Episode 66: Deliberate Practice for Marketers

Written by HubShots | 07 January 2017

Welcome to Episode 66 of HubShots!

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

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Recorded: Thursday 05 January 2017 | Published: Saturday 07 January 2017

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

Prediction free zone until February!

Thinking through Deliberate Practice

Craig has been reading books on peak performance and improving productivity.

One of the topics that comes up is the concept of ‘deliberate practice’. But the idea is usually tied to musicians or athletes. It’s often hard to relate to marketing.

How can a marketing manage ‘practice’ marketing to get better at what they do?

Some thoughts:

Be inquisitive, read what industry experts are saying (check out our links at the end)
Learn about the technology: consider certifications and be a practitioner
Test and measure
Write more: posts, sales pages, ads
Work hard at your creativity

Being creative is hard work. Examples:

Write down 10 creative ideas now for new audiences you can target for your current products.
Write down 10 new creative ideas for problems your current product/service can solve.

Be a practitioner - you need to be using HubSpot and be current with certifications.

The marketing experts of 2017 will combine:

Analytics + Creative + Implementation

Action item: Write down 10 creative ideas for X

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

A/B Testing

A/B testing of landing pages and emails (in addition to CTAs)

Here is a https://knowledge.hubspot.com/landing-page-user-guide-v2/how-to-ab-test-landing-pages

Now part of HubSpot Pro (seems to have been added in November)

Love that you can change everything in a variation (including template, page title, even the form that is used)

Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Use Email Templates

Have a consistent and effective way you/sales communicate with people. Make your repetitive sales emails into templates you can access inside your inbox and share with your team.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/sales-templates/how-do-i-create-an-email-template-in-hubspot-crm

This alone will buy you back some valuable time!

Shot 4: Opinion of the Week

Brian Halligan on Marketing in 2017:

https://thinkgrowth.org/4-things-marketers-should-do-in-2017-18c37a1d6d21#.ip9c6rhu9

The ‘second act’ of inbound marketing.

Here are the four things Brian thinks every marketer should do next year:

Invest in video. Diversify your content playbook to include social + video in addition to text + search.
Live in social. We’re not B2B or B2C marketers — we’re business to human marketers. Humans live in Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger, and a host of other social apps. Find them there.
Accelerate your content. Combine content marketing and paid marketing. Repurpose your most successful content for multiple channels and boost it with budget.
Automate your buying process. Buyers expect to be able to buy on their timeline with either minimal or no human contact.

Shot 5: Creative Idea of the Week

Given that video is growing (and recommended by just about everyone), what are some video ideas you can consider for your business?

Ian’s thoughts: Go back to your persona and figure out where they are in the buying journey and what kind of video would be required. I can relate this to recently buying a car for the family and all the research and information gathering I did. What I enjoyed most was listening to a Mazda engineer talk about the car and WHY they did certain things. Made me understand some of the decisions they made that may not on the surface seem obvious.

Here is the video Ian was talking about:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrY4g9EAveg?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Craig’s thoughts: Remember utility versus entertainment - work out which response you are aiming for.

For Technology companies you can provide screencasts of using features, meeting the team building the product, etc. For Catering companies you can provide examples of your food and events, people enjoying it - it’s a simple extension from your photo (think Instagram) process to move to video.

Review anything you’ve previously photographed as a social update and consider whether a video extension of it would provide value (or entertainment).