Author: Franz Malten Buemann

 

 

Remote work was known even before the marvelous year of 2020, when folks were mostly thrilled to have this one or two days a week in a home office, laying with their laptops under blankets, wearing pajamas instead of elegant blazers, and eating snacks during the work. When the situation drastically changed at the beginning of last year, the privilege of working from home became mandatory for most. 

 

Even though for some remote work is actually a great alternative to going to the office, for others it may really be a pain in the… head. If you feel like you’re going to explode spending even one more day on remote work, this guide is for you. We’ve collected the 10 best strategies, to maintain a work-life balance, improve well-being and keep the flow going while working remotely.

 

I. Find a space you enjoy working in

 

This may seem like a piece of rather poor advice, but don’t feel discouraged! The most common mistake for remote employees is mistaking the space they enjoy working, with the space they enjoy, period. No, your bed is not a good working area, even when it seems the most comfortable piece of furniture in the whole world. Working, sleeping, and eating in the same place may lead to blurring the boundaries between your work and free time, which then leads to working overtime. Set a clear place, a desk or a sofa in the living room, something you would treat like an office, and being on time with your schedule, should become easier.

 

II. Pretend like you are going to the office

 

I know, it sounds controversial, why the heck you must act like going to the office when you actually don’t? The answer is easy – it helps your productivity flow. I won’t encourage you to put on your best clothes or to wear full makeup, but getting out of pajamas and brushing your teeth is a start. This way you may actually feel the work atmosphere and perform better. 

 

III. Get your groove on

 

Did you know that music can reduce stress and anxiety and increase motivation? There’s nothing worse than being annoyed or anxious during work hours. But as it turns out simply playing your favorite music can help a lot. Call after call, overtaking deadlines, and your favorite neighbor drilling the same wall for 3 hours? Sometimes drowning all this in music can help you get back the concentration you so desperately need. Supposedly, it takes 15 to 30 minutes of listening to music to regain strength to get back to work.

 

IV. Keep a distraction around but not too close

 

It is quite common, to get bored of your daily work or suddenly lose all of the motivation you thought you have. Having some sort of entertainment in your reach could be beneficial to your mental health during work hours. Music instrument, the game of Chicken Invaders, or Rubic’s cube – all can ease your mind when you’re having a bit of a hard time doing your job. Distracting yourself for a short time may be a great idea, and can help with boosting your productivity later. Remember though, keep your distractions out of sight during work, because it may have quite a different effect.

 

V. Declutter your space

 

Just like with distractions, having a lot of things laying around you without a purpose may lead to drifting your mind away from the important stuff. You should definitely have your workspace spick and span, having around only necessary stuff such as a notebook, pen, or a cup of coffee. Having a feeling of mess around will affect less organized work. So make use of your trashbin and keep only bare essentials nearby.

 

VI. Get a plant

 

And I don’t mean any plants with additional effects, just a normal green, eye-pleasing, live plant. As it turns out, plants not only have visual qualities (duh…) but are also helpful in converting nasty human gases into more oxygeny air around you and your laptop. Choose the one you will find visually appealing and boost your comfort.

 

VII. Cast light on it…

 

…literally. You may think you have the predisposition to become a vampire and Dracula’s best friend, but honestly light is the fuel for you (and your plants). Try to arrange your home-office to get the most natural light on your workspace. Don’t let the sunshine hit your screen though, it’s doing no good for your eyes.

 

VIII. Keep a to-do list

 

The Airtasker research showed that 30% of employees working remotely keep a to-do list to boost their productivity. Every morning try to set the list of key responsibilities for the day, and after completing a task just cross it out. This way you will keep your work more organized, and see how much you’ve managed to achieve. It is key, not to jump from one assignment to another without completing any.

 

IX. Let me out!

 

I mean, let yourself out. You have an option to work remotely, it doesn’t say where exactly. Around 19% of remote employees report loneliness being away from the office. Nobody said you need to be stuck in your flat, especially during summertime when children are playing and birds are chirping. Go ahead, charge your laptop and go sit in the backyard or some nice and cozy bench in the park nearby with a coworker also working online. Get fresh air in your lungs and sunlight on your face. Even if you don’t feel like working outside (after 10 minutes an urge to kill all the chirping birds emerges), use your lunch break to go on a short walk with someone and come back with a fresh brain.

 

IX. Do whatever suits you best

 

The previous 9 examples are just hints to help you start your adventure with productive remote work. The truth is, after some time you will on your own, work out a set of habits that have the best effects for you. The most important is your well-being, motivation, and relaxation during work. Sadly, your home would never be a 100% optimal space for you to work in, but you can try your best to make this time the most optimal for your needs.

marketing automation

marketing automation

There’s tons of automation software for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc that is promising to automate the behavior of a user by connecting and generating leads through “random human behavior.” I’m very vary of those softwares as the danger getting banned is real. But company heads are asking me for the service and insisting that it’s the way to go. What do you think fellow automation specialists?
submitted by /u/gerrrywiii [link] [comments]

Hi, We have been working lately on an AI tool to optimize Budget Allocation for our clients ad campaigns. We use machine learning to analyze historical ad campaign data and predict cost and revenue curves for campaigns with multiple channels and geos. The tool allows us to provide insights on the optimal budget allocation for each media, for a target spend level, or a target CPA. Here we wrote more about this use of AI. https://www.winclap.com/how-ai-is-impacting-budget-allocation-decisions/ Are you using any tool to optimize your media mix modeling? How do you allocate budget at multiple media sources/geos?
submitted by /u/winclap [link] [comments]

This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters.
Platforms are embedded in our daily lives — whether we realize it or not.
Have you recently … ordered food from a service like GrubHub or made a reservation using OpenTable? Booked a ride using Lyft? Used your phone to check your email? All of these seamless interactions require systems to talk to each other via open platforms.
What about at work? How many tools do you use to do your job? Do you spend a lot of time updating disparate systems, or do you use a connected stack of technologies to keep things up-to-date? If it’s the latter, you have a platform to thank for your saved time.

A platform makes it possible to connect tools, teams, data, and processes under one digital roof. It’s the nucleus of all systems and allows you to connect all your favorite tools seamlessly using integrations. An integration allows disparate systems to talk to each other. By joining tools via integrations, a change made in System A automatically carries through to System B.
Leveraging platforms and integrations hasn’t always been commonplace. A couple of years ago, HubSpot Research found that 82% of salespeople and marketers lost up to an hour per day managing siloed tools — a costly mistake.
Today, employees recognize that integrating technologies to do their jobs isn’t an option but a requirement. Individual employees are opting to connect their tools and, on average, leverage eight apps to do their job.
Employees and businesses alike run on connected applications. Okta found that it’s small-mid sized customers (defined as companies with less than 2,000 employees) average 73 apps — up 38% from last year. While larger customers (companies with over 2,000 employees) leverage closer to 130 apps — up 68% from the past year.
From personal life to work, platforms have become a staple in our day-to-day. These platforms are well-oiled machines that initiate seamless connections between technologies. Today, the consumer not only anticipates but also expects their systems to connect — raising the bar for companies to make it possible.
But more tools shouldn’t mean more friction. At HubSpot, we want to help our customers connect their tools on our platform to reduce friction and grow better. Customers should have tools and solutions to solve their needs, regardless of if HubSpot built them. Connecting tools allows for uniform data, processes, and experiences. This year, we’re experimenting with ways to expose integrations to our customers to increase adoption.
However, as a platform scales, it becomes increasingly tricky for customers to navigate exhaustive lists of integrations and identify what’s relevant to them. We recognized this at HubSpot and began experimenting with paid ads to see if this could be a valuable distribution channel to our customers.
Our Experiment on Paid Integration Ads
At the end of Q4, the Platform Marketing team decided to use some leftover budget to try a channel we hadn’t yet proven viable for integration adoption — paid ads.
We hypothesized that we could influence the adoption of an integration through paid ads. To test our hypothesis, we ran a retargeting campaign for three integrations on Facebook. The ads were surfaced to HubSpot’s retargetable audience.
These ads featured three HubSpot-built integrations: Slack, WordPress, and Eventbrite. We selected these integrations because they are natively built (built by HubSpot) and structured in a way that allowed us to measure multi-touch attribution.
By leveraging Google Tag Manager on the in-app integration directory, custom UTM parameters, and funnel reports, we were able to measure all steps from viewing the ad to installing the integration. Before launching the campaign, we tested our Google Analytics custom funnel reports by completing all actions — including installing the integrations to make sure they worked as designed.
Before running the campaign, we made the conscious decision to split our budget evenly across all three integration ads — regardless if one ad outperformed the others. We did this to minimize variables for the experiment.
Because we ran ads through November and December, we decreased spending from $130 dollars a day to $5 a day on and around holidays. We did this to “pause” the campaign on days where the ads would get lost in the noise, as this data could skew overall results.
Lastly, we determined our success metrics. Because we didn’t have apples-to-apples benchmark data for integration paid ads, we worked with our paid team to establish reasonably similar benchmark data. While it wasn’t a direct comparison, we were curious to see how ads could influence multi-step actions. We evaluated our performance based on click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition.
Experiment Results
The integration ads surpassed our benchmark data for click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition at the 7-, 30-, and 44-day marks — supporting our initial hypothesis and prediction.
The 30-day CTR for our integration ads was higher than the 7-day and 30-day CTR for the benchmark data, which is surprising as we expected the audience to become more fatigued over time.
Fatigue can be measured by the frequency a user views the same ad. For example, at HubSpot, we look at if a viewer has seen the same ad over 2.5 times within 30 days, which we consider high. Additionally, we kept an eye out for an increasing cost per acquisition.
Paid ads for these integrations was attractive to our retargetable audience and a legitimate acquisition point for HubSpot. It helped us influence adoption of integrations — resulting in hundreds of installs in the featured technologies. It also provided us with a data point we’ve been curious to see — the cost of an install.
When considering the value and acquisition cost of an install, it’s helpful to understand the impact on the business. At HubSpot, our customers with integrated stacks of technologies tend to be more successful — and they stick around.
This makes sense — as the more apps installed, the higher the likelihood someone will stick around. This is a common finding among platform companies.
On a recent trip to San Francisco HubSpot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker found that “a common pattern on platforms is that the more apps a customer integrates into their system, the higher their retention rate will be — for both the platform and the apps integrated into it.”
Connecting their tools allows customers to access all their data in one core system while staying flexible and adaptable to their needs as they grow.
Since HubSpot doesn’t currently charge integrators to be part of our ecosystem, spending money to drive a net new install may seem counterintuitive. When weighing the long-term benefits of an install for customer value and retention, we are able to determine what is a reasonable cost per install. The experiment cost was worth the insight, as it allowed us to gain a baseline understanding of the cost per acquisition of an integration install.
Ultimately you can determine if the long-term value outweighs the upfront cost. (While directional value is a good baseline, you’d ideally look to lifetime value [LTV] to establish actual value.)
What This Means for HubSpot — and For You
Our experiment with paid ads outperformed our expectations and helped us reach a larger audience than we anticipated. It became clear that this was and is a viable channel for us to increase adoption of integrations and better understand the cost per integration install.
Future looking, we could alter who we target to see how it impacts CTR. We could leverage enrichment software like Datanyze or Clearbit to see if users have tools and cross-reference install data to create a list of folks using tools we integrate with but have yet to connect to. Alternatively, we could leverage this data to target a group of users going through onboarding to encourage them to connect existing tools to HubSpot.
Additionally, we could look through the required steps to connect an integration and consider how we could reduce them to simplify the process for our users and potentially increase our CTR.
Not a platform company? No problem. This retargeting campaigns can be leveraged to evaluate other valuable actions for your users, such as sign-ups, free trials, or event registration.