what, last episode we told people to tell us the people that would be listening from the start, we totally forgot to--

- Oh my goodness, we did. Did anyone contact you to say they'd been listening from the start? I didn't get anyone.

- Anyway, I think there are a few. Let's just name a few. Charles McKay being one of them.

- Yeah, good one, Charles. Just didn't go the extra.

- That's right. Dan. I'm sure I had to use him. Remember Dan from, remember inbound that time we went.

- I'll probably had them down, shout out to, that's right.

- Now listeners thank you for sticking with us over the last five years. And we would love you to share this with your colleagues or share these with people on your team. Until next week, Craig.

- Catch you later, Ian.

- Hey there, thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. To get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and resources, sign up at hubshots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better with HubSpot.