Category: Marketing Automation

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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Last Updated on December 3, 2020 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: How do you automatically remove records from the Chatter Groups? Salesforce allows you to add a record to Chatter Groups, which means you can now collaborate and … Continue reading →

Web push notifications are a unique, fast and convenient way to stay in touch with your customers. See how to use them in GetResponse.

Unprecedented times. The new normal. We all have our own least favorite catch phrases to describe what it’s like to live through a pandemic, just as we all have our own stories about how COVID-19 has impacted our day-to-day and professional lives. Eleven months into the year, I don’t think it’s necessary to spell out how work life has shifted, in-person engagements have dropped to all-time lows, and how so many people found new work spaces sitting somewhere in front of a Peloton.
What hasn’t changed in the midst of this pandemic and our global shift to working from home is what it takes for sales people to succeed — the ability to adapt. Adapting to fewer (if any) in-person visits, to meeting your customers where they are, to a world of yet-unknowns that will continue to crop up over time. And for those who learn to do this well, there’s a huge opportunity to not just succeed but excel.
Throughout my tech career I’ve worked with dozens of sales representatives. Over the past year, I’ve watched top performers struggle to close a single deal all month. I’ve seen sales people with traditionally challenging territories knock it out of the park. I’ve also had a lot of conversations with my sales reps. Here’s what I’m hearing:
What is the rest of the team doing to succeed? Why is it working for them but not me? Why is it that what used to work for me no longer works?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. That’s why adaptability is key. But it leaves an uncomfortable gray area when it comes to how we should change. What it comes down to is this:
How are you adapting to your customers’ needs? How are you adapting your sales process to our new digital-first world? Are you willing to make the changes necessary to succeed? 
As you ponder these questions, here are three ways that technology and insights can help you reach the right answers for you and your team.
1. Collaboration
The best sales reps are not lone wolves. For some, this isn’t a surprise. For others, it may be difficult to let go of being in control, trust others to get the job done, or admit that they aren’t always (and don’t have to be) the smartest person in the room.
There’s value in having multiple roles supporting the sales process. Realizing that you don’t have to go it alone can help you close bigger deals faster and smarter.

Understand the roles and functions that surround sales at your company. With this basic level of knowledge, you can’t collaborate effectively.

Take stock of where you get the most value. This may not be linear — think about what you need depending on the situation you’re in, or the stage of the sales process.

Provide feedback on what’s working well or what could work better. And be open to receiving and acting on feedback as well.

2. Insights & Intelligence
Once you’ve identified your key internal stakeholders and what they bring to the table, it’s important to put that information to work. One of my favorite synergies is when marketing and sales are truly aligned and build a holistic view of the customer journey together. By understanding where your customer has been and where they are now, you can help them get to where they’re going more effectively.

Familiarize yourself with your prospects’ activities before they land in your lead queue. When you understand the content that prospects are engaging with on your website and  through their inboxes, you can start identifying their interests before you ever talk to them.

Find your account champion. When you’re selling to a company, the purchasing decision typically sits with more than one person. Finding the right contact to facilitate introductions and help sell your product or services internally can make all the difference. If you have visibility into who’s engaging with your content, how much they’re engaging, and how they’re engaging, this knowledge can help you pinpoint how to start the conversation.

Invest in artificial intelligence (AI) to remove human bias from the equation and glean insights you may not have known to look for. AI can help uncover a subsegment of prospects that responds more positively to certain messages or identify leads that are most likely to convert into contacts. Using unbiased insights helps focus your efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

3. Organization
Juggling all of your accounts at different stages and with different business needs is hard enough. But when this information is stored in your mind or simply written down, it’s difficult to find, access, and share. Putting effort into the following can go a long way:

Use the tools at your disposal. Having a CRM doesn’t help you if you’re not actually using it. When you add and update key information, it helps everyone you’re collaborating with to stay on the same page, and empowers you to draw comparisons across accounts. When processes like lead funnel stages and opportunity statuses are standardized, you can easily look across all of your accounts and prospects to see where the needle is moving and where you’ve hit a roadblock.

Make the most of repeatable processes. Each account may need something slightly different, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from what’s worked in the past and make the necessary tweaks to get it to resonate. Once you know which campaigns helped to push opportunities across the finish line, you can use that knowledge to your advantage. For example, you can maintain a library of email templates that get the best responses. Learn, organize, and optimize.

Prioritize your time and effort. There are only so many hours in the day. If you’re ready to start your day with a call blitz, how will you ensure that you’re calling on the hottest prospects first? Using tools like lead scoring and organizing your CRM leads by top lead score first ensures that you’re reaching out in an order that makes sense for your business and is most likely to lead to success.

I’ll ask again: How are you adapting to your customers’ needs? How are you adapting your sales process to our digital-first world? Are you willing to make the changes necessary to succeed? 
Change is inevitable. So think about that last question. I’ve just laid out the key trends I’ve observed in my most resilient sales reps. It’s time for a bit of self-reflection to understand if you’re ready, willing, and able to adapt.
Register for our Dec. 15 Pardot-Like-a-Pro webinar to learn how to sell smarter with Pardot in 2021.

How does IFundWomen empower and support women entrepreneurs? Their strength is in their community. IFundWomen, the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses, aims to empower and support women entrepreneurs as they navigate building their businesses. They’ve identified a powerful marketing channel to help these women bring their visions to life: digital community.
Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at how IFundWomen integrates their marketing and community building to foster inclusive digital spaces. You’ll hear directly from Shakivla Todd, Marketing Associate at IFundWomen, and you’ll learn:

Community tactics to build closer, longer-lasting relationships with your customers
How to learn from your community to inform your marketing strategy
Where Shakivla finds inspiration for creating social media content for a small business audience⠀
How to avoid tone-deaf marketing in uncertain times

This post is part of the #BufferBrandSpotlight, a Buffer social media series that shines a spotlight on the people that are helping build remarkable brands through social media, community building, content creation, and brand storytelling.
This series was born on Instagram stories, which means you can watch the original interview in our Highlights found on our @buffer Instagram profile.

Who are you?
My name is Shakivla Todd and I am the Marketing Associate for IFundWomen. More importantly, I’m a stellar older sister, a dope friend, and a budding plant mom. IFundWomen is the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with capital, coaching, and connections. We offer immediate access to capital through a premium online fundraising experience, access to small business grants from corporate partners, expert business coaching on all the topics entrepreneurs need to know about, and a network of women business owners that sparks confidence, accelerates knowledge, and ignites action.
I manage our digital communities through social media strategy, Slack engagement, and e-mail marketing. I also am a startup coach and I get to coach women entrepreneurs on how to level up their social media game—this is one of my favorite parts of my role!
Where do you find inspiration for IFundWomen’s social media content?
I spend a lot of time scrolling through Instagram to get inspo for social content. I am always stalking Ellevest, R29 Unbothered, Freelancing Females, Girlboss, the list goes on. Additionally, our community is #TeamMemes so pop culture inspires a good amount of my content. I am also looking for the next thing to be memeified! For example, millennials collectively are re-watching the early 2000s sitcom Girlfriends on Netflix. Everyone is talking about it, so I made a meme from a picture of the cast to promote one of our grant programs.
Lastly, I would be lying if I didn’t say that we get inspired by checking out our competitors. It’s a great tactic!
How does managing IFundWomen’s social media account and community look like on a day-to-day basis?
First thing I do in the morning is check all DMs across platforms. I can do this from laying in my bed, so it’s a good slow start to the day and I don’t have to worry about it during the workday. I like to respond to any messages and comments within 24 hours, but if it’s a launch day or something important I check in with Instagram much more frequently.
On an amazing day, I have already scheduled my posts into Buffer. So, I’ll go check on them to make sure everything is still good to go. After that, my day is clear to be creative and strategize for future content. I collaborate with our sales, coaching, and creative teams to ensure that we are consistently marketing our products, services, events, and partnership. I have to make sure everything is reflected in our marketing content calendar.
What advice do you have for brands that are trying to foster a supportive, inclusive online community?
Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice. That being said, don’t just say something to say something. Be authentic and make it work for you. For example, during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death instead of going silent or posting a black square, our response was amplifying and supporting Black women-owned businesses recognizing that one of the most important actions to combat racial injustice is to redistribute money to Black-owned businesses. ⁠

Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice.
How do you learn from your community to help guide your marketing strategy?
Our community is loud and clear about what they need, want, and love. I like to try out different tactics and just watch to see where our community takes it. If something goes “viral” I continue to create content similar to that. Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.
Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.
For example, IFundWomen partners with companies to build grant programs for businesses. Over the summer, during the application window for one of our grants people were consistently sliding in our DMs asking very specific questions about their grant application. We decided to host a workshop specifically on grant writing. To promote this free workshop I seriously just took a screenshot of the first slide of the presentation that was going to be used for the workshop. The post blew up with nearly 1000 likes and over 400 people registered for the workshop. I think it succeeded because the Instagram post was very simple, straight to the point, and directly addressed a concern our community was having.
What’s your number one tip for engaging with IFundWomen’s community?
Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram. What does that mean? That means most comments and DMs get very personalized responses. I interact with our followers not only on our posts but on their posts as well if it comes across our feed. I often engage as if our business account is a personal account. It’s a great tactic to beat the algorithm, but also to build community and brand trust.
Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram.
How do you stay up to date on social media/marketing trends?
I love reading Buffer’s, Later’s, Hootsuite’s blogs, and Social Media Today. A good scroll through TikTok and Twitter is also good for the brain. I think most trends start in those two apps. Shameless plug, I take what I learn all over the internet and put it into a roundup of “trends to keep up with” in my newsletter, Trending with Shak.
What’s your favorite IFundWomen partnership to date and why?
The Funding Journey is an IGTV series where we interview successful founders on the long, sometimes complicated, journey to getting their businesses funded. It’s my favorite because:

I get to put on my true producer hat and build something out start to finish.
Most of the founders we interview are from HUGE brands. It means amazing reach for us as a brand plus our community LOVES hearing from brands they love like Black Girl Sunscreen, Lively, and The Helm.

Link to Instagram post found here.Link to Instagram post found here.
We hope this interview with Shakivla helps you get started with or double down on your social media efforts. You can follow her journey on Instagram here!
Have any questions for Shakivla? Feel free to reply with your questions to the Twitter post below and Shakivla or someone from the Buffer team will get to them as soon as possible.

Are you seeing a lower return of effort for traditional premium content like whitepapers, webinars, ebooks and more?
Alternatively, do you find the biggest results just aren’t there for the amount of work you put into the creation? If so, you’re not alone. While these offers can provide in-depth insights for prospects, not every prospect sees the value in them.
Still, we continue offering premium content to build trust throughout the buyer’s journey and learn information about prospects along the way.
And yet, the problem remains: Where do you draw the line between offering free, useful content and charging for your expert knowledge and insight?
Some brands are beginning to define this blurry line by developing their own learning management systems (LMS), as a private hub for paid access to their best educational resources.
And yes, you can even build an LMS in HubSpot. Here, we’ll explore what a learning management system is, the benefits of using one, and how you can repurpose content into your own guided learning course. 
Let’s dive in. 

What’s a learning management system (LMS)?
First, let’s first make sure we’re on the same page with a definition.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application to administer, document, track, report on and deliver educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.
It’s a portal that users can log into to exclusively access the premium content you develop specifically for your paid audience. (Paid can mean literal financial payment or the currency of data/membership).

While online courses aren’t new, using a learning management system (LMS) to deliver premium content is still uncharted territory for most brands.

As marketers, we’re always trying to create valuable content. But in a crowded marketplace, it can be difficult to demonstrate value in your content even if you have a strong content marketing strategy.
That’s where a guided learning course can prove beneficial. A guided learning course can offer in-depth solutions to your prospects’ challenges, and ultimately, can provide your company with higher-quality leads.
Which makes LMS’ invaluable to anyone wanting to create a guided learning course, since courses need to be built on a LMS. 
To explore the importance of guided learning courses, let’s consider an example. Let’s say you have two competitors, and both offer a webinar on “Email Marketing Strategy”.
To differentiate your own brand, imagine instead you take an hour-long webinar and split it up into a dozen topics for five-to-seven minutes each. That could easily be offered as a 12-module course.
Your prospect can now go through the content on their own time and only explore the sections that feel relevant to them, versus having to sit and listen to an hour-long webinar. The perception and value is magnified and fits the nature of how your prospect actually wants to consume the content.
Why use an LMS?
Once we know what an LMS is, it’s time to explore why. As you learn what an LMS is and how it works for users, let’s dig into why it could change your business.
1. User Accessibility
Right now most marketers create an ebook, promote that PDF through blog posts and social posts, then use workflows and emails to “guide” prospects and contacts throughout the journey.
We can tell when someone downloads the PDF, but we have no idea how much they consume. Then, with emails, information can get lost on the user side of the equation. So many of us delete emails or forget what the exact phrase in an email is we’re searching for … it can easily become a mess.

An LMS allows the user flexibility to go back into the journey and see what they need to see inside a comprehensive portal.

Users no longer have to rely on emails. Instead, they can reference each step in the learning path, see what’s next, and enjoy a more realistic and user-friendly experience.
2. Buyer’s Journey Trackability
On the marketer’s side, an LMS provides us with more data points to better understand a prospect’s position in the buyer’s journey — especially when using an LMS for lead management and education.

Imagine a world where you can watch your buyer discover your content during their awareness stage, and move through consideration and into the decision stage, all within your ecosystem.

It’s possible to track a prospect’s journey throughout the buying stages with guided learning courses that tailor to users in different stages of the buyer’s journey — this is what truly creating content for the buyer’s journey looks like.
With a webinar or PDF, you’re left wondering how much someone consumed. You don’t have access to the data with PDFs. You know prospects downloaded it, but did they actually consume the information? For the most part, it’s the same with webinars on the user level.
When you use guided learning or an LMS, you can see every module or every single page they viewed, and how far through the course users got. You can measure to make sure it’s effective in general, and you can also measure the intent and automate your systems based on topic performance and even individual chapter performance. 
3. Cross-Device Consumption
Want to know a bonus to creating a guided learning course that users sign into for consumption? Think about a frictionless cross-device experience.
How often do we start a video or article on our laptop while working or researching, only to want to continue it on our phone later? This is especially true when the content is longer than a 2-minute video.
When a user has a membership to your LMS, they can go to their laptop, their phone, their iPad … wherever they want to consume content at that moment, and it’s there waiting for them. That’s winning at UX!
Guided Learning Course Examples
What does a learning management system look like in practice? Let’s take a look at two examples right under our noses.
1. HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy is a great example of using an LMS for lead generation and trust building.
Academy courses teach users all about HubSpot’s philosophy and mindset. Users can learn about HubSpot before purchasing HubSpot’s products or services — but users can also learn about a variety of other marketing, sales, service, and web design topics without ever becoming a HubSpot customer. 
Consider the Marketing Software Certification course. Instead of a PDF with screenshots, users can walk through videos with screen-sharing options, download study guides, and take quizzes and exams along the way to assess progress.

2. SEMrush Academy

SEMrush offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research. To appeal to both prospects and users, the company created SEMrush Academy, a Digital Marketing guided learning course with courses on SEO, content marketing, PPC, and more. SEMrush Academy is free and offers a certification when users complete courses.
Best of all, the guided learning courses have both video and text with some of the industry’s most well-known digital marketing professionals, and while all courses are offered in English, many of them are also offered in Spanish.
Whether you’re a content marketer looking to up your game or you’re already a customer of SEMrush, you’ll undeniably find value in their courses, ranging from beginner to advanced.

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For more inspiration, take a look at 60 Best Free Online Courses For Whatever You Want to Learn.
How to Repurpose Your Content into a Guided Learning Course
If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute … Now I have to create all this new content?” take a breath. Yes, new content is needed. However, you can also repurpose content you already have as you’re creating new content for your LMS strategy.

Most of your existing content can be reimagined into a guided learning course.

You can revisit popular ebooks, webinars, pillar pages, blog posts, slide decks and more to create a multimedia course to serve your customers. You can even turn toolkits and related offers into guided learning opportunities.
For instance, you might consider taking your ebook and using each chapter as a chapter or module in your course. Additionally, you might take some information on the subject from various blog posts and turn it into a checklist or template format for users to try for themselves.
At Impulse Creative, we can turn our Brand Plan ebook into the Brand Plan Course and create a whole new offering. Here’s how that would look:

You get the idea. Each chapter becomes a module, and the subjects in those chapters become the videos that make up the course. This way, you can keep videos shorter for more bite-sized consumption.
Additionally, you’ll want to perform a content audit to uncover what pieces you have and what problems each one solves before placing them into buckets. Then, you can take each of these buckets and create a course.
The content you have will act as a storyboard so you can script your videos. Then you can use the existing content with a slight refresh as the bonus materials in your courses.
Brands find themselves at a critical turning point today … Traditional content can feel stale — and users are demanding more.
There is a major opportunity for the LMS to serve multiple facets of your business, from lead generation to sales or customer success. Ultimately, you’ll want to figure out how a LMS could serve your own business needs, as well as the needs of your prospects and customers.