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.

[JoseyDeRossi]

Thanks to Kieran and Omer for the content and their approach to communicating it in the Masterclass.  The power of the structure and exemplification within their presentations were excellent.  They prove the fact that good teaching is good storytelling.  

I did not have such a productive week this week, so I didn't make time for the live Q & A or anything in Elevate... you know how it is...the worse it gets sometimes you just dig yourself deeper into the problem. 

I wish I had surfaced for air before I did... the Masterclass alone was inspirational. It proves that there's so much merit in stopping and listening to another perspective in this complex space of digital communications. 

I have to do catchup now with looking at the recording of the Q& A and doing the homework on SEO but I'll now make time in the week to give myself the gift of being 'elevated'.  

Thank you

Josey

[raymondcarl]

Hi,

I'm trying to test the Problem-Solution Fit of an app I'm building. In the beginning, I thought the problem my app solves is painful enough that the people who have the problem would subscribe for a low amount ($1/month) without having to resort to free trials or the "use basic for free and pay for premium" model. I'm finding that I have to resort to the "use basic for free and pay for premium" model. I have noticed that many apps (including Litetricks) use this model, but does this mean that I probably haven't reached a Problem-Solution Fit if I have to resort to those marketing / sales tactics?

Thanks for any advice you can give! 

[cpieri]

Hey @raymondcarl!

I'd love to understand a bit more about why you are so hesitant to embrace the freemium model for your product. No matter how great a product is today people typically feel much more comfortable investing in something if they have tried it a bit before they end up paying for it. As such, I don't think there is necessarily any 'issue' with your product if you are seeing more success with the freemium model, rather this is just how consumers prefer to consumer products these days. Also $1/month is a very low cost so its possible you'd be able to charge a bit more when you go through a freemium model (and it's like investors would like to see you charging more if you are going down the angel or VC route).

[raymondcarl]

Thanks for replying @cpieri.

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@cpieri wrote:

I'd love to understand a bit more about why you are so hesitant to embrace the freemium model for your product. 

---

I'm new to the area, so I was just concerned that the model feels coercisive. At this stage, I only want to know if the need for the product is strong, and I was worried that if I use a coercisive tactic, I might be tricked into thinking there's a strong need for the product when there really isn't.

---

@cpieri wrote:

Hey @raymondcarl!

No matter how great a product is today people typically feel much more comfortable investing in something if they have tried it a bit before they end up paying for it. As such, I don't think there is necessarily any 'issue' with your product if you are seeing more success with the freemium model, rather this is just how consumers prefer to consumer products these days. 

---

That's good to know because if this is what consumers expect, then I'm less concerned that adoption is less driven by coercian rather than need.

---

@cpieri wrote:

Also $1/month is a very low cost so its possible you'd be able to charge a bit more when you go through a freemium model (and it's like investors would like to see you charging more if you are going down the angel or VC route).

---

Yeah, thanks. I'm going to raise the price in the next round of testing because I think there's a signal being sent that the product isn't that good if I'm only charging $1.

 

[Vato]

I represent the claim agency Flyhelp . We support the air-passengers to receive financial compensation from various airlines. Our major challenge is to find out the passengers on flights, which ere entitled to compensansation. What is your opinion, if we do a user persona analysis on existing data, can it help us to find out the other passengers, who were on the same flight?

[cpieri]

Hey @Vato,

To make sure I'm understanding, your agency helps clients when their has been a delay or other distrubance on a flight so that they can get money back from the airline?

I think it would be quite hard to use persona analysis to find people who were on the exact same flight based on your data research. This data is generally going to be very protected. While some paid ad platforms may be smart enough to determine this by proximity, I'd say the success cases would be few and far between.

A much more succesful strategy is going to be centered around thinking about the mindset your persona is in after such a flight disturbance that might lead them to your company. What forums are they going on? what are they searching? What resources are they leveraging? Creating content that dominates in this space will help direct this weary travelers to your brand.

The key difference here is about trying to go out and find the customers vs letting the right customers find you.

[paulomondi1]

Hi Carl,

I sensed that I did miss out on the Attract masterclass content. This has to do with my time of registration. Could I kindly gain access to this content for download since I don't want to skip any step in the customer acquisition and retention journey course. Thank you.

[cpieri]

Hi @paulomondi1! All content can be found on the ELEVATE Learning Center, here: https://offers.hubspot.com/elevate/lms

[navjotsandhu]

My startup is for setting up a consulting firm for Smart City Product and Service Development.  After mathematically analyzing all the difficulties involved, and self assesments of capabilities, I am taking the approach of high quality products and service creations to attract customers as a one stop shop to help them create succesful, well engineered products and be successful in the smart city ecosystem(which is huge and difficult).  While I knew there would be noise, I didn't realize there would be so much, so I'm glad I did due dilligence on market and product segmentation.  I am going to be using free, low cost strategies to attract customers because the industry is very new and it is important to build a network of new customers and knowing I'm there.  Any advice? Should I not be in the free, low cost quadrant?

[cpieri]

Hey @navjotsandhu!

Thanks for your question. I want to make sure I'm understand your company properly. It's going to be a consulting firm for startups who are developeming products or services for Smart Cities? Is that correct. 

If so, I'm not sure if the free/low-cost quadrant makes sense for you. Typically free/low-cost are products like Venmo or Buzzfeed where the company makes money off of ad revenue or small transaction fees. Let me know if I'm not fully understanding your situation so I can give you the best answer possible.

[navjotsandhu]

Yes, it will be for startups and/or companies that want to do business in that space.  

Will high per hour consulting cost keep customers away, or will it be expected for the customers budget?  Is there a sweet spot or price range for initial consultation fees when first starting a consultation company?

[b0bbybaldi]

This topic was great, I especially liked the idea of getting partners/fans to help you promote your brand and product (however this is still not clear to me how to achieve as it is a difficult task, only a few companies really achieve this).

How do you feel about utilizing google optimize, and other analytics tools to help determine such route in the customer journey to aid in achieving this goal?

[cpieri]

Hey @b0bbybaldi!

On your point about partners, we actually talked about this alot during yesterday's AMA with Kim and Mia. You can find that here if you'd like to check it out.

On your question about specific tools. I highly recommend Google Optimize if you are thinking about it, its been very helpful for my team's work. Other tools that we find very useful at HubSpot for tracking the customer journey would be Google Analytics and Amplitude!

[DR16]

For our product, there is very little search done outside of 1 or 2 keywords and that volume is relatively small. Potential users mostly search on the brand name.

Any recommendations on how to create the SIR when very little search is being done? We can take down the 'minimum' number, but at what point is it worth the effort?

[cpieri]

Hey @DR16 !

So Kieran actually have a good answer to this during the live AMA last week. You can watch that here  (Password: ELEVATE20!) and its at 49:15 that we talk about this specific question.

Let me know if you have any issuesor if this does not quite answer what you're looking for.

Best,

Carl

[DIMPACT]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to get relevant leads. I am speaking about business email addresses if they download content and I want to avoid that they use personal emails. Is there any tool, how I can force them to use the business email address?

[cpieri]

Hey there @DIMPACT!

I am not aware of a tool that explicitly does that but in certain tools like HubSpot you can block certain domains from being submitted (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) to decrease the likelihood that someone is sharing their personal email. You can see a knowledge doc on how to do that here.

Another alternative may be to simply put it in as sub copy underneath the form field “Email” and say something like “please use your business email address.” And instead of “Email” you could put “Business Email” and even put an example like carl@hubspot.com in the sub copy. Just a thought!

[stephenspiegel]

This is more specific to Hubspot use case:

Kieran spoke about attributing revenue during the talk today.  We are B2B, and in the Hubspot analytics tool, revenue is attributed to campaigns even if the company is an existing client, so existing revenue is attributed to the campaign.  Is there a way to attribute influenced campaign revenue to companies?

Also as a B2B SaaS company, I am more interested in company analytics than contact analytics so I can track # of new company MQLs > Free Trials > Deals >customers.  Is there a way to accomplish this in Hubspot? 

I could be wrong, but Hubspot seems to fit better with B2C.  Can anyone point me in the right direction to help setup better analytics in Hubspot for B2B.

In Gratitude,

Stephen

[LoganTO87]

Question didn't get answered in the AMA. If you're starting off on content marketing and are still an early stage startup, video and podcast content seems like a very large time commitment when time is the tightest resource.

Is it worth starting with a blog and trying to expand to other media platforms as you grow, or is it not worth doing if you aren't going to do it all?

[cpieri]

Hey @LoganTO87!

Our VP of Content at HubSpot Meghan Keaney Anderson answers this in an AMA on the power of content marketing that she did a few months ago. You can find the recording here, but to summarize, she shared:

Like most things, which content marketing channels you sink your time/budget into depends on the type of audience you are going after and what kind of startup you are. The one thing that should be consistent regardless of industry is to start a blog. This helps you build a website that is search engine optimized and will help lift your website’s credibility up - establishing yourself as a thought leader in the market. Outside of the blog, startups should choose one other social channel to throw the bulk of your effort into - be better than all your competitors in that channel. Then have a secondary channel as a back up to experiment with. 

Some platforms to consider include Instagram, which is a great platform for consumer-facing startups and LinkedIn for B2B startups. Youtube can be interesting to explore for the right content but it can be more expensive than other social platforms. What about podcasting? You don't do podcasting to get discovered - there are too many podcasts out there. But a podcast can be repackaged for multiple different channels so you can get a lot of value out of your time. Finally, Facebook groups are an up-and-coming feature that startups could explore if they are looking to build more of a community.

Let me know if you have anh questions!