Category: Marketing Automation

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Every year, the U.S. observes Hispanic Heritage Month from September to October. The celebration got its start in California when congressman George. E. Brown introduced legislation to create a week acknowledging the positive contributions of the Hispanic community. That same year, President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed September 17, 1968, as Hispanic Heritage Week.In 1988, President Ronald Reagan extended the holiday, declaring September 15 – October 15th Hispanic Heritage Month. There is significance to these dates as September 15 marks the anniversary of independence for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Hispanic Heritage Month provides an opportunity to honor individuals of Hispanic descent as well as highlight their culture, traditions, and impact. Today, almost five million businesses in the United States are Hispanic-owned and bring in more than $800 billion dollars each year. Most small businesses have limited resources, making your support crucial. When you buy from these brands, not only are you stimulating the economy, but you’re making it possible for these mom-and-pop shops to stay afloat. We wanted to highlight five small Hispanic-owned businesses that are providing innovative products and services as well as ushering in more representation in their respective industries.Bonita Fierce Candles is creating candles inspired by Hispanic cultureMelissa Gallardo, a Salvadoran-American, created her own brand in 2020 called Bonita Fierce Candles. The small business creates scented candles with distinct aromas that Melissa grew up around. Her candle range includes a variety of warming and calming scents, including ‘cafecito con leche,’ which is inspired by Latin American coffee, ‘coquito,’ a scent reminiscent of traditional Puerto Rican eggnog, and ‘abuelas bakery,’ a candle meant to make you nostalgic for home.On the company’s website, Melissa discusses how she’s struggled in the past to connect with her heritage but found solace with the Latin American community after she graduated college. When the pandemic hit soon after, she began making candles as a quarantine hobby and realized most candles on the market did not represent the various scents she grew up with, which led her to open up Bonita Fierce Candles as a way to celebrate Latina heritage at home. For the rest of Hispanic Heritage Month, Bonita Fierce Candles is offering twenty percent off its products along with free shipping. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bonita Fierce Candles | Latina Candles (@bonitafiercecandles) Embed Instagram PostAlter Eco’s chocolate is fighting back against climate changeAlter Eco is a small business that is revolutionizing the chocolate industry. Their slogan is “the cleanest, greenest chocolate,” as the company’s mission is to create food that nourishes the Earth rather than depleting it. They work on small-scale fair trade farms, practice dynamic forestry, which can mitigate climate change, and launched the world’s first commercially compostable candy wrapper in 2013, to name just a few of their many sustainable practices. While the brand has a range of chocolate products and also sells quinoa and granola, they created new limited edition items with A Dozen Cousins in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month: hot cocoa bombs. The product can be bought in two flavors, Mexican Hot Chocolate and White Chocolate Coquito.In a newsletter announcing the collaboration, Alter Eco’s CEO Arnulfo Ventura reminisced on his own childhood, “Growing up my mom cooked dishes native to her hometown of Guadalajara, Mexico. When we were lucky, the aroma of simmering Mexican hot cocoa filled the kitchen.”Alter Eco is donating all proceeds from this collaboration to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Andrea Loret de Mola (@andrealoretdemola) TOA Waters is shaking up the bubble bath industryMost bubble bath products contain floral scents, something Javier Folgar wanted to change. As someone who takes bubble baths himself, the entrepreneur is on a mission to end the social stigma around men enjoying baths, which led to the creation of his small business, Toa Waters. The company is named after a Cuban river – a nod to Javier’s heritage. Tao Waters bubble baths come in a variety of bold scents, including teakwood, rum, sandalwood, and tobacco. All of the products are vegan and made with organic and responsibly sourced ingredients. Customers can feel extra good about supporting this brand as the small business has partnered with several deserving causes, including the American Cancer Society. They’ve also donated ten percent of proceeds from their Sweet Temptation line to the Ukrainian red cross. View this post on Instagram A post shared by TOA Waters (@toawaters) El Comalito is serving authentic Salvadorian foodPupuseria El Comalito is an artisanal Salvadorian pupuseria, or tortilla shop, with several locations throughout Maryland. They prepare their food with a traditional cooking process from El Salvador, making their cuisine authentic and delicious. Silvia Huezo is the current owner of the pupuseria and inherited the business from her parents. She immigrated to the United States with her family when she was only six years old. By the time she was in high school, her mom and dad had opened up the first location of the restaurant. Now, all these years later, the family owns four locations, and their food has been a staple for the Salvadoran community in Maryland. Silvia was interviewed by a local Maryland business association in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month and said she was happy to take on her parent’s legacy. She also spoke about what it’s like being a Latina entrepreneur. “One of the things that I am most proud of as a Latina is our resilience and tenacity,” she said. “Our unwavering disposition to never give up! Whether it’s unstable political climates in our homelands, poverty, lack of acceptance … we continue to get up, dust off and carry on.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Takoma Langley Crossroads CDA (@takomalangleycrossroads) El Ballet Folklórico Estudiantil is passing down traditions through the artsEl Ballet Folklórico Estudiantil, translated to The Student Folkloric Ballet, is a nonprofit organization in Michigan that preserves Mexican culture and educates its students on Mexican folkloric dance and music. The Ballet then performs these very dances throughout Michigan, bringing more cultural awareness to the community. They also provide private and group lessons for students wanting to learn instruments.The organization’s goal is not only to help students embrace their heritage, but to also provide them with structured community programs that can help them become well-rounded individuals. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, the Ballet performed at a local community center on October 7th. We love highlighting diverse voices at Buffer and appreciate all the good these five brands are doing, all while staying true to their roots. Remember, these businesses deserve your support beyond Hispanic Heritage Month, but all year round. While purchasing their products is the most impactful way to help these small businesses, there are other ways to show your support, like sharing these brands with your friends and family on social media and leaving reviews for their products and services.What small businesses are you supporting this Hispanic Heritage Month? Let us know on Twitter and Instagram!

Marketing is about reaching people. But far too often, marketers spend their time performing repetitive, robotic tasks that could be better handled by software.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to substantially change this. According to research from McKinsey, the marketing and sales sectors have the largest possible benefit from implementing AI-based solutions in the coming years, with up to $2.6 trillion in increased value.
Here are three ways modern marketers are using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create more effective lead generation strategies and get them back to what they do best: Connecting with people.

How to Leverage AI for Lead Generation
Artificial intelligence makes marketers more efficient by shortening the time it takes to move from research to outreach. AI tools can be trained to spot patterns and draw conclusions that might otherwise need a human expert to spotlight.
1. Create Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) that match your biggest wins.
When your sales team wins a deal, the next logical move is to go after similar accounts. But replicating that ideal customer and tracking down best-fit, lookalike prospects can be a slog. AI software can dramatically speed up this process by analyzing closed-won (and closed-lost) opportunities and generating a profile that can be matched against your contact database for strong lookalikes.
For example, say your sales team just closed on a medium-sized business in the SaaS industry that has 50+ salespeople, uses Salesforce, and is located on the East Coast. AI can take these attributes (and others) to create a target list of lookalike accounts.
This process works for buying committee members, too. If most of your customer buying committees consist of marketing directors at enterprise-sized companies who use Marketo, AI can identify that trend and provide you with a dynamic list of prospects who fit the criteria of an ideal buyer.
To accomplish this, you need the right tech at your disposal. Tools like ZoomInfo’s RevOS platform, with its database of over 100 million company records, can automatically analyze your past deals, identify similarities between them, build your buyer persona, provide a list of lookalikes, and create a targeted account universe.
If you’re already a ZoomInfo customer, click here to get 20% off HubSpot products.
Automated demographic, firmographic, and technographic data all play a part in drawing your absolute best-fit accounts — which means you can spend time crafting a compelling message instead of conducting research.
2. Personalize your campaigns with up-to-date data.
Professionals who run account-based marketing campaigns know that one size definitely does not fit all. How can they cover all the angles of a large buying committee without spending too much time trying to qualify their prospective leads?
The answer is buying signals. With a modern, AI-driven marketing platform, marketers can be alerted when a target account has significant changes that might inform, alter, or elevate their ABM approach:

A prospect gets a new round of investment: They’re likely to be greenlighting budgets for new or upgraded tools, so tailor your ABM campaigns accordingly.
A new executive is hired, or an internal champion gets promoted: Now’s the time to strike with an ABM campaign that targets a new leader who is likely reassessing their team’s contract.
A target account visits your website: With real-time insight into the companies visiting your site and which pages they landed on, you can quickly send a targeted message while you’re still top of mind.

There are dozens of different types of buying signals that can inspire personalization.
For example, Rocks & Gold sends real-time alerts of B2B companies in buying mode based on their history of hiring dynamics. This includes when a prospect, customer, or stale deal:

Starts growing or decreasing in company size
Makes leadership changes
Announces a new fundraising round

This type of insight gives you a competitive advantage by helping you customize your message to speak directly to the circumstances that make them a good fit right now.
3. Use intent data that illuminates the last mile of prospect interest.
You know which accounts you’d like to target. You have the campaigns that will resonate with their buying committee. But timing is everything — are they ready to hear your value proposition right now?
Intent data answers that question. By using AI-driven systems that can match corporate IP addresses and user profiles to web data, marketers can be aware when a prospect is actively in the market.
How does it work? Say a prospect account visits your website and downloads your marketing content on a pretty predictable but relatively rare basis. As the second quarter is coming to a close, that company is suddenly filling out lots of forms and engaging with your how-to videos. An AI-powered intent data system connects those dots — and elevates the significance.
On top of that, it connects the dots outside of your website. Say your company sells project management software. Intent data can track which companies are searching for terms like “project management vendors” or “project management software free trial” and consuming content on external websites — including your competitors.
If a current customer is searching these terms, it could be an indication of future churn and you can get ahead of the problem. If it’s an ideal prospect, it indicates a level of interest in making a purchase and enables you to target them with relevant content.
There are many tools that track and monitor intent-based keywords in HubSpot’s partner ecosystem. Benefits include:

Market clarity: Gain a clearer understanding of whom to target and how or when to engage with them
Efficiency: Increase ROI by reducing wasted time and effort pursuing bad-fit prospects
Impact: Quickly increase leads and ABM effectiveness

AI Marketing Tools & Software
There are hundreds of AI vendors, each with unique tools and technology to help make your marketing efforts easier, faster, and more successful. Here are a few we’d recommend:
1. Personalize your website experiences with Justuno
According to Forrester, 56% of marketers strongly agree that personalized content is key to ABM success. Justuno empowers marketers to convert more website traffic through personalized pop-ups and onsite messaging that is customized to speak to the unique visitor’s interests and priorities.
2. End-to-end content engagement with Paperflite
According to the Marketing AI Institute, the top use case for Marketing AI is analyzing existing online content for gaps and opportunities. That’s exactly what Paperflite does. Paperflite centralizes and curates all of your marketing and sales content into a single interface, and provides recommendations to surface the right content for the right opportunity.
3. Manage email replies for B2B sales and marketing with LeadGnome
As your company grows, manually managing email replies becomes daunting — at a certain point you need AI to scale your business. LeadGnome automates email reply management, which helps increase open and deliverability rates so you can engage customers faster.
Marketing is part art and part science. Using AI to eliminate the drudgery and cut down on the guesswork gives marketers the ability to bring their A-game to every campaign.
With AI-driven marketing tools, your next campaign can use the science of cutting-edge technology, while your reps tackle the part that only a seasoned marketer can supply: the art of connecting with people.

Do you remember when you were introduced to long-division in grade school? You found yourself needing multiple steps to solve a single problem. It probably seemed like a very daunting and impossible task before your math teacher showed you a hack that broke down your seemingly endless series of steps into only a few.
The same can be said about business. Initially, we all have to go through “long-division” level processes, procedures, and series of daily tasks. These might include entering a new marketplace, testing out new messaging and branding, pushing for new profit margins, or onboarding new clients.
But we can convert the long-division within our business into short-division, making our efforts much simpler and more manageable.
How, you may ask? Through the power of strategy.
I’ve had plenty of experience helping companies scale — in fact, I’ve launched over 35 brands and generated over $175 million in revenue for clients worldwide, and I currently host the Webby-nominated top 100 marketing podcast iDigress, which provides actionable insights to help businesses grow.
Here, I’m going to walk you through the three reasons many business strategies fail — and how you can succeed.

Why do so many business strategies fail?
When you have the right business strategy or series of strategies in place working for you, it will have you screaming “I have the power” like He-Man.
But if everyone supposedly has a business strategy in place already, why are 65% of businesses still failing during the first ten years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics?

The culprit for most business strategies failing comes down to the 3 Cs: complexity, confusion, and complications.

They are slowed down by trying to implement complex processes. The roadmap, messaging, and foundation upon which the business strategy is built are confusing. The business can’t act decisively because the strategy is overly complicated.
The three primary reasons your business strategy probably isn’t working:  

It’s undeniably not working for you, but you refuse to change it.
No one understands it and therefore cannot execute it properly.
You’re doing a ton of tactics and calling it a “strategy” when it’s not.

So now that we’ve addressed the elephant, how do we get rid of it?
Piece by piece.
There are three components necessary in creating a successful business strategy that can serve as our “short-division” hacks to growing our business: simple, sustainable, and scalable.
We will expand on how to incorporate these three components into developing business strategies that do work while also including episode references throughout from the Strategy Hacker’s podcast iDigress, which is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
How to Create a Successful Business Strategy, According to the Strategy Hacker
1. Start simple. 
The quickest route to success is a straight line. A straight line, in its purest form, is simple. We must embrace and integrate the power of simplicity within our business strategy.
An easy way to do this is by simplifying the structures, systems, and steps involved in creating and executing your strategy so that everyone can understand it.
For example, let’s imagine your current process for determining how marketing is performing is by reviewing a series of reports. This takes a ton of time and energy, and the people who review the reports don’t always understand the terms or references included in the report. To make matters worse — even after all of that, you still aren’t sure about why things aren’t working.
When you simplify and streamline your processes, the time it takes to understand, make decisions, identify weaknesses, amplify strengths, delegate tasks, and execute is significantly shorter.
By incorporating a higher level of simplicity within your business, things naturally become more effortless. Look at all the areas where the team spends the most time. Maybe you have friction points in using expensive, ineffective software or creating multiple reports that no one understands.

Instead of keeping things as is because “we’ve always done it this way” or “this process worked in the early days,” allow yourself to get basic with everything.
Simplifications lead to making smarter decisions. Create S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals using a unique set of criteria to ensure your objectives are attainable within a specific time frame.
Additionally, many business strategies don’t work because business leaders haven’t removed unnecessary roadblocks. These might include too many audience profiles, too much data, too much busy work that doesn’t produce results, or too weak of a brand positioning.

When you remove complexity, confusion, complications, and clutter from the business equation, you’re left with clarity. And that clarity can help you generate consistent business conversions.

Clarity is a powerful thing to have, but how do we align clarity into a solid business strategy? Below are a list of some episodes that can help:

Ep 29: How to master the three modalities to growing your business

Ep 24: How to activate the power of strategy to achieve business success
Ep 43: How to define your number to achieve your business goals this year
Ep 37: How to build trust currency: a masterclass on increasing brand equity
Ep 33: How to determine if you’re the Tylenol or chocolate cake to your audience

2. Focus on sustainability. 
The most efficient business strategies are the ones that don’t just work today but continue to work tomorrow, next week, and even six months from now.
When you’re developing and implementing a strategy, you can’t set-it-and-forget-it. Strategy is a living and breathing system that requires constant evolution to continue to be effective. Create strategies with the end in mind.
The friction you typically hear from many businesses struggling to develop and enable true strategy is that they are always busy, and always in “go-mode.” They would rather execute blindly out of the need to do something, instead of strategically planning out their moves — which leads to a higher chance of success.
Sometimes, it’s not that your efforts won’t work. It’s understanding the bigger picture of what efforts are most essential to focus on right now to position yourself for true sustainability first, and then scaling second.
You can’t scale if you aren’t stable, and some business leaders’ full of zeal forget that.
When was the last time you looked at your customer journey through the eyes of your ideal customer? Is your journey optimized and systemized to give the right value at every stage? Are your marketing, branding, SEO, and selling initiatives in alignment with where you are in your business right now?

Some businesses’ customer journeys and initiatives are stuck on awareness mode when they need to switch to sales, acquisition, and conversions mode. So which mode are you? Ep 34 of iDigress shares a 5-point customer journey blueprint that can be modified to fit your current business situation and address all of these questions:

Awareness
Interest/Attention
Conversions
Relationship Building
Advocacy

Sustainability requires a certain mindset and level of tenacity accompanied by patience, poise, and persistence.

3. Ensure your strategy is scalable. 
Consistency is key for sustainability, but in order to scale one must be willing to fail. Unlike sustainability, scalability requires a different focus, and a little more risk tolerance.
When you’re evolving your business strategy to pursue next-level growth, your mindset has to expand to see infinite possibilities.
You will need to identify, isolate, and innovate. For instance, you’ll want to:

Identify your ideal customer profile, what’s working, and what’s not working
Isolate the best opportunity for next-level growth
Innovate your offerings to meet the additional needs of the consumer  

The business strategies that generate the most money and continue to work are designed as living, breathing plans of action that can be expanded to handle high-level growth and capacity.
In order for your business to scale effectively, you must have a clear path on what you need to do to make that leap in growth. Ep 48 of iDigress reflected on the four lessons Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing at HubSpot, attributes to HubSpot reaching one billion in ARR and the business, marketing, and mental approach necessary to start achieving disruptive growth in your specific marketplace.

Scaling business growth is all about leveraging strategies that can scale to generate consistent revenue growth without adding a ton of extra costs. This keeps your profit margins high.
Any campaign, business, or movement that scaled quickly in a very sustainable way probably…

was easy to identify, understand, and share
was attractive to the eyes, heart, and soul
was so social it transcended audiences, countries, and languages
was there at the right time, and used the right platform and distribution methods

One way to improve your odds of scaling astronomically, which we discuss in Ep 44 of iDigress, is by embracing the E.A.S.T. framework with your efforts. Here’s how it works:

Step 1. Make it Easy
Step 2. Make it Attractive
Step 3. Make it Social
Step 4. Make it Timely

Applying E.A.S.T. may seem very simple in scope. However, many still fail to implement this framework successfully when it comes to marketing, branding, sales, and communication.
Strategy serves as the pen and paper to create the story you want for your business.
With strategy, you can map out the business you want to build, remove anything you don’t like, and add anything that you desire to create the organization you want. But it’s not instantaneous. It takes time. Yes — even with “short-division” hacks.
It all builds on top of each other. Simplicity lays the foundation for sustainability, which lays the runway for scalability — and, all the while, you can use strategy as your guiding light to help you navigate as you continue to level up.

TikTok, like many social platforms, often rolls out new features to improve the app experience and offer new opportunities for creators and users.
It recently launched a feature that calls into question whether, in the future, the app will require its own unique SEO strategy. Let’s discuss this.

TikTok’s New Search Feature
TikTok’s new search feature is primarily seen in comment sections, where keywords are hyperlinked next to a magnifying glass icon. Pressing on the linked keyword brings you to a discovery page of videos related to the keyword.
For example, Steven Lim made a video sharing new need-to-know features of iOS 16. A user left a comment about one of the features Lim mentioned, haptic keyboard, and it’s hyperlinked and leads to a larger selection of videos about haptic keywords.

Image Source
Hyperlinked keywords can also appear at the top of comment sections, and clicking on them leads to a selection of videos on the same topic. The Pasta Queen shares authentic Italian recipes on her account, and the comment section of a recent video is headed by a hyperlinked “pasta recipe” keyword.

Image Source
The feature is currently available as part of a limited run test and, according to TechCrunch, TikTok has not yet made an official comment.
What’s the potential with this feature?
The feature comes at a critical time for TikTok’s impact in the search world, as Google has recently acknowledged the platform’s impact on its Search product.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Senior Vice President of Google Knowledge and Information, said that 40% of young people go to TikTok or Instagram when looking for a place to eat, as opposed to Google Maps or Search. This means that users, albeit part of a specific generation, favor the content on TikTok when finding answers to their questions.
As mentioned above, TikTok has not made official comments on how to use the new feature. But, if rolled out officially, it will likely have significant power for creators looking to build a following and brand awareness, and for those using the app for discovery.
For creators, brands, and businesses, we can assume that the new search feature gathers context for videos from keywords in comments, hashtags in captions, and actual video content (on-screen text and voice). In the future, it would make sense that a TikTok SEO strategy would involve optimizing videos with related keywords to help hyperlinked keywords appear in comments, in comment section headers, and to help videos appear in relevant queries.
For TikTok users, SEO on TikTok would mean that the app would become a more powerful search engine as searching for keywords or clicking on hyperlinked keywords would bring them to a library of snackable content that will answer their specific questions.

Last Updated on October 9, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How to display records in a table using the datatable and process selected records?  Objectives: After reading this blog, you’ll be able to: Understand how to use data table Works with Get Records element to fetch
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Last Updated on October 8, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta It has been six years since I passed the Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant exam. In the past few months, many people reached out to me asking for guidance and a path to becoming a certified Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) Consultant.  That
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The main goal of marketing automation is to put the customer first and make their journey through your ecosystem as seamless as possible. Marketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to manage marketing processes and campaigns while effectively targeting customers with automated messages across multiple channels, such as email, websites, and social media platforms. This is commonly done through the implementation of tools such as CRMs, CMSs, and other tools to connected databases. It can help you stay connected with your audience and find new customers, so you can eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on other parts of your business, same as save a lot of time since you won’t have to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create. Before implementing such software, you need to be aware of four key steps which need to be completed: what you need to automate, what software is best suited for the job, create processes so your team can support it, and most importantly evaluate its effectiveness. Aside from those common key steps I also like to audit quarterly. – I’ve been in the direct response marketing industry for 5 years managing an ad budget of $200k/m across a team of 12 brand marketers. Building out marketing automation systems is what I do, how can I help? submitted by /u/Sticky_Bryce [link] [comments]

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