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Recorded: Monday 11 October 2021 | Published: Friday 15 October 2021
By the time you are reading this Inbound 2021 will be over - and there’s been a bunch of announcements made about product updates. We’ll have further details on those next week. (At the time we recorded on Monday we couldn’t be sure about what was definitely going to be announced).
I’m interested if you attended Inbound or not?
I suspect many people are over the whole online events format - after all you can likely find better produced recordings of more interesting guests discussing more relevant topics to your interests on YouTube. So what’s the benefit of attending an online event?
I’m genuinely interested in your thoughts - personally I don’t understand. But then again, to be fair, I’m still confused why people attend webinars (with their substandard audio and video, and sales push to boot). I realise I’m in the minority here - and webinars are still a highly successful channel.
For my money, just buy a YouTube Premium subscription and spend your time on YouTube watching some of the best in the world discuss strategies and tactics all day long.
And let’s not forget Zoom fatigue is a real thing...
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
Saved Sections are a handy way to - as the name implies - save sections of your emails or pages to be used easily again in future:
Deal Splits is rolling out.
This allows a deal to be credited to multiple people on your team. Here’s how it appears when you’ve set a split for a deal:
You can edit the splits at any time:
These splits then flow through to sales reports.
Note: Deal Splits can be added to Closed Deals - nice!
XML Sitemaps are useful hints for Google to crawl through your site - usually submitted via Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
You’ve likely put them in place for your website(s), but have you forgotten to add them for your knowledge base?
If so, here’s your reminder for how easy it is.
You can find the sitemaps for all your web pages, blogs and knowledge bases in Settings > Domains & URLs:
Choose your Knowledge Base domain and you can edit the sitemap just as you would for other website pages:
Once you have your XML Sitemap URL, simply add it into your Google Search Console property.
Learn about Sitemaps from Google here. It's a great resource.
The Clear Property action is likely one of the less used actions in HubSpot Workflows, but it’s crucial for a few key operations:
The most important example I can think of is when you want to set a contact’s Lifecycle Stage back a stage.
Let’s consider a workflow that runs through and wants to set a Contact’s lifecycle stage to be an MQL (perhaps based on some behaviour or criteria). If the contact is at a later stage (eg an SQL), then the usual HubSpot Set Property action will be ignored.
This is because HubSpot has a rule that a workflow only can only set lifecycle to a stage later down the funnel.
To get around this, you first need to clear the Lifecycle property - and hence why the Clear property action is required:
Further reading about how the HubSpot Lifecycle Stages work is available on their knowledge base here.
We want to highlight this and the importance of it. Even when you do the right thing you can get slowed down by higher than usual bounce rates.
Make sure you use a service like Neverbounce to validate emails.
Then you can avoid situations like this:
If you do end up in this situation what you will need to do is segment your contacts further and break the sends into smaller chunks to build back some reputation!
If you are a long time listener, you may recall Ian and I chatting in episode 151 (in March 2019) about ‘Should you advertise on cigarette packets?’ (see Shot 6).
In that episode we discussed whether Facebook was a good or a bad influence on society - and if it wasn’t, whether we should still use it as an advertising channel.
Fast forward to this past week and we’ve seen increased scrutiny on Facebook, lead by ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen’s testimony about the harm Facebook knowingly allows (in the name of profit) and the impact this is having on society (especially children).
This is the time or place to dive deep into the details, but it is useful to take a step back and consider whether Facebook is a channel that we (as marketers) will continue to be comfortable advertising on.
Back in episode 151 we simply advised thoughtfulness.
But perhaps it’s time to be stronger.
Scott Galloway’s recent post holds nothing back - it’s a wonderful evisceration of Facebook specifically, and the larger digital programmatic advertising ecosystem generally. Highly recommended.
Some of the key takeaways from me concern measurement and re-measurement.
I’ll cut to the chase and simply say this: for some of our enterprise customers we’re considering turning off advertising on some channels for a month, just to test and measure whether there is any meaningful difference in results.
It’s scary to consider. But perhaps scarier if there’s no impact...
Via the HubSpot product updates blog.
This time a year ago HubSpot introduced Marketing Contacts! Plus all the product announcements from INBOUND.
Thank me later. Watch it here.
“If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” — Frank Howard Clark
A nice thought piece from Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz on Web3.
Interesting also because it started as a tweet thread.
Summary: tokens.
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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 and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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