Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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Internet security is always evolving. As attack methods change, so do defense mechanisms. A few years ago, we saw a new development in email security. Some inbox providers started employing scanners that would click every link in an email to test its source. This is good news for email security — less risk in your inbox! — but terrible news for digital marketers, who saw click rates suddenly skyrocket to impossible percentages over 100% and watched unengaged prospects with lots of automated “scanner clicks” get passed along to confused and frustrated sales teams.
At first, these scanners were mostly coming from the same few IPs. So in the December 2018 Pardot release, we identified consistent email scanner IPs and packaged them as visitor filters out-of-the-box for all Pardot customers. But the problem didn’t go away. As this practice of protecting email recipients from malicious links gained popularity, we saw a proliferation of scanners on cloud hosts.
Now, a cloud host is tricky. When the activity’s IP can only be tracked to AWS or another public cloud provider, we can’t simply add that IP to a blocklist. Will clicks from cloud IPs always be scanners, or will they sometimes be customers? Will they be scanners this month and customers next month? Unlike IPs we can easily identify as belonging to security providers, we couldn’t just filter out all activity from public cloud IPs that sometimes acted like a security scanner.
But we can filter out activity from an IP when it is acting like a security scanner. So that’s exactly what we did.
We built Metrics Guard for Email to watch for activity that isn’t really part of your hard-earned metrics. This brand-new service monitors email clicks and opens to identify patterns that are clearly bot-based, and it keeps those activities out of Pardot entirely. In its first week, Metrics Guard for Email kept 2 million scanner clicks from inflating our marketers’ metrics and triggering actions that shouldn’t have happened.
The best part of this service is that it’s totally hands-off for you — no activation is required! Since early November, Metrics Guard for Email has been working behind the scenes to keep your engagement data clean so that your click metrics are accurate and only truly engaged prospects become qualified.
So send away, knowing that Metrics Guard for Email is serving engagement metrics you can trust.
Check out how to use email metrics to make data-driven decisions.

I can distinctly remember being extremely excited to attend a presentation from a speaker whose book I had read and loved in class. Unfortunately, the speaker was not as engaging as I’d hoped, and I found myself getting bored and distracted.
Marketers know better than anyone that capturing audience attention goes hand in hand with keeping people engaged. If people are bored, their thoughts will drift somewhere else, and you’ll miss out on the opportunity to impact their behavior. This is true regardless of the marketing medium, from advertisements to presentations.
That being said, marketers need to create effective ways to gain audience attention during their presentations — one of those is interactivity. According to the Oxford Dictionary, interactivity is defined as how two people work together and influence each other. Therefore, creating interactive presentations means using strategies that will capture and hold audience attention. It makes it easier to leave lasting, meaningful impressions about the content you’re sharing with them.
This post will outline the importance of interactive presentations and share tips from HubSpot experts for giving engaging, interactive presentations.

Why are interactive presentations important?
Interactive presentations are those where audience members and presenters feel like they’re in conversation with each other. It’s a pivot away from the lecture and listeners feel, as presenters entice audiences to participate and interact with them.
The reason for creating interactive presentations is simple: marketers who make a connection with their audience are more likely to have them leave feeling as though they’ve learned something from you.
All marketers want to leave good impressions, so understanding how to do this during presentations is important. Below we’ve listed nine interactive presentation ideas that you can use when planning your next virtual or in-person events.

Use a PowerPoint.
PowerPoints help you incorporate various media into your presentations, like text, images, and even videos. This ensures that there is an aspect of your presentation that appeals to every audience member, as everyone learns differently.
For example, someone may have an easier time digesting your content when they can see visual examples. In contrast, their neighbor may retain more information if they can follow along by reading a brief summary. When you tailor your presentation to meet the differing needs of your audience, it’s easier for everyone to interact with your content and learn from your talk.
Should you choose to use a PowerPoint, this HubSpot download gives you four different slide templates to choose from that can be used to create high-quality presentations.

Draw comparisons to your passions.
It’s probably safe to say that the presentation you’re giving is about a topic you’re an expert in. It’s also probably safe to say that your audience isn’t necessarily as informed as you are, so they’ll need more context to catch up to your level of understanding.
Content Creation and Lead Acquisition Marketing Manager AJ Beltis says that drawing comparisons to your passions during presentations can engage your audience and enhance their understanding of new concepts, especially if they aren’t contextually related. This could look like drawing in references to sports, movies, and pop culture.
Beltis says, “Help your audience better understand what you’re presenting by referencing something outside of the context — sports, movies, and pop culture references can work really well if they make sense.”
This keeps your audience engaged because you’re relating the information to real-life examples that may be more readily available to them. Bonus points if you use a humorous reference, which can cause your audience to create a positive association with the information and retain more of what you’re saying. If you begin with a cheerful anecdote, you’ll set the tone for the rest of the presentation.

Use an ice breaker.
One way to ensure that your presentation is interactive is to generate rapport with your audience with an ice breaker.
Ice breakers are short activities that audience members can participate in that are meant to inspire a sense of community and help audience members meet their neighbors. Ice breakers can also diffuse any sort of tension or anxiety from being around unfamiliar people.
If you’re at a loss for ideas, you can always try Two Truths and a Lie. Every audience member comes up with two factual statements about their life and one lie, and the rest of the audience works together to pick out the false statement.
Ice breakers are great because they are adaptable to both in-person and virtual meetings. For in-person events, per safety regulations, presenters can pre-select an ice breaker, and small audiences can go around the room responding to a question. For larger audiences, participants can simply introduce themselves to a neighbor.
For virtual events with small audiences, you can use the same structure as in-person presentations, but larger audiences can be broken down into smaller, more intimate break-out rooms. Either way, people are still breaking the ice, so to speak, and interacting with each other.
Tell a story.
Use your presentations to interact with your audience by telling a story. It could be a personal anecdote, a story from a customer, or a well known-story that you adapt to illustrate your presentation’s message.
Senior Marketing Director Emmy Jonassen recalls one of the most memorable presentations from a HubSpot Marketing Team planning session: “There was a group that used Goldilocks and the Three Bears to illustrate how they went about solidifying the perfect strategy. The story paired with the imagery kept the audience engaged, and people were listening and laughing.” Jonassen says that, almost a year later, that was one of the most memorable presentations of the two-day session.
By telling a story, you’re using interactivity to influence your audience and help them remember what you’re sharing with them. A story gives your audience something to associate the information with, which may make the information you’re sharing easier to recall. You’ve used a story to influence their retention of the information you’re presenting.

Use data representations.
Using data representations is a valuable way to showcase your content in a digestible format. For reference, data visualization is using things like charts and diagrams to help viewers understand the significance of the information you’re showing them. It’s easy to say the words out loud, but using pictures gives the audience a visual representation of your words.
Say you’re a marketer giving a presentation on the benefits your business has found from advertising on different social media sites. You can certainly verbalize how Twitter was the best, but using a chart that shows the difference in return on investment (ROI) between different platforms gives audience members a visual representation of your success.
If you’re a HubSpot user, Marketing Hub allows you to create visualizations from the data in your HubSpot analytics reports. The image below is a pie chart that was created using HubSpot reports.

All-in-all, data visualization increases the impact of your words because audience members get a picture of the significance of the information you’re giving them.
Breakaway from the “expected” format.
The disappointing presentation I mentioned earlier followed the typical structure of an introduction, content presentation, brief Q&A, and then it was over. I expected more interactivity from the author, but it really felt like a regular college lecture. I wish the author had mixed it up and varied their structure, maybe by asking us questions about our interpretations of the book, but she didn’t.
Many presenters follow this structure, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the framework can become boring to your audience. If you mix it up and vary your style in a way that your audience wouldn’t expect, you can capture their attention by throwing them off (in a good way), and they’re likely to stay attentive because they don’t know what’s coming next.
Amanda Sellers, Historical Optimization Writer, says that breaking away from expected format could mean playing a game, or subverting expectations. She recalls giving a presentation on a Monday afternoon where she knew that the audience would likely be a bit quiet. For part of her presentation, she had the audience stand up and repeat the words she was saying; “Standing up got their blood flowin’, and I encouraged them to participate at full volume. This shook up the presentation, and it helped with information retention because the attendees were listening and repeating back the information.”
Breaking away from the expected format doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do something at the beginning that you’d usually do at the end — get creative with what this means to you personally and how it would benefit your presentations’ interactivity.

Have Q&A or AMA sessions.
A great way to interact with your audience is to have question and answer (Q&A) or ask me anything (AMA) sessions during your presentation.
When you do this, audience members can ask clarifying questions about what you’ve already said to gain a full understanding before moving on to the next concept. For example, if you’re presenting your recent marketing campaign, consider stopping after each step of your plan (like plan goals, measurement, target audience, etc) to allow the audience to ask clarifying questions before you move on to the next section.
You can also switch it up and ask audience members questions, as they likely have valuable input into the topic at hand. Consider creating quizzes and polls where they can respond to your questions and submit feedback. You can make submissions anonymous so audience members feel comfortable to share anything (within reason) that they have on their mind.
Weaving Q&A and AMA opportunities throughout your presentation is also a great way to re-capture audience attention if they have become distracted, as it requires them to think critically about your content and their own information retention.
During virtual presentations, audience members may not feel as comfortable interrupting you to ask clarifying questions, so purposely taking the time to ask participants questions or have them ask you questions is worth considering. Becca Stamp, Senior Learning & Development Operations, says “It’s important to give everyone space to come off mute and contribute throughout the session. The participants add so much value to the session, either through discussion or over the zoom chat.”

Get off the stage.
During in-person presentations, getting off the stage and quite literally leveling yourself with your audience is worth considering.
Most people expect presenters to remain on stage and separated from them, so varying your delivery style and being closer to your audience may inspire a sense of interaction that is different from simply standing in front of a podium for 20 minutes.
If you employ this strategy, you can also have Q&As and where you walk over to audience members and respond to their questions as if you’re having a one on one conversation. Referring back to the definition of interactivity, you’re leaving an effect on your audience by being more approachable than they’d expect.
Share resources for later.
A useful way to inspire continuous interaction with your audience is to leave them with something to take away from your presentation. Depending on the content you’re sharing, maybe you’ll hand out brochures to advertise your service, provide them with a link to your website, or have them sign up for an email list.
Whatever your desired action is, giving them a way to remember you and your presentation is a great way to inspire continuous interaction with them.
Spend Time Making Your Presentations Interactive
All-in-all, the goal of creating interactive presentations is to influence your audience members. Whatever your presentation content is, using strategies that center audience engagement is a valuable way to connect with them and teach them something new.
Feeling like they’ve been in conversation with you rather than being talked at can help you fulfill the ultimate goal of marketing: to leave a lasting impression.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we think about a lot of things.
From the size of our weddings and special events to the comfort level of our pajamas and stay-at-home clothes, we’ve reconsidered the size, shape, and necessity of many, many elements in our lives.
Work is one of these elements, if not the main one. We’ve asked ourselves (and our employers) questions like:

“Can I get as much done at home as I would in the office?”
“How do I stay connected to my team if we’re all remote?”, and
“Is it really necessary to have as many meetings as I did before?”

While we’ve all found different answers to these questions, one thing is consistent: COVID-19 has forced us to learn how to stay connected, motivated, and productive in new ways.
Canva + HubSpot Marketing Survey
In October, we teamed up with Canva to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected marketing leaders, their resources, and their teams. We surveyed 502 marketing leaders (mostly senior-level marketing managers, directors, VPs, and CMOs) from across the United States and asked them how COVID-19 has affected their teams, processes, and priorities.
The results are in, and our findings are pointing towards a new way of thinking about work — especially the tools and technologies we use to get stuff done.
Download the research here, and keep reading to unpack some of our most important findings.
How COVID-19 Changed the Way We Think and Use Office Technology
It’s no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic has massively impacted where we now work. Out of 500+ marketing leaders, 73% reported that they’ve been working remotely for over three months.
This will likely be the “new normal” for some. A recent Gartner poll revealed that 48% of employees will likely work remotely at least part of the time after COVID-19, versus 30% doing so before the pandemic.

But COVID-19 hasn’t just affected where we work — it has also changed how we work. Many of the respondents reported new challenges in their day-to-day projects and processes:

Decision-making: Over 50% agreed that their team’s ability to make decisions has been negatively impacted.

Planning: 72% agreed that their planning process has been more difficult, and over 70% have seen their planning framework dramatically change with the impact of COVID.

Feedback: Over 70% agreed that it’s become more difficult to give and receive effective feedback while working remotely.

Productivity: Over 66% agreed that their team’s productivity has dropped, and nearly 50% said they’ve struggled to motivate their teams.

If you resonate with these findings, you’re not alone. It’s clear the COVID-19 has been tough all around, regardless of your team size or industry. Let’s unpack some more detailed trends — and potentially permanent changes — we’re seeing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some organizations are outsourcing more marketing projects.
Gartner found that the COVID-19 pandemic has led 32% of organizations to replace full-time employees with contingent workers and contractors.
We see some of this reflected in our survey respondents’ post-pandemic resource planning:

Resource
Pre-Pandemic
Post-Pandemic

Growth marketing
Majority in-house (64%)
Shift to more in-house (68%)

Design
Majority outsourced (48%)
Small shift to even more outsourced

Content marketing
Majority in-house (48%)
Evened out

Web development
Majority outsourced (50%)
Shift to more in-house

Social media marketing
Majority in-house (50%)
Shift to more outsourced

Media buying
Majority in-house (51%)
No change

Affiliate marketing
Majority in-house (55%)
Shift to more in-house (58%)

SEO
Majority in-house (55%)
Shift to more outsourced

PR
Majority in-house (55%)
No change

Why might this be? For one, outsourcing is a common cost-saving measure. It can also help meet demand.
50% of respondents reported that it’s been more difficult for their teams to come up with creative content — perhaps outsourcing projects like content marketing and design has helped teams maintain their production cadence during times of stress and burnout (which we’ll explain below).
However, hiring contractors and external agency services requires increased communication and collaboration.
Gone are the days when we could walk across the hall for a chat at a coworker’s desk or host in-person meetings with agencies. During the pandemic, we’ve learned to replace these conversations with quick messages or video calls — most likely using a tool like Slack or Zoom.
Our respondents would agree. 75% reported that instant messaging platforms like Slack were “good” and “exceptional” at supporting collaboration. 72% rated the same for the level of usability for these tools.
If companies and teams weren’t using an instant messaging platform before the pandemic, it’s highly likely that they are now. The need for a tool like this also arises when outsourcing projects. It’s more important than ever to stay aligned — especially when working with third-party contractors.
For those keeping marketing in-house, new tools are needed.
You’ll see in the table above that many of our survey respondents still reported keeping or shifting many resources in-house. This could also be in an effort to save money and meet demand — by using new tools and technologies to compensate for a lack of labor.
For example, 44% of respondents reported that their need for new visual assets and graphic design has increased since the start of the pandemic. 39% reported the demand has mostly stayed the same.
Regardless, this is a vast majority of marketers who need to maintain or boost their graphic design production — in the middle of a pandemic, no less. A similar number of respondents (38%) reported that their graphic design software did a “neutral,” “poor,” or “terrible” job of supporting collaboration within their team.
This presents a unique opportunity to use office technology and tools like Canva — to support increased customer demand while saving costs and supporting remote collaboration.
Another set of respondents (50%) reported seeing traffic to their website increase and the need for regular updates also increase. Our study also revealed that 16% of marketers find the usability and collaboration of their website content management system (CMS) either “neutral,” “poor,” or “terrible.”
For those keeping website management in-house, incorporating a tool like HubSpot CMS can vastly improve your team’s remote collaboration and productivity — all while meeting the increased demand from your customers (which is a good thing!).
Organizations are using technology to monitor and support employees.
We’ve confirmed so far that marketing teams have been pressed for productivity and collaboration while being asked to create more creative content to meet customer needs, employer demand — all in an ever-changing, pandemic-soaked market.
While office technology has never been more critical, neither has recognizing and acknowledging the barriers COVID-19 has created, such as an increased team workload and employee burnout (17%).

This rise in employee burnout has led to more discussion around the responsibility of employers to their staff. A Deloitte study found that, as the “pandemic has put more hours into the working day,” organizations should do more than just foster open dialogue and open practices around well-being. Gartner agrees — they theorize that COVID-19 has expanded employee expectations of their employer as a “social safety net.”
Technology has come in handy for non-work related needs, too. Zoom has equipped teams to host online happy hours, virtual holiday parties, and even team-building activities. Companies are also sponsoring free telehealth and virtual therapy sessions.
Gartner also found that, in a less digital sense, employers are also offering “support includ[ing] enhanced sick leave, financial assistance, adjusted hours of operation and child care provisions.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how employers use office technology to understand not only the employee experience but also remote employee performance. A Gartner study found that 16% of employers are using tools to monitor employees through virtual clocking in and out, tracking work computer usage, and observing employee emails or internal communications.
This trend started well before the pandemic, but it will continue to grow in popularity as more folks opt to permanently work remotely.
Over to You
As large and difficult as these COVID-19 shifts have been, for the time being, they are here to stay.
Listen to these emerging trends and invest in new processes, tools, and technology in 2021. Doing so will help you combat these challenges and better motivate, monitor, and equip your remote teams. Remember, it’s your responsibility to help them be productive at home, stay connected to their teams, and make room for how the pandemic is affecting their personal lives, too.

Every marketer has run into one of these roadblocks before:

They wanted to create an ads audience off of recently closed lost deals, but didn’t have access to the customer data in their CRM.
They needed to change some of the copy on their homepage, but their developers couldn’t fit it into their next sprint.
They needed a quick graphic to illustrate a point they were making in a blog post, but their design team was wrapped up in other projects.

In these scenarios, marketers aren’t held back by a lack of good ideas. Instead, marketers are struggling with gatekeepers.
Gatekeepers are unnecessary areas of friction within your growth machine that prevent marketers from providing customers with the best experience possible.
Gatekeepers can be anything from unusable data that’s spread across different tools, to a CMS or design solution that’s powerful but requires technical expertise to use.
When marketers encounter a gatekeeper, the customer experience inevitably suffers.
Take your website, for instance. HubSpot research shows that a business website is the most used distribution channel for marketers today.
When trying to provide your customers with an amazing experience, nothing is more important than your website. But when asked who is responsible for keeping a website up to date, many marketers pointed to their IT team as owners of their company’s site.
This is a classic example of gatekeepers inserting unnecessary friction into your marketing. Your IT team isn’t goaled on generating leads, or how customers perceive your brand — so when marketers approach them with an update that needs to be made to their website, it isn’t prioritized.
Inevitably, your customers’ experience suffers. Imagine if your IT team owned your email marketing, or your social media accounts — how might your customer experience suffer as a result?

Marketers at growing companies need to be the owner of their organization’s growth machine. This used to be a given, but as customer journeys have gotten more complex, so have the systems we use to reach our customers.
We’ve added unnecessary complexity into our internal processes and tools — to the point where only specific people within your organization have access to data that could be used to improve a campaign or the technical ability to update content as needed.
Today’s fastest growing companies are doing three things:
1. They’re leveraging customer data across all their marketing channels.
2. They’re optimizing their marketing efforts by leveraging comprehensive reporting.
And maybe most importantly,
3. They’re putting marketers in the driver’s seat — removing gatekeepers at every turn so they can act quickly and decisively to best serve their customers.
The need for a clear owner of your business’ growth machine has only been heightened by the global pandemic. As external factors force leaders to pivot quickly at a time where collaboration and strategic planning is more difficult than ever before, gatekeepers cannot be tolerated.

By leveraging tools that centralize your data, remove gatekeepers, and make it easy to see what’s resonating with your audience, you’ll make it easy for your marketers to iterate on the customer experience.

Take stock of your current tech stack. What systems do only certain teams have access to? Is that team best-suited to understand what your customers are looking for from your brand? Are gatekeepers forcing you to make unnecessary tradeoffs between using a powerful tool and one that will empower your marketers to take ownership of your organization’s growth machine?
Answering these questions will help ensure that you’re able to adapt to whatever 2020 (or 2021) has in store for you.

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