Category: Marketing Automation

As the world continues to move in a remote-first direction, it’s important to consider how to make your company’s in-person events remote-friendly.
Even if you don’t always do remote events, the remote option is great for anytime your team is spread around the world.

But, a virtual offsite meeting? Sounds oxymoronic. How can you have an offsite, that doesn’t feel like work, virtually?
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into how these brands thought about virtual offsites in a creative way. And didn’t just ask everyone to be on Zoom for 8 hours.

1. Loom VR Virtual Offsite
At the end of 2020, Loom decided to host a virtual offsite. What made this different than attending an 8-hour Zoom meeting?
Well, first, the company sent VR headsets to their team to allow employees to feel like they were leaving their homes for a large company meeting they used to travel for.

We just announced our @loom offsite being done in VR and us shipping everyone an Oculus headset. The smiles. 🙂 — Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth)
December 10, 2020

According to Loom, “with virtual reality, we were able to send everyone an Oculus Quest 2 headset to bring the virtual world to them. Plus, we were able to limit Zoom content to only two hours per day to keep the content engaging.”
Once they got started with virtual reality, they had to find virtual reality apps to host their events. But they also included their employees in the planning process. The company sent a Google Form to employees to share any ideas for activities and sessions they could do during the virtual offsite.
Loom worked with a partner to create a virtual reality island where team members could go for watercooler conversations, ice breakers, and happy hour.
Interestingly, the virtual reality component was not mandatory. Any events that were VR exclusives were optional. And the VR island they created was also accessible via desktop, so everyone could participate.
It’s important to remember that when you’re creating a virtual offsite experience, you want everyone to be able to show up. Hopefully, the tools you use will be available on several devices or you can make those events not mandatory if it takes a special device.
The team also created unstructured time during their day so that people working from home could still do their normal work and activities.
2. First Round Review Interactive Virtual Offsite
Another company thinking about virtual offsites creatively is First Round Review.
First Round Review held a virtual offsite and had activities including group meals, cooking competitions, self-reflection exercises, group presentations, unconference events, and more.
The company knew that they wanted to use all different kinds of formats for their activities so that they could keep people’s attention.
Before they planned the event, they wrote down their objectives, breaking them into task- and team-focused outcomes. Then, they came up with ideas to achieve those outcomes.
Again, First Round Review knew they didn’t want to spend all day on Zoom. A few things they did to make their virtual offsite interactive and successful were:

Send an interactive surprise: The team sent everyone a kit that they were instructed not to open beforehand. The kit included candy, a chalkboard to write on, coffee, and a kombucha starter kit. This was a fun way to kick off the virtual offsite.
Get in costume: The team was all sent special hats and everyone showed up to the meeting wearing their merch.
Cooking challenge: Groups were split into breakout rooms so each group could cook together live. Then, everyone presented their meals together and people voted on creativity and presentation.
Unstructured time: This is huge. Don’t make people spend all day on the computer. Include unstructured time and breaks.
Playtime: Include team bonding events such as trivia or virtual escape rooms. First Round Review even hired a magician to join them for a group dinner.
Show gratitude: First Round Review spent an entire meeting having everyone write out gratitude for every team member and then emailed everyone their list of comments from their coworkers. For each teammate, they had everyone spend one minute answering by writing a line or two in response to the following questions: What’s something you admire about this individual? What’s something this person did recently that you appreciate? Why are you grateful to count this person as a teammate? Answers are anonymous. After they’re all in, the meeting owner will round up the lines for each individual and share them in a private email.

One of the biggest takeaways from this virtual offsite is that you can have several formats, different sessions, interactive and engaging content, and still get work done in strategy sessions.
3. Wikimedia Product Team Virtual Offsite
The Wikimedia Foundation Product team also had productive virtual strategy sessions and meaningful team bonding in a remote environment across various time zones.
To achieve this, a lot of planning went into it. The team first decided what story they wanted to tell during their offsite. To ensure this was discussed throughout the virtual offsite, they revisited their product roadmap to understand where the team had been and where they’re going. On the first day, they held a retrospective to accomplish this.
Ultimately, the creative way that the company thought about this offsite was in the agenda and planning.
If there was a presentation or low energy session, they wanted to make sure it was followed up by a high engagement interactive session.
Additionally, the timing was important. They decided that instead of having 8-hour Zoom meetings, they’d have four hours of virtual sessions a day, broken into 2-hour blocks with a break in between of about 1.5-2 hours.
The offsite included low energy sessions including a Q&A with the Chief Product Officer, where they prepared questions ahead of time and used a thirty-minute window to go through their questions. But followed up those sessions with interactive activities.
One session even had team members create a homepage for newcomers based on previous features built by the product team. This had the team actively working in the tool so they could see what features stand out.
They also had a session with a specialist that was a step-by-step process of the Wikipedia editing process so employees understand the user experience.
Other fun sessions included friendly games online.
When planning a virtual offsite, it’s important to consider the timing and energy levels of the event. Spending all day on a video conferencing tool isn’t going to be effective for most people.
Hosting a virtual offsite doesn’t need to be an overly complicated process. And it doesn’t need to be a boring, 8-hour long Zoom meeting. You can host interactive sessions, presentations, and truly engage with your employees.

We’ve covered email marketing trends for 2021, but that’s just one piece of the marketing strategy puzzle. It’s never a bad idea to have a firm grasp on the bigger picture by tapping into various marketing trends that are likely to dominate in the months to come. And with how unpredictable 2020 was, having an…
The post 5 Marketing Strategies You Should Adopt in 2021 appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

Salesforce Summer’21 Release Quick Summary Continue reading →
The post Salesforce Summer’21 Release Quick Summary appeared first on Automation Champion.

You have to keep investing in new tools and software to stay ahead of your competitors. The product is still in its early days but the set of features it offers already makes it an attractive tool for most marketers. ClickProof is a MarketerMagic feature that helps you add social proof to your website and landing pages in different innovative ways. LivePic is an innovative feature in MarketerMagic that allows you to create highly personalized visual emails for your audience. https://www.siogar.com/2021/04/marketermagic.html
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Affiliate marketing programs are one of the most popular ways to earn revenue just by recommending products. Learn more about how they work and check out these 10 programs you should sign up for.

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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.
There are 72,000 new podcast episodes each day — which means there are five new podcasts made every six seconds.
And, as of March 2020, there are a reported 1.9 million total podcasts, and 47 million total episodes. Depending on when you read this article, these numbers could be drastically different.
Which is all to say: The podcast industry is rapidly growing.
In a world of fast-growing competition, how do we — as podcast marketers — compete for listeners’ attention, while also expanding reach and growing our audiences?
I wish that I could tell you that I have it all figured out. However, not having it figured out is what ultimately led to a 271% increase in downloads for season six of HubSpot’s podcast, Skill Up.
Here, I’ll share my lessons for how I achieved that growth.
Lesson 1: There are a lot of podcast listening platforms.
When you think of podcast platforms, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts are probably top of mind, right?
Well, there are many, many more listening platforms beyond those three.
I downloaded every podcast platform available through the App Store on my iPhone. This included Podcast Addict, Overcast, Castro, PlayerFM, Pandora, Pocket Casts, and about ten others.
I then cross-referenced the players I downloaded with the audience application report from Megaphone. If there was a small or nonexistent audience on a platform, I highlighted it.
The first recommendation I can make is to look at where people are listening to your podcasts using the reporting provided by your podcast host. Are the majority of your downloads coming from Apple or Spotify? If your answer is yes, then that’s good news. You have untapped audiences on other platforms, including PlayerFM and Podcast Addict.
Which brings me to my next recommendation …
Lesson 2: Paid ad placements on podcast platforms pay off.
After I had a list of podcast platforms that would allow me to expand the reach of my podcast, I opened each platform and took note of their ad placements. I looked for anything that said “Sponsored” or something along those lines. If I liked the ad placement, I included it in my list.
Next, I focused on gathering data on ad cost, estimated CPM, and estimated downloads for the placements I was interested in. This is relatively easy, since many of the platforms share both the ad placements available and estimated campaign results on their websites.
If they don’t have the information available on their website, you can email the podcast platforms’ advertising team, who will provide you with that information.
After gathering this data, I assessed the best ads forSkill Up. Fortunately, before I joined HubSpot, my manager had already run ads on podcast listening platforms — which meant I had data to reference to make more informed decisions.
If you haven’t run ads on a listening platform previously, I have good news for you: Ad placements range from $165 to $3,000, so even if you don’t have a large budget, you can likely still experiment with these types of ads.
Lesson 3: Episode-specific promotions are incredibly effective.
Within my marketing plan for the launch of season six, I focused on promotions that announced the upcoming season.
The season was comprised of five episodes that were released over the span of three weeks, so it made sense to drive awareness towards the new episodes. The podcast ad copy read something along the lines of, “A new season ofSkill Up is here!”
Towards the end of the season, however, it didn’t make sense to announce the season anymore. Instead, I created episode-specific promotions.

In comparison to the show promotions, the episode highlights resonated better with audiences and increased our conversions through distribution channels, such as email.

Here’s an example:
HubSpot’s Skill Up podcast presents … “How a Sales Manager at LinkedIn Builds a Buyer-first Selling Strategy”
What’s the best selling strategy in 2021? Kwesi Graves, Sales Manager at LinkedIn, champions the “buyer-first selling” methodology, which prioritizes quality over quantity, emphasizes the importance of the buyer’s context, and encourages his team of reps to spend more time researching than reaching out. If you’re a manager, sales leader, or rep looking to transform how you sell in 2021, this is a great place to start! Listen now:

Episode-specific advertisements also performed much better than season advertisements. Unfortunately, however, most podcast listening platforms don’t allow episode-specific advertisements.
There is one that does: PlayerFM. Our episode-specific ads on PlayerFM outperformed all our other ad campaigns. Hopefully, more podcast platforms will eventually offer the same.
While I wouldn’t say these initiatives are revolutionary, they were incredibly effective for us. Our team is on an exciting journey where experimentation and innovation are key to success.
For any podcast marketers in the industry — This is just the beginning.

Pinterest is an undeniably powerful opportunity to reach and convert new audiences.
If you don’t believe me, consider this: The platform has over 250 million users. And roughly 90% of those Pinterest users say they look at content on the network to make purchasing decisions.
However, excelling on Pinterest versus using Pinterest as a strong distribution channel are two different things.
If you’re starting to see an uptick in followers on your Pinterest account, you might want to consider how you can turn those followers into real leads and customers for your business.
Here, let’s explore some creative strategies for turning the followers you get on Pinterest into traffic for your website and social channels.

1. Create boards using relevant keywords.
A board — or an organized compilation of related pins, for easier discoverability — is a necessary component for a good user experience on Pinterest.
For instance, CoSchedule, which has almost 17,000 followers on Pinterest, has organized their pins into boards titled “Content Marketing”, “Social Media Marketing”, “Marketing Inspiration”, and more:

New followers can easily find the pins they’re looking for using these broader categories, which is why it makes sense to use popular keywords when creating your boards, as CoSchedule did.
Additionally, these keyword-optimized boards can help make your Pinterest content more discoverable on search engines when someone searches for related keywords — particularly on Google Image searches, since Pinterest is primarily a visual channel:

As shown above, two images from Pinterest arise on Google’s Images search page for the search term, “Best marketing statistics”. By creating boards with searchable keywords, you’re more likely to reach users both on, and off, Pinterest.
2. Leverage Rich pins to ensure your Pinterest content is up-to-date.
Simply put, Rich pins can sync with your website to ensure your content is up-to-date on Pinterest when you make any changes to those pages on your site.  
There are a few reasons you might use Rich pins. If you post your products on Pinterest, Product Rich Pins can ensure availability and pricing are updated automatically as those factors change on your ecommerce site.
If you post recipes, alternatively, then Recipe Rich pins can add extra information to the recipes you pin to your site — including serving size, diet preference, and ratings — for increased discoverability.
Finally, Article Rich Pins will add headlines, titles, description, and author byline information of the article or blog post to your Pinterest site when you pin an article.
These small details go a long way towards ensuring your Pinterest content is always fresh as users find it. Particularly if you’re aiming to drive sales for products from Pinterest, it’s important to use Product Rich Pins so people aren’t frustrated when they find pricing or other information is different between Pinterest and your product pages.
3. Pin consistently, and often.
You can’t expect much traffic from Pinterest if you don’t regularly pin content on the platform. Pinterest, like any social network, requires dedicated, long-term work to see results.
You wouldn’t expect to write one blog post for your website and see a major, steady flow of traffic as a result — and the same goes for Pinterest.
Additionally, as your followers grow, you want to provide high-quality, interesting content to increase brand loyalty and keep those followers active on your page. By regularly pinning, you’re increasing your odds of converting those followers into fans of your brand — which will ultimately drive them off Pinterest, and onto your website or social pages.
4. Optimize your pins — and boards — for search.
At its core, Pinterest is essentially its own visual search engine. And, similar to other search engines, keyword-optimized content performs best on the network.
Additionally, keyword optimizing your Pinterest profile increases your chances to rank organically on other search engines, and drive traffic from search engines like Google to your Pinterest site.
To optimize your Pinterest page, consider inserting brand-related keywords into your bio and profile, pin descriptions, board titles, board descriptions, and even the image alt-text of content you post on Pinterest.
This can help your images appear on Google’s Image search results, as well as improve your chances of ranking on Pinterest for your intended keywords.
5. Create pin-worthy images, and use those images to link out to original content on your website or social pages.
One of the easiest ways to drive traffic back to your website is by creating unique, original content specifically for Pinterest, and then using that pin to link back to your website or blog post.
For instance, consider the infographic below, which I found when searching “best social media platforms” on Pinterest:

It’s a good idea to create unique, standalone value with your images for Pinterest. In this case, I can find my answer to “best social media platforms” by looking at the infographic itself without ever leaving Pinterest — which makes for a better user experience.
However, if I’ve found unique value in the content, I might want to click the brand’s website to learn more about their business or see additional content. When I click on the digichef URL, I’m taken to the original page for the infographic, on the business’ website:

You might try a similar approach with your own Pinterest strategy. Consider how you can create unique, standalone content that will perform well on Pinterest. Alternatively, perhaps you can post infographics or other visual assets you’ve already created for your brand on Pinterest, with a link back to your site.
6. Follow similar brands for content inspiration, as well as opportunities to re-pin images that align with your brand.
With Pinterest, each pin you save doesn’t have to be original branded content. Instead, one easy opportunity to increase engagement is to re-pin images that align with your brand to share with your own followers.
Additionally, following other brands can increase traffic to your own Pinterest profile and, ultimately, your website. When you follow someone on Pinterest, Pinterest sends a notification letting them know they have a new follower. Some of those people may then follow you back in return, which is a good way to grow your audience.
Following similar brands can also help you identify popular or trending content on other profiles, as well as gaps in your own Pinterest content strategy.
If you work at a home decor ecommerce store, for instance, you might find that many competitors are posting ‘Easter Home Decor’ images:

This might inspire your team to create your own version of Easter home decor content, as well as other seasonal pins and boards.
Finally, consider partnering with certain brands that have complementary products or services to your own. For example, Benefit Cosmetics partnered with Shutterfly to create the page, “Wedding Looks: benefit cosmetics x Wedding Paper Divas”:

The page is filled with pins related to both makeup and stationary for the big day. For expanding your reach and increasing value for your followers, you might try partnering with other popular brands on Pinterest. 
Ultimately, creating a successful Pinterest strategy takes work and dedication, but if you find Pinterest is a popular social platform with your target audience, it’s likely worth the time and effort it takes to grow your following, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales.  

Hulu gave us “The Handmaid’s Tale,” then gave us “Little Fires Everywhere.” So, personally, I don’t need another reason to love the streaming platform. But if I had a small business, I would have just gotten one.
In July 2020, Hulu announced Hulu Ad Manager, a self-service advertising platform designed for smaller advertisers with limited budgets.

Previously, Hulu ads were only accessible to top brands with the finances to fund large campaigns. Now, small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) can reach the platform’s 92 million ad-supported viewers without dishing out thousands of dollars.
So, how exactly does the Ad Manager work? We’ll cover that and more below.
How to Use Hulu’s Ad Service
Currently, Hulu’s self-service solution is in the beta phase.
To access the platform as a beta user, you must first submit an RSVP form with information on your business.

If accepted, setting up your ad is easy. Here are the steps.
1. Select the dates within which you want to run your ad campaign.
2. Build your audience.
On Hulu Ad Manager, you can target users by age, interest, gender, location, and of course show genre. When it comes to location, you can narrow it down by state, city, ZIP code, or a designated marketing area (DMA).
However, you cannot select which shows you want your ads to run on, only the genre. If you’re not sure what will align best with your brand, look through the current show selections to get an idea of what to expect.
3. Set your budget.
To run an ad on Hulu, you must have a minimum budget of $500 per campaign, which is considerably less than the usual cost of ads on streaming platforms. For comparison, Amazon’s self-service platform for video ads typically requires a minimum ad spend of $35,000.
4. Upload your video ad.
There are a few requirements your ad must meet to be approved:

Be between 15 to 30 seconds long
Formatted in MP4 or MOV
Be in HD and have stereo sound
Fit the tech specs outlined by Hulu
Comply with Hulu’s advertising policies.

The approval process usually takes up to three business days.
5. Make a payment.
Currently, Hulu doesn’t accept business bank accounts or debit cards for payments. You must use a credit card. If you choose to pause or cancel your campaign, you will only pay for the delivered impressions.
6. Track your ad performance.
Once your ad is live, you can start tracking its performance in the Hulu Ad Manager.
Note that you will not be able to find out what times your ad aired and during which shows. However, you can expect to find standard metrics, such as impressions and clicks.
Hulu Advertising Options
In addition to Hulu’s most recent self-service option, the streaming service also offers two other advertising options:

Premium Programmatic – This is ideal for brands who want to leverage lookalike audiences, audience CRM matching, and behavioral segmenting in their campaign.

Action With Broad Appeal – With this option, you can integrate your brand with Hulu’s, create branded content collections, and deliver ads in innovative formats.

Each option caters to your brand’s specific goals and can be designed to fit your budget.
For instance, you can run brand lift studies, which are ads designed to measure consumer perception of your brand after a campaign.
Jillian Hope, senior marketing manager of brand advertising at HubSpot, explains that they can help brand advertisers understand the impact Hulu campaign exposure has on key brand KPIs.
Pros and Cons of Hulu Ads
Pro: Hulu has extensive targeting capabilities.
With any one of the three advertising options available on Hulu, you can use Hulu’s targeting features to reach your ideal viewers.
“[You have] the ability to define target audiences using Hulu’s first-party audience data or leverage lookalike audiences using your own first-party data,” said Hope.
The extent of the targeting parameters will depend on which option you are using. For instance, if you are using programmatic buying, you can use lookalike audiences to match the exact users you’re looking for with Hulu’s viewers.
However, on the current beta version of the self-service solution, you can only target users by demographic and show genre.
Despite this, Hope adds that targeting on a platform like Hulu is much more advanced than it would be with traditional, linear TV.
Pro: Innovative ad formats allow you to experiment.
On Hulu, you’re only limited to video commercials if you’re using the self-service option. The platform offers over 15 ad products to reach viewers.
“There are multiple ad formats available and lots of innovation happening,” said Hope. “For example, [there’s the] new QR code integration that is more desirable to direct response advertisers.”
It’s just a matter of figuring out which ad product best aligns with your goals.
For instance, there’s the cover story brand placement, which allows you to seamlessly integrate your branding on Hulu’s homepage.

Image Source
Then, there’s the ad selector, which puts the power back in the consumers hands by letting them select which ad they want to see.

Image Source
These are just a few of the ad formats you can pick from, each one creating a different experience for the user. To see all the ad formats available on Hulu, visit Hulu’s ad product page.
Con: You can only accomplish so much with a limited budget.
One of the downsides of Hulu ads is that certain campaigns will require a bigger budget than you may have available.
“Some of the more premium ad placements, as well as brand lift studies, require budget minimums in order to reach statistical significance,” said Hope. “So, they are less attainable to smaller advertisers.”
In this case, Hulu may not be the best platform on which to run these types of campaigns. You may want to opt for another ad platform, like Facebook Ads, where you can reach more users who still fall within your target audience for less money.
How Hulu Ad Examples Can Inform Your Next Campaign
If you’re not ready to pull the trigger on a Hulu campaign, get inspiration in the meantime.
See how other brands – notably your competitors – are using the platform to reach their target audience. This means looking at their creative, reviewing case studies, and monitoring consumer sentiment via social media.
This competitive intelligence can help you devise a strategy during the ideation phase of your campaign.
Given that the Hulu Ad Manager is still in beta, the platform will likely include more features once it fully launches. In the meantime, SMBs can reach TV viewers for a fraction of what it used to cost.

affordable Chatbot and website
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