Attract Masterclass and Case Study Questions

[cpieri]

Have any questions about this masterclass and case study? This is the place to post them!

We'll be sourcing answers to our questions from our instructor as well as various experts across HubSpot and other organizations. As such, it may take some time to answer every question, although we aim to answer them all as soon as possible.

[BrianSparr]

For a brand new company (in case it matters, in the B2B SaaS space), how do you recommend we prioritize our efforts on creating content versus spending that same time designing and building the product?

Are there any shortcuts/tricks/hacks that we should consider in the early days to help accelerate our content strategy?

[cpieri]

Hey @BrianSparr!

Great questions! To answer the first one, our VP of Content at HubSpot, Meghan Keaney Anderson answered some questions around this in a "the power of content marketing" AMA she did a few months ago that I think will be helpful in answering this. You can find that here. Typically in the early stages I recommend focusing heavily on creating the product with consistent communication with your customers at every point in this process. These communications with customers often lead to you realizing the kinds of content that you need to create (and often you end up half creating them in your comms with customers). 

As for your second question, I think that AMA I shared above will also be helpful but also many universities have startup programs, whether an Entrepreneurship Center or some kind of community-oriented incubator or just entrepreneurship classes. Many of those professors and program directors are looking for experiential learning opportunities for their students. The students may receive credit or fulfill working hours requirements for working with a startup, or they just may be looking for experience. Consider tapping into your local higher education programs and seeing if there is a way to work with the students. 

[nvakaliuk]

Hi, Guys, 

First of all, I wanted to thank Kieran and Omer for shared expertise. It is very helpful and we already started building our Viewst Playbook for Growth. 

Also, I have a few questions which would be cool to discuss during the online Q&A session today: 

1. How to convert users from a Free trial to a paid account? Is there any specific feature on web-site, or particular techniques while building communication in a blog? 

2. We built a design tool for the development of web banners of any kind from scratch and we are mainly focused on B2C segment (designers-freelancers, SME, head of production at media agency), my question: shall we use different approaches for user acquisition of each category or we may stick to a unified method of attracting users?

3. Based on Hubspot experience, what was the best channel for organic user acquisition?  

4. How to maximize word-of-mouth marketing for B2C business? Shall we use specific buttons, like "Invite Friend" or other kinds of call-to-action buttons to attract more users? 

5. How to connect deeper with potential customers in COVID- era? What do you do in Hubspot? 

Thank you in advance

Nataly

[cpieri]

Hey @nvakaliuk! Below are answers to your questions:

1. We actually were able to ask this question during the live AMA this week, so I think you might find some value in seeing Kieran and Omer's answer to this question at about 2 minutes in the AMA recording here from last week (under "Attract" and then the "Ask Me Anything Recording" tab

2. General strategy can remain similar, but content needs to be personalized to the pain points of the end user. One very important part of acquisition is to be relevant to your end user, and the messaging and benefits of your tool are likely different based on the persona.  I’d suggest doing some research about each persona, how they learn about new tools and their pain points. You may find that each persona gathers information in different ways and channels, in which case you will want to adjust your strategy accordingly. This research can be done through customer conversations, surveys, listening to sales calls, focus groups.

3. This will vary a lot based on the persona. HubSpot has built a very strong content engine, something we have focused on since day 1. In fact, our founders were some of our first bloggers! Through our content engine we have acquired strong organic user growth.

4. A referral program is a great thing to try out for WOM. Try a pilot program and do research before investing a lot, to understand what motivates your customers. If you are hoping to build out a more formal/lasting customer advocacy community, here is an article I wrote last year that might be able to help you out.

5. During Covid-19, we have found that connecting with customers effectively has required a significant change in our tone as well as a more personalized approach when it comes to marketing and sales. Certain ‘one-size-fits’ all strategies no longer apply during this time. You can check out this post here on specifically how HubSpot is responding to the pandemic. As you’ll see on that post, we have significantly altered the kind of content we are producing at this time, particularly in our Adapt 2020 campaign.

[LydiaNicoll]

Hi! Looking forward to the AMA today.

I have these questions:

As a small startup with b2b and b2c products (with the business model being b2b, but needing end-consumer adoption) how do we prioritize activities with limited time and budget to grow both bases simultaneously?

Which tools do you think are valuable for startups to invest in? (Besides HubSpot 😁)

If we are pre-launch with no customers yet, how do we achieve being ‘experts’ on our customers? How can we ensure the assumptions and hypothesis we have are accurate? (We are in pilot phase)

What is the best way to acquire local beta-testers and what are best practices for ensuring conversion/long term usage after the testing phase?

Lydia, ClowID, Malmö, Sweden

[cpieri]

Hey @LydiaNicoll!

1. So I want to make sure I'm understanding clowID - businesses will pay a subscription to use the product, but ultimately customers will need to download the app (for free?) in order to leverage the product, view their receipts, etc? As such, the model becomes more and more useful as more people and businesses adopt clowID? If that is the case, I've often found that these brands find success by locating a local chain in a certain area that will be willing to beta-test the product and encourage their loyal customer base to adopt it. As such, at the beginning, much of the effort is spent on getting the B2B side on board as this is critical in order for the B2C folks to find value. This a generalization however, if I understand your situation a bit more I may be able to get more sepcific. 

2. We typically recommend investing in AWS (if you qualify for the AWS Activate program that is even better!) for web-hosting, Google products for team comms (sheets, forms, gmail, etc), and Google Analytics for tracking purposes. Another tool that I really love and I think helps startups tremendously improve their website experience is HotJar.

3. If you are still pre-launch, the best recommendation I can make is to identify who you think your target customer may be and find a group of beta-testers (more on that shortly) who are willing to use your product and provide feedback on it throughout its development. Many times I have worked with startups who develop their entire product in a bubble and by the time they bring it to market they find that it does not align with customer expectations and has to be changed dramatically to fit the need.

4. Finding local beta-testers can be tricky. Most startup leverage their friends & family networks at the beginning to source these testers. However, you can also take other actions such as posting on reddit, or beta-testing sites. Here is an article I find to be pretty good when thinking about acquiring beta testers. Since your product can also involve in-person point of sales systems you may also find value in trying to source beta testers in local businesses / chains. As far as converting them to long-term customers, I think you might find some value in seeing Kieran and Omer's answer to this question at about 2 minutes in the AMA recording here from last week (under "Attract" and then the "Ask Me Anything Recording" tab

[chromabill]

I really loved the workshop this week for attracting customers.

I learned a tremendous amount about engaging with customers,  building out our customer acquisition strategy, market research, distribution playbooks, and defining key metrics to measure our goals.

I even took it one step further and defined the 10x for Chromabill. 

Some key questions:

1. We’ve been running ads for the past quarter and have found that we have a strong male audience. How do you suggest we market differently so we have higher conversion rates for women?

2. In order to be an expert on our customers, we have to understand where they are coming from. Is there a way I can efficiently track exactly where our customers found us from without needing to ask them?

3. What are some great incentives for referrals we can implement without having to lose out on profits such as free months of service per referral? 

[Haelsoft]

Amazing. Building Customer Acquisition Strategy and Market Research was a breakthrough for me. I went further to study more about Buyer Persona. Developing the right Buyer Persona. 

Thanks for sharing.

[cpieri]

Hey @chromabill!

I love it! You're 10x looks great! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the session 🙂

To answer your questions: 

1. From our ads experts at HubSpot: most ad platforms allow you to target gender, so one option could be for them to run one campaign for women and one campaign for men - that way the spend is evenly distributed. Some followup questions on this however: are you seeing your ads spends skew automatically towards men or are you seeing the conversion rates and performance is better for men?  Are you trying to increase spend and volume for women, or are you trying to improve the performance such as CVR and CPA for women compared to men? With these answers @chromabill, I can get more accurate answers for you!

2. Identifying the source of your customers and proving ROI is an age-old problem when it comes to marketing. The good news is that with digital marketing this has improved significantly from where it once was. The bad news is that digital data is very segmented so it can be tricky to identify this effectively. The most direct answer to your question is that you will likely need to invest in a tool that can provide some level of source data or attribution data. Tools I'd recommend include Bizible, Google Analytics, or even HubSpot now has attribution reporting in our Enterprise tier. The tricky thing about attribution data however is that it typically can only measure your contacts as far back as their first interaction with your brand (and their source for that interaction) but does not capture all the interactions with your brand that might occur outside of this (word of mouth, referrals, blog posts, articles, etc). As such, it may be necessary to ask your customers where they are coming from in order to make sure you are getting the full picture. To make this less of a burden on our customers, one thing I do is periodically add a question into our signup flow that asks our customers how they found our brand/product. We don't have this question running all the time, but just occasionally so we can monitor any changes in trends and action them approriately. 

3. Great question! There are two ways to think about referral bonuses: what the brand who is cashing in on the referral wants and what the actual person who is cashing in on the referral wants. While the brand may want free months of software or upgrades, the actual person cashing in the referral is more likely to want gift cards, cash, presents, etc. Typically something like an Amazon or Visa gift card or a 'choose your own present' site such as this is a good option. You also have the option to build a more constant referral community where participants can earn points that they cash in when they want to. If you are hoping to built a customer advocacy community, here is an article I wrote last year that might be able to help you out.

[chromabill]

@cpieri Hi Carl ! Thank you for the compliments! These workshops have been extremely insightful and incredibly invaluable to our team, especially now more than ever since we're launching July 1st. Even this week, I'm already learning a tremendous amount on how to go-to-market! This accelerator is perfectly aligned with our launch date. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions! I really appreciate it. 

1. (Thanks for having your ad experts look into this!) I think that's a great idea. I'm going to do some experiments on running a few different A/B targeted campaigns for different genders to see how they play out. We've been running a few Instagram ads for the past Quarter in 2020 and our Fb Ads Manager has shown these results. We've only spent around $500 since most of the costs have been on the actual product development for the MVP buildout. However, these are the results that we have gotten. 

It seems like all the ads spend do skew towards men ($412) meaning that more men are engaging with the content.  We want to increase the spending up to and following our launch but we ideally want to try to achieve a solid 50/50 split between the genders so that we have a good engagement with both. @cpieri 

2. So for this question, we currently are using Wix for our landing page since their customization options are so easy to use and they provide notifications for each visitor on our site. They do have their own attribution data, see photo below:

but I think you make a solid point that we should engage with our customers and find out where they're coming from. Especially for metrics like WOM which is harder to track. We are using Intercom, so we can easily send welcome messages to users and ask them questions right from the Intercom messenger. Our marketing team has even decided to extend our free trial for users impacted by Covid-19 as long as they're willing to answer 3 key questions. It would go something like this: 

“We can extend your Chromabill Trial for an additional two months so you can focus on getting back on your feet. The only thing we ask for in return is your time. May I ask you three quick survey questions? It would benefit our company greatly.” 

• How did you find our app?
  What do you love?
  What can be improved?

Additionally, Intercom has rules that we can implement for our messaging. We will have tags on users who will be inching closer to the end of their expiration date for their free trial so that we can send them this targeted messaging for any user tagged "Trial Expiring":

Thanks for sharing the links to some attribution reporting companies. I think Bizible is only for B2B, but I'll research into the kind of attribution Google Analytics can offer. Apple's recent announcement during WWDC emphasized privacy so it's going to be harder for app developers to subtly get as much data on our users as possible starting in Fall 2020.  

3. This was extremely insightful. One thing our target market loves is instant gratification so if they can earn points and redeem it for an Amazon card, for example, I feel like that would be a lot more beneficial for them than just free months of service! We're focusing mostly on retention when we launch so we can keep our retention as high as possible instead of focusing on just growth.  The probability of selling our app to new prospects is 5-20%, meanwhile, the probability of selling our service to an existing customer is 60-70%. So it’s clear to see that it’s far easier to keep our loyal users than acquire new users, so I think it's extremely important for our team to start building out a good rewards/advocacy program.

Thank you for sharing the links and the article you wrote. Like you said in the article, we want our customers to be our brand ambassadors and promote our products and the best way we can do that is to remain customer focused throughout every experience. That is pretty crazy that you were able to conduct a survey with 731 participants!! How were you able to get so many willing participants? I would love to have that kind of number for my customer interviews, haha. Also, I totally didn't expect that these personalities, including Educators/Validators, would be interested in a cash incentive, but your graph proved me wrong! It's clear that most people would much rather take a thank you letter and cash incentives over new features or content from the brand. 

How can I determine which personality my current customers will fall under? Is there a way to do so without having to survey them? For example, if (without having to survey them) the majority of my users are in the collaborator personality, then they would obviously want more features as showcased in this chart below. So how can I determine this without turning my app into a focused group? For example, if we were to move away from gift cards and swag and offer other unlockables such as customization of wallpaper, exclusive avatars etc. I would want to understand which personality fit would make sense so we can set up the best rewards system. If we do a welcome survey, do you have any recommendations on what we could ask?  

Again, thanks for your time and value! I really appreciate it. 

- Tony 

[cpieri]

Hi @chromabill 

I shared your information with our ad experts and this what they said "Facebook optimizes towards whatever the campaign goal is set to (conversions, clicks, etc.), so in this case men are likely performing better than women as far as the goal. If they want to have a more even split between the two, they can do the previous recommendation of creating a second campaign or ad set and target men in one/women in one and set the budgets evenly"

And I think that idea of asking three simple questions to extend the trial is a good one! Never heard of doing that before!

As far as how we got so many participants, we were able to work with QuestionPro and one of their providers to source people for the survey. It was across industries and ages so the cost was only about a dollar per survey (it goes up a lot as you get more granular).

On the question of how you determine a personality type. We have not found a great way to identify someones personality without asking them directly via a survey. I suppose you may be able to build a complex AI with certain products usage factors but we didn't have those resources! We also only use this process for our advocates as opposed to all customers. So when they request or are invited to join the adovcacy community, this survey will be part of their signup process. These are the specific questions we asked.

[DR16]

We have a SaaS product that solves the top 3 pain points for attorneys, who is our target audience that would pay for the software. The other target market, potential clients, get a lot of great benefits, too.

The trick is conveying the benefits to each target market succinctly without sounding like total marketing-speak. 

Content, social, SEO is all good by target market. But the top statement is the hardest one!

[cpieri]

Hey @DR16!

Conveying a large or complex offering (particularly when you have two personas) in a succint manner is an age-old struggle in marketing and something that can take time to figure out (some people never get it right!). It's tough to give advice without understanding where you currently are on this.

Mind telling me what you are currently using to serve this need and the benefits you are hoping to convey to each market? From there I can do my best to help you figure this out! Feel free to DM me if youd like.

[JohnB2]

Hi,

I am in a market (software sales) where the existing distribution channels hold great power. The alternative, where you are selling directly to the ultimate customer, is a slower route to market but may be the only available route for startups. 

If we do sell through the existing distribution channels, should the buyer persona(s) be created for the distributor or for the ultimate buyer? 

Thanks

[cpieri]

Hey @JohnB2!

Great question! If you are selling through a distribution channel, the buyer persona will still be the ultimate buyer. Depending on your distribution channel, you may need some content/enablement resources in order to get listed/promoted within an existing distribution channel, but the large majority of your content (particularly that early-stage, attract content) is oriented towards the ultimate buyer.

[jennnickols]

It sounded like when you are planning your content clusters you used keywords as your guide to decide on the content.  Can you give some more details or practical steps about how you take your story, create the content pillar and then decide on the clusters?

[cpieri]

Hey @jennnickols!

Awesome question, this is one of my favorite things to do in marketing these days. Planning your content strategy involves a balance of discovering what is relevant for your brand, what is attainable SEO wise, and what kind of things people are searching for. The way we do this is through something called a Search Insights Report. 

I'm happy to explain it in more detail but I actually thing it will be more valuable to direct you to the courses/content we have created with Search Insights Reports experts at HubSpot. This is an amazing resource that will walk you through what a Search Insights Report is in more detail as well as specifically how to create one yourself.

If this is not quite what you are looking for and I'm misunderstanding your question please let me know!

[nvakaliuk]

Hi, Carl, thanks for sharing the Insights Report. Does it cover also a short-tail and long-tail keywords and which one is better to use in blogposts? I suppose it is very important especially when it comes to competition of a startup with an established company with a longer presence on the market. 

Thanks in advance. 

Nataly

[cpieri]

Hey @nvakaliuk! So it does get into that a bit, but the Search Insights Report is also a bit of a different way to thinking about getting traffic. Given that short tail keywords have much more traffic than long term keywords (in general), creating a search insights report is generally about finding short tail keywords that are not oversaturated, and you have a real opportunity to gain authority on. This happens through creating content specific to that term as well as the terms that surround this (often longer tail keywords). I highly recommend checking out the course (it's not too long), and I'd be more than happy to get a bit more specific in helping you create yours specifically!

[jennnickols]

I think this is exactly what I'm circling around.  Just how all the pieces work together instead of them just being individual piece.  I will definitely look into these.

[donovanw]

When building your customer story and focusing on whats changed in the world etc., how do you choose whats most relevant? How do you determine its relevancy and if it will remain relevant? I want to avoid choosing something to develop a story around that customers care about now, but may not care about in 6 months.