Customers like doing business with companies that not only provide strong services, but help them feel engaged or, at the very least, give them a sense of trust. Doing that can be tricky, though. That’s why we asked 15 members from the Young Entrepreneur Council this question: Q. What is one way that goes above and beyond expectations that you’ve found keeps customers happy and coming back? 1. Give customers exactly what they need My industry—infrastructure hosting—thrives on aggressive upselling and cross-selling, but we’ve … [Read more...]

Social media is one of the best ways to amplify your brand and the great content you’re creating. But it isn’t enough to just post content to social whenever you feel like it. Some times are better than others. So, which one is best? Unfortunately, there's no perfect answer. Different businesses may find different days and times work best for them. In fact, timing often depends on the platform you're using, how your target audience interacts with that platform, the regions and corresponding time zones you're targeting, and your goals (e.g., clicks versus … [Read more...]

What catches your attention? The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention. Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market. Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off … [Read more...]

Welcome back. If you're just tuning in, allow me to catch you up: This post is the second in a two-part series on our experiment to move gated offer content onto a site page, and test different conversion methods. If you missed Part I, check it out here. Back in Part I, we saw significant increases in organic search traffic only on offers that already were performing well for search. Also, our Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) test failed. So in Part II, we turned our focus to running more CRO tests. In order to avoid putting many more conversions at risk, we … [Read more...]

Whenever a new app or technology is released, marketers are among the first to experiment with it -- and to start creating new content with it. That's because marketers are constantly competing for their audience's attention -- and often by the most innovating and engaging means possible. And right now, that means creating video content. There's no getting around it -- marketers must create video content if they want to broaden their reach and connect with audiences across platforms -- such as on blogs, YouTube, social media, and search engines.  Video … [Read more...]

As a B2B texting software, one of our main goals at Text Request is maximizing value, both for ourselves and our users. That's what led us to focusing on organic traffic. Billions of people are looking for answers or solutions to their questions or problems, and we're trying to add value. So we saw organic search as a symbiotic relationship we could tap into. As the guy responsible for our content and SEO, I've only found one "secret" to growing organic traffic. I'll share this secret in a bit, but first I'll walk you through the steps we took to grow our organic … [Read more...]

SurveyMonkey’s weekly polling (ending Thursday July 20) finds 42 percent of adults nationwide approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 57 percent disapprove. Compared to the previous week, that result represents no change in the approval percentage and a one-point uptick in disapproval (from 56 percent) since last week. “Health care” edges up two percentage points over the past week (from 27 to 29 percent) as the selected issue that matters most to Americans, putting it five percentage points ahead of “jobs and the … [Read more...]

Whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, chances are, you have an opinion about forms. Trust us -- they’re not evil. We still use them, and still believe that many marketers should continue to do so, too. But truth be told, the "Should we gate our content?" question has been flying around HubSpot for a few years now. We’ve looked at the topic through various lenses, from SEO, to lead generation, to channel-specific implications. After all, gated offers tend to provide fairly consistent lead volume and lead-to-customer conversion rates.   But … [Read more...]

People make entire careers out of keeping everyone in their team up to date and in the loop. No offense to them, but that sounds like an awful lot of extra work. We want to help you cut corners—responsibly—by finding ways to automate the extra work so you can focus on the really important parts of your job. That’s why we’re excited to introduce you to Shared Response Alerts. It’s the easiest way to make sure everyone knows what’s going on with your survey, without having to send a bunch of emails and messages to update everyone. The … [Read more...]

On any given day, most of our email inboxes are flooded with a barrage of automated email newsletters that do little else besides giving us another task to do on our commutes to work -- namely, marking them all as unread without reading, or unsubscribing altogether. But every now and then, we get a newsletter that's so good, not only do we read it, but we click it, share it, and recommend it to our friends. Exceptional email marketing campaigns need to be cleverly written to attract attention in busy inboxes. Marketing emails also need to be personalized, filled … [Read more...]