3 more things you can do to help your business grow better.
The INBOUND conference is an annual event hosted by HubSpot, a leading marketing and sales software company. INBOUND is one of the largest marketing and sales conferences in the world, bringing together industry professionals, marketers, salespeople, and entrepreneurs from various fields. This year’s conference welcomed 12,000 attendees in-person and virtually from all over the world.
I’ve distilled the learnings from day two into three actionable items you can implement for your small business tomorrow:
Hire for Passion Over Talent
Believe it or not, this takeaway came from a session with New York Yankees hall-of-famer, Derek Jeter. In his interview with HubSpot Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, Jeter highlighted the importance of hiring passionate people rather than focusing purely on talent. This piece of advice rings especially true for small businesses who often rely on passionate people to go above and beyond in their daily activities. People who are passionate about their career and about their company will ultimately work harder, collaborate more, and contribute to high-quality customer experiences. It’s not easy to fake passion.
In the same vein, it’s important for business leaders to think about how their organization is inspiring team members to be passionate and feel valued. Businesses need to have a clear set of values that are clearly communicated in the hiring process and revisited frequently. This will make it easy to tell whether or not someone is a good hire for the culture of the organization.
Action Item: Review your mission statement and core values (or create them if you don’t already have them). Ensure these are documented somewhere all team members can find them, and be sure to include interview questions about them in your hiring process.
Invest in Brand Marketing
When I say “brand marketing,” I’m referring to any initiative that promotes the awareness of your brand with the goal of securing sales in future buying situations. This differs from performance marketing, which involves very tactical promotions generally geared at a specific product or service and focuses on driving revenue and influencing decisions in an easily-attributable way.
This takeaway is from a session led by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute team, a research organization within the company that is exploring new ways for B2B marketers to influence growth. The session was centered around a common marketing idea that only five percent of your buyers are in-market at any given time. These are the buyers you can influence with traditional performance marketing tactics. The other 95 percent of the potential buyers are out-of-market, but will enter the market for your product/service in the future. The brand that gets remembered usually gets bought, hence the importance of brand marketing.
Because of this, the LinkedIn team advises businesses to invest in brand marketing consistently over time, rather than in spurts. (Keep in mind LinkedIn makes its money from businesses buying advertisements, so it’s relatively obvious why they would recommend this). That said, it’s a worthwhile consideration and there are a lot of things you can do beyond paid social media advertisements.
Action Item: Pick out one or two things your company does better than all of the competition. Make this the foundation of your brand marketing strategy and then start to explore resources that can help you put together the creative material you’ll need to stand out in promoting your brand. It might make sense to engage a creative agency if you don’t have the resources in-house.
You’re Probably Not Sending Enough Emails
This was one of the opening lines of Jay Schwedelson’s presentation on event marketing and he may be right. Schwedelson is the Founder and CEO of Outcome Media, a multi-brand marketing services company. His work focuses primarily on email marketing and its impact on event attendance, customer engagement, and more.
In addition to sharing some tips for improving email open and click-through rates, Schwedelson encouraged attendees to not get discouraged by unsubscribe requests or bounces when sending emails. Both situations can make marketers feel as though they failed or they are sending too much email to the point where it feels like spam. This might be the case if the majority of your list is unsubscribing, but more often than not, it’s only one or two recipients. Unsubscribing is a good thing; it represents an engagement, and your email successfully encouraged the recipient to open and engage with it even though they decided your offer is not for them.
The reality is, people receive hundreds of marketing emails in a week, and are subjected to thousands of other marketing messages outside of email. It is extremely difficult to remember anything, and if you’re emailing people about something that’s relevant and that they can benefit from, chances are they will appreciate the reminders.
Action Item: The next time your prepare to promote something via an email campaign, whether it be an event, a sale, or a new product launch, start planning your email schedule at least a month ahead of time when possible. You’ll want to gradually increase the emails sent as the event gets closer, sending as often as five times over three weeks or daily during the three days leading up to the event. It helps to have tool like the HubSpot Marketing Hub that can schedule and help you optimize your emails.
Delegate These Action Items
It can be difficult for a small business owners with limited resources to strategize, plan, and execute full-scale marketing campaigns while running a business. If you want to chat about any of these topics or the action items I’ve outlined, feel free to book a meeting with me using the link below:
