How Hubspot Do Inbound Marketing

2 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE IS THIS BOOK RIGHT FOR ME? Not quite sure if this ebook is right for you? See the below description to determine if your level matches the content you are about to read. INTRODUCTORY THIS RESOURCE Introductory content is for marketers who are new to the subject. This content typically includes step-by-step instructions on how to get started with this aspect of inbound marketing and learn its fundamentals. After reading it, you will be able to execute basic marketing tactics related to the topic. INTERMEDIATE Intermediate content is for marketers who are familiar with the subject but have only basic experience in executing strategies and tactics on the topic. This content typically covers the fundamentals and moves on to reveal more complex functions and examples. After reading it, you will feel comfortable leading projects with this aspect of inbound marketing. ADVANCED Advanced content is for marketers who are, or want to be, experts on the subject. In it, we walk you through advanced features of this aspect of inbound marketing and help you develop complete mastery of the subject. After reading it, you will feel ready not only to execute strategies and tactics, but also to teach others how to be successful. www.Hubspot.com

3 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE HUBSpOT’S All-IN-ONE Request A Demo MARKETING SOFTwARE. ... brings your whole marketing world Video Overview together in one, powerful, integrated sys- tem. MARKETING ANAlYTICS SEARCH OpTIMIzATION Analyze your web traffic Improve your rank in and see which sources search engines by finding Yare generating the most sand tracking your most leads. effective keywords. BlOGGING lEAD MANAGEMENT Create blog content Track leads with a quickly while getting SEO complete timeline-view of Ntips and best practice Utheir interactions with your pointers as you type. company EMAIl SOCIAl MEDIA Send personalized, Publish content to your segmented emails based social accounts, then Mon any information in your qnurture leads based on contact database. their social engagement. www.Hubspot.com

4 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE HOw HUBSpOT DOES CONTENT. WrITTEN by COrEy ErIdON Corey Eridon manages the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog, creating content about SEO, social media, analytics, business blogging, marketing automation, and email marketing. before joining HubSpot, Corey worked as a marketer and FOllOw ME ON TwITTER. consultant. @COREY_BOS dESIgNEd by brITTANy LEANINg brittany Leaning is HubSpot’s Social Media Manager. She is responsible for strategizing, creating, managing, measuring, and scaling organic social media efforts across HubSpot’s various accounts in order FOllOw ME ON TwITTER. to generate leads and grow reach. @BlEANING www.Hubspot.com

5 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE CONTENTS. 06 INTRODUCTION 07 CREATING A CONTENT CUlTURE 15 JUST DO IT AlREADY 23 CREATE CONTENT THE FAST, EASY, & EFFICIENT wAY 39 REFINING YOUR CONTENT CREATION pROCESSES 48 ITERATING, IMpROVING, AND ExpERIMENTING 54 CONClUSION www.Hubspot.com

6 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Introduction. To“do” inbound marketing, you need to “do” content. but when marketers set out to actually build a content creation team, there’s the dream ... and there’s the reality. Here’s what the dream looks like: • Publish amazing blog content every day. • Create new lead generation offers every week. • design beautiful, engaging images to share on social media. • Newsjack in the blink of an eye. • be on the cutting edge of new content formats and ideas. www.Hubspot.com www.Hubspot.com

7 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Here’s the reality: • Publish blog posts when someone has time to write one. • Plan to create a new lead generation offer all month, crank one out before the end of the quarter. • Maintain a largely image-free social media presence, except for the ones that get pulled in from the blog posts you put on your Timeline. • Newsjacks a few days after news breaks. • remain about 12 months behind adoption of new content trends. Some -- or all -- of that feel familiar? What’s with the disconnect? Why can’t dreams become reality? At the risk of sounding like a disney movie, your dream of turning your company into a content creation machine can come true. downloading this ebook that outlines HubSpot’s own content creation methodology was the first step; reading on will show you exactly how to do it yourself, building your company’s content machine from the ground up. www.Hubspot.com www.Hubspot.com

8 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 01 CHApTER CREATING A CONTENT CUlTURE. www.Hubspot.com

9 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Everyone has a talent. what is rare is the courage to nurture it. - Erica Jong A well-run machine is built with solid, high quality parts that are all working together to achieve the same goal. To become a content creation machine, you need to create a company culture that supports the goal of frequent, high-quality content creation. In a content culture, content is not an afterthought; a fluffy pursuit; an optional expense. Companies that have created a content culture view content as the basis for running an inbound company -- from Marketing, to Sales, to Services. In order to create this culture of content, we have four big tips to follow. www.Hubspot.com

10 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 1 Invest in Qualified Content Hires. Time to level. Content isn’t free, and it’s not easy to create. Historically, content creation has been relegated to free interns and content farms. The success you’ll see from that method notwithstanding (hint: little to none), consider the message this sends to your team. The message is that content is not important enough for you to invest serious resources in. Invest in bringing at least one excellent content creator into your organization. This person should know about your industry so he or she can write intelligently about the subjects that matter to your target audience. If you don’t have the budget to hire one more employee, identify a current hire with writing chops and industry know-how, and adjust their job description to allocate some time toward content creation. These steps set the stage for a strong content culture, because they show that you value content so much, you are willing to allocate budget and time to high-quality content creation. www.Hubspot.com

11 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 2 Mobilize Every Employee to Create Content. Everyone in your company should have the ability to contribute content. It’s how you’ll build a scalable content creation machine. To foster a culture of content creators, however, you need to reiterate -- over and over -- the concrete benefits to participating. You should explain that: • being a regular content creator will help them move upward within the company. This must actually be true, ideally with examples you can point it. • Content creators are often also thought leaders, and it will help them gain credibility with leads, customers, and even future employers. •The content will serve as a built-in online portfolio they can reference years down the road. • Content drives critical business metrics, like lead- and customer- generation. Using closed-loop analytics, you can demonstrate the actual dollar value of one piece of content to your business. • being a published author might lead to future opportunities, like speaking engagements, or quotes in high-profile publications. www.Hubspot.com

12 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 3 Inspire Every Employee to Create Content. you’ve explained why everyone in your company should create content. Now make them want to. • Reward it. The authors of content that performs particularly well should be highlighted for their contribution. you can do this at your next team or company meeting, in an internal newsletter, or in a group email. Be sure to detail the specific results it drove for the business, like leads or opportunities generated, or customers won. Again, using closed-loop marketing software, this information is just a click away. • Make it a competition. See who can create the best piece of content to move a specific business metric -- like the most leads generated from a post about a certain subject matter, or the most socially shared piece of content. • Lead by example. Whether you’re in an “official” leadership position or not, you can lead by example if you’re championing a content creation culture. be an active content creator yourself. Practice what you preach. www.Hubspot.com

13 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 4 Foster and Enable Employees’ Content Creation Abilities. you’ll come across some employees that want to contribute content, but don’t feel capable. To create a scalable content creation machine, it’s up to you to enable their success. First, remember that creating content shouldn’t be reserved for just Marketing -- or even just a couple people within Marketing. Enable anyone in your organization to contribute content, from Sales, to Services, to R&D. This is beneficial because you’re getting content that highlights different perspectives, and different areas of expertise, both of which make your content arsenal more well-rounded and able to address the needs of different buyer personas. To make it easier for everyone to contribute, create guidelines they can follow to make it more likely their content fits your publishing standards. you can even have content specialists on your team, who train those extremely interested in contributing content, on the types of editorial guidelines the marketing team follows. These folks -- your marketing team’s “editors,” if you will -- can be the ones who brush up the content you receive so everything that’s published aligns with the tone, style, and other guidelines you’ve established for your brand. More details on how to do all this in coming chapters. www.Hubspot.com

14 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Nothing crushes a contributor’s heart more than when you say their content isn’t fit for publishing. by creating and enforcing a set of editorial guidelines, your contributors know expectations and are set up for success. That’s how I’ve ensured all the HubSpot blog content published lives up to the same quality standards. www.Hubspot.com

15 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 02 CHApTER JUST DO IT AlREADY. www.Hubspot.com

16 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work. - Calvin Coolidge The More you do It, the Easier It Will be Now that we’re done fostering and enabling, let’s get down to brass tacks. Nothing in this ebook about content creation will just happen. Reading a lot about it, and understanding the theories behind efficient and scalable content creation, doesn’t get any content actually created. So here is the part of the ebook where we tell you ... JUST dO IT ALrEAdy. This may be the most painful thing you have ever done in your marketing career. Or it may not be that bad at all. Either way, the more you do it, and the more you encourage colleagues and employees to do it, the easier and more natural and frequent content creation will become. www.Hubspot.com

17 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Think of it this way: content creation is like running. The first time you do it, you might kind of stink. but you got out and did it, which is better than not doing it at all. The next time you do it, and each subsequent time after that, it won’t be as painful ... until eventually you’re pretty darn good at it and it’s actually pretty painless. Maybe even enjoyable. you’ll get your processes down pat. you’ll get good at this. Content creation will be part of how you operate. you might even end up liking it. but you won’t become a content creation machine if you don’t just get started. One the most common issues we see when it comes to getting started, is getting past writer’s block. We’ve identified key problems we’ve heard time and time again, followed with our solutions for combatting each. How HubSpot Does It: At HubSpot, we encourage content creation from the very beginning of an intern or employee’s career. Our rule of thumb is, “If you have nothing left to do, go write a blog post.” And content doesn’t fall on the shoulders of a few writers, or just the marketing team, we receive contributions from everywhere. We’ve had sales reps write posts about a topic they hope will attract the right leads for their quota. We’ve had executives write posts to help attract more C-suite audience. We even have customers contribute from time-to-time to share their external perspective on all things inbound marketing. www.Hubspot.com

18 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Getting past writer’s Block. Writer’s block is a state of mind, and it’s a very real, very debilitating malady -- even for the most prolific content creators. It helps to try and pinpoint the source of your writer’s block outside of just “The blank screen is taunting me.” Often it falls into one of these buckets. The Problem: “I don’t know what to write about.” The Solution: Fall back on your editorial calendar, where you keep a backlog of topics to write about. you can also reach out to people in Sales or Services and ask them to share some frequently asked questions they receive, which typically makes for excellent and quick blog posts. www.Hubspot.com

19 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE The Problem: “I’m just not in the mood to write.” The Solution: Use the laptop trick. Unplug your laptop and go into a quiet room, free of distractions. your challenge is to complete your blog post before your battery runs out. See if a little competition with yourself can kick things up a notch. www.Hubspot.com

20 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE The Problem: “I can’t find the words.” The Solution: Write like you speak. Content should be free of jargon and business babble, anyway. If you write like you speak, it will be an easier writing and reading experience. do not, however, write like you think. Our brains are jumbled messes. We filter ourselves for a reason. www.Hubspot.com

21 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE The Problem: “I don’t know how to approach this topic.” The Solution: Your topic isn’t specific enough. Refine your working title to say what you really mean. It doesn’t have to sound good now; you can finesse it later. Just ensure it’s clear, specific, and tells you exactly what the post is about. www.Hubspot.com

22 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Ever wonder how HubSpot posts so many social media updates? We do it by taking a piece of content and presenting it in unique ways. This can further emphasize a specific point to help get our message across better, in ways our audience gets excited about. don’t ever be afraid to repackage and repurpose your content! www.Hubspot.com

23 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 03 CHApTER CREATE CONTENT THE FAST, EASY, & EFFICIENT wAY. www.Hubspot.com

24 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Get ‘er done. - larry the Cable Guy Now that you’ve started exercising your content creation muscles, it’s time do it better, faster, stronger. In other words, let’s make your life easier and marketing results more remarkable -- yes, you can have better marketing and an easier life -- by enabling you to create more content, with less pain. This is where you transform from a content creator, into a content creation machine. This is where you become unstoppable. Now, let’s jump into the tips. www.Hubspot.com

25 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 1 Quick Content Formats. To become one of those companies that always has something great to write about, you have to embrace multiple content format types. Some of them might take a long time to write – such as the thought leadership pieces your favorite executives are writing, or the big research reports that required a ton of surveys, data slicing, and analysis. you should create that kind of content. but you should also make your life easier, and realize there are a ton of content formats that are extremely valuable to readers, drive serious business results, and don’t take that long to put together. Here’s your quick content toolkit, from which you should draw every day: www.Hubspot.com

26 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE How-to If you know how to do something your readers would want to know about, it’s easy to transfer your knowledge to paper -- or your computer screen. remember -- just write it out like you’d speak it if you were telling a lead, customer, or colleague. Top lists A tried and true content method, top lists are a mix between original content and aggregation. you aggregate the ideas, and write short blurbs about each. This is excellent content for a new writer, because each blurb in the list is quite short, and the post provides a built-in structure to work around. www.Hubspot.com

27 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Curation recognizing remarkable content from others is a core link- and relationship- building strategy, and requires a little original writing, and more aggregation -- perfect for those just whetting their writing chops. FAQ Think of the questions leads and customers ask you every day, and turn that into a piece of content in which you answer the common question. you could also pose a question on a social network, at an event, or during a webinar, and then respond to them in aggregate in a blog post. www.Hubspot.com

28 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Data Whether you have your own data or you stumble across interesting industry data in your reading, take one or many data points and compile them into a post. data makes very shareable content, and tends to say a lot in few words. Factbrowser.com is a good resource for discover and citing stats. Excerpted Content When you publish a gated piece of content (typically lead generation content that is gated behind a form on a landing page – such as a whitepaper), a quick source of content is an excerpt of that piece. The excerpt also serves to promote the gated content, showing readers what they’ll get if they download the full version. It’s the same as when an author shares a free chapter of their published book. www.Hubspot.com

29 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Video Content If cat’s got your tongue, a video could be the way to go. Videos are excellent alternatives to how-to posts in which you talk through a concept like you would to anyone in-person -- no bells and whistles needed. you might also schedule an interview, another helpful video format that doesn’t require a lot of investment. Newsjacks by their very nature, newsjacks are quick content formats. When a piece of news that would impact your industry -- or which you could find a relevant spin for your audience -- hits the press, hop on it like a rabbit in mating season. www.Hubspot.com

30 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 2 Sourcing Content Internally and Externally. Part of becoming a content creation machine is having a never-ending source of content, about a variety of topics. One -- or even a couple -- content hires isn’t going to get you there. Source content from content creators outside of Marketing. This taps into different areas of expertise among your staff, and creates a more robust topic catalogue as well as a higher volume of content coming your way. Additionally, consider a content creation requirement from certain employees; everyone on the marketing team should be required to contribute a certain volume of content each month to set a good example. How HubSpot Does It: At HubSpot, we built blogging quotas for every team in the marketing department. The quotas are based off number of people on team to understand what they can best contribute each month. That team then decides how to split up the posts. For example, a two-person team with a 4-blog post goal may take on two blog posts each a month. Or, if one person is crunched for time, the other may take on an additional post to help make the quota. This puts the power of contributions into the team’s hand, while ensuring the blogging team receives the proper amount of content set for the month. www.Hubspot.com

31 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE you should also be open to accepting guest blogging submissions from external sources, which have the added benefit of helping build a stronger link profile. Be discerning when accepting guest blogging submissions, only accepting the highest quality content from legitimate folks in your industry. As your domain gains authority, you’ll receive more and more inquiries about guest blogging; it’s important you sift through the content coming from shady SEO firms and link farms, and publish only good content from credible sources. Centralize the flow of all this content, promoting at least one member of your Marketing team to act as the editor of any content that comes through. He or she will ensure any content that comes from internal and external sources is high quality enough to be published. www.Hubspot.com

32 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 3 Repurposing Content. To squeeze more rOI from the content creation work you’re already doing, it’s important you get comfortable with finding new ways to use the content you’ve already created. This is your content repurpose toolkit -- even if you get time-crunched and content creation seems impossible, these repurposing tactics should keep your machine from dying out: www.Hubspot.com

33 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Most content creators view the creative process as: 1. Write the copy, and 2. Throw in visuals to match. In reality, there should be no distinction. The relationship between text and visual elements is not sequential in nature. It is one of interdependence. www.Hubspot.com

34 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Blog Bundle Create a lead generation offer by bundling together the content you’ve created on your blog -- all around one specific topic -- into a longer- form content asset. presentation Slides When anyone presents, whether in an internal meeting or at a public speaking event, consider whether those slides can be tweaked to be a SlideShare presentation, standalone social media images, or featured on your blog. www.Hubspot.com

35 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE persona Alignment If you target multiple personas, rework existing, successful content targeted at another segment to speak to a different persona. Internal Content If you have an internal company collaboration tool, repurpose any industry insights shared there that might be interesting to your target audience. www.Hubspot.com

36 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Content Updates Content that performed well in the past, but has since gone out of date, should be updated and relaunched. written Content, Visualized How-to content can take visual formats if you strip down the copy, and reformat the headers into one-sheeters or checklists. These are perfect for social media, particularly Facebook and Pinterest. www.Hubspot.com

37 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 4 Content Cross-Channel and Cross- Department promotions. For the most returns from your marketing content, it’s important all your marketing channels are working together on promotion, and folks across your entire company know about the content in your campaigns. Here’s a sample scenario for you: You’ve just finished writing a fantastic new lead generation offer – such as an ebook -- that you’d like to email to a segment of your list. How can you better support that offer’s success? First, promote it with a blog post; excerpt a chapter that can stand alone, and let blog readers know the excerpt they’re reading is a small part of a larger ebook on the topic, which they can download via the call-to-action in the blog post. Then give social media a heads up that pages 2, 5, and 8 in the ebook have some interesting quotes that could be turned into compelling visuals to be shared on social media networks -- with a link to the landing page to download the ebook, of course. The image you choose for your blog post should also keep social media in mind, since you’ll surely share that blog post on your social networks, and a compelling post image will help drive more engagement. www.Hubspot.com

38 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE And since those that receive the email for the new ebook are probably going to be further down your sales funnel, and this might be the action that incites them to get in touch with Sales, it’s a good idea to let your sales organization know about the latest ebook you’re launching, and provide them with a short synopsis of the key points you touch on so they can carry on a productive conversation with new and existing opportunities. your Services team would also like to know about the new ebook, since it might address the questions they answer on a daily basis. Finally, alert employees in all departments that a new offer is being released, and ask them to share either the landing page or the blog post on their personal social networks -- Twitter is great for this -- to benefit from the network effect of multiple people recommending a piece of content within a short time frame. How HubSpot Does It: HubSpot does this by communicating offer creation with the entire company – from marketing to sales to services, and even product and support! We send out a weekly email titled, “This Week in Marketing” that highlights the upcoming ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc., with a short sales soundbite. In addition, employees can also opt-in to receive notifications via a Google Group every time a new offer is created. The content team sends the offer, along with assets such as landing page, email copy, and social media images, in this email so subscribers can quickly access everything they need to know about every piece of long-form content the company publishes. www.Hubspot.com

39 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 04 CHApTER REFINING YOUR CONTENT CREATION pROCESSES. www.Hubspot.com

40 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE It’s the little details that are vital. little things make big things happen. - John wooden you’re creating a ton of quality, helpful, valuable content. you are an undisputed content creation machine. but you’re v1 of that machine right now. How do you make your content creation machine the best on the market? you get rid of the hiccups that prevent you from running as smoothly as possible. This is the “cherry on top” stuff that makes your content creation machine the best in the biz. Here’s how to make it happen. www.Hubspot.com

41 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 1 Invest in Editors and proofreaders. Hiring, outsourcing, or promoting employees to be proofreaders and editors is the first step to upping your content creation game. To do it right, it’s important you know the difference between the role editors and proofreaders play in the Marketing world. Proofreaders are ... the folks that make sure there aren’t typos in your content, look for comma splices, check to see if you put two spaces after a period or one, that type of thing. This is important for making your content look uber- professional, and can do a lot for your street cred. If you don’t have the budget to hire a professional proofreader, fall back on a word processor with a spell- and grammar-check. Proofreading is a very hard job, and requires someone with superhuman attention to detail. Even if you fancy yourself an excellent proofreader, it’s always best to leave proofreading your own content to someone else; you’re too intimately connected to the content to be able to pick up on little errors that, to others, would be obvious. www.Hubspot.com

42 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Editors are ... the folks that identify what’s wrong with content, and either communicate how to fix it with the writer, or fix it themselves. In the marketing world, editors sometimes also play the role of proofreader. It’s very difficult to be a good editor, because they not only have to know something is “wrong” with a piece of content (that’s relatively easy), but they have to be able to identify exactly what that is (that’s unexpectedly difficult). Not only that, they have to articulate it clearly to the writer, explain precisely how to fix it, or be capable and knowledgeable enough as a writer to fix it themselves. This is an excellent career path for a great writer within your marketing department -- it’s difficult to find good editors that aren’t also good writers -- and a prime example of investing in a content culture at your company. www.Hubspot.com

43 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 2 Establish Your Style Guide. Editors’ and proofreaders’ jobs are made much easier when you have an established style guide that everyone knows about, and has access to. This enables content creators to reference things like: • What tone should I use? • does the tone change for different personas? • by the way, who are our personas? • do we welcome humor? • What industry terms do we treat as proper nouns? • How do we cite data? Illustrating this in a document and periodically opening up teaching sessions to your content contributors so you can walk them through this and other protocol will help make your submissions better on the first try, alleviate pressure on editors and proofreaders, and decrease the number of required revisions. www.Hubspot.com

44 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE abc How HubSpot Does It: At HubSpot, we have our own Style guide on our internal wiki – a hub for sharing company information. We ask all our content creators – whether that’s email copy, social media copy, or product copy – to bookmark this. The Style guide was written by our blog manager and our product user experience writer. This allows us to have the same consistency in copy from notifications in our software, to posts on Facebook, to copy in ebooks and blog posts. you can check out our Marketing Style guide here. www.Hubspot.com

45 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 3 Create an Editorial Calendar. An editorial calendar is just what it sounds like -- a calendar that details the content you’ll be publishing every day. you can create an editorial calendar with varying levels of sophistication to meet your needs, but the benefit is the same: To elevate your content strategy from random publishing, to creating content with a purpose that’s meant to serve a specific business need. The most simple version of your editorial calendar can simply be with your blog. Schedule out content for anywhere from two weeks, to a month, to a quarter, and include topics, date of publish, and assigned author. Keep authors to a submission deadline that works for your editorial team, whether that means authors submit one business day in advance, or one week in advance. you can elevate your editorial calendar by also incorporating other channels and campaigns. For instance, v2 of your editorial calendar might pull in content used to promote blog posts on social media, and might coordinate campaigns around new lead generation offers scheduled to be created. This is how you can facilitate other departments and sub-teams within your marketing department working together. www.Hubspot.com

46 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 4 Align Content with Strategy. you’re planning your content in advance now. This is where you get really good at creating content with a purpose, not content for the sake of content. Every topic you create content around -- whether in a Facebook update, a case study, a blog post -- should solve a business need greater than, “we need something to publish.” because your rich content culture has made it so you aren’t the sole person responsible for content creation, it’s time to tighten the reins on what content you allow to go public. Whereas before you may have allowed contributors to write about just about anything that’s relevant for your industry, now you should require contributors to run topics by you before they begin drafting. This saves them time creating content that doesn’t align with your goals, and it’s important you position it as such to ensure they don’t feel their contributions aren’t appreciated anymore. So, for every piece of content you set out to create, ask yourself what business goal that piece of content helps achieve. www.Hubspot.com

47 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE readers always wonder why HubSpot cranks out such a high volume of ebooks, templates, and webinars. What they don’t see is that every piece of content has a purpose -- to educate, to blow up the internet, to generate leads. The marketing world is moving too fast to not share the latest tips and tricks as they come. www.Hubspot.com

48 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 05 CHApTER ITERATING, IMpROVING, AND ExpERIMENTING. www.Hubspot.com

49 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE when you’re finished changing, you’re finished. - Benjamin Franklin New content formats and promotion channels emerge frequently, and you will not need to add every one to your marketing toolkit. The companies that have built unstoppable content creation machines, however, do know how to figure out what of the latest and greatest is worth investing resources into, and which ones to throw out. www.Hubspot.com

50 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 1 Experiment with New Types of Content. Marketers that have the most prolific content catalogues provide a healthy mix of not just topics, but content formats. They are also typically agile marketers -- people that don’t shy away from new technological advancements, love experimentation, work, adapt, and adopt quickly, and use measurement to determine whether a new content type worked. Most importantly, though, they don’t view an experiment’s failure as a personal failure; it’s just the cost of doing agile business. They’ve also mitigated the risk by investing very little resources into the initial experiment, instead opting to iterate on that initial piece of content to see how and if they can make the new content format, platform, etc. work. Some examples of how you could do this include: • Trying out new social networks. See if a new or underused social network is a good platform to share your content. • Adopting the content format of a particular network. See if you can create visual content that works on, say, Pinterest, or short Vine videos for Twitter. • Creating videos. Many marketers shy away from videos because of the initial barrier to entry. See if you creating a low-cost, low-resource video pays you any dividends, and if so, iterate from there. www.Hubspot.com

51 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE 2 Measure Content performance. All content, whether part of an experiment or a regular guest in your content creation machine, needs to be pulling its proverbial weight. Measuring content performance allows you to assess whether a piece of content was worth the time you put into it, and whether you would do it again in the future. Here are the metrics you can track to evaluate the success of your content assets. www.Hubspot.com

52 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Offer or landing page Submissions How raw number of people who redeemed a content offer. you can also look at the conversion rate to see the percentage of visitors to a landing page that redeemed your offer. New Contact Rate This number tells you how many of the people that redeemed a piece of lead generation content were new to your database. reconversions are important, but it’s also critical your content is helping you continually fill the top of your funnel. page Views and Traffic An excellent metric to determine the success of your overall blog and individual blog posts, this will tell you whether certain subject matters are more appealing than others, and help you inform your content strategy. www.Hubspot.com

53 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Inbound links An indicator of content quality, inbound links also help you identify which content is helping you improve your SEO. Social Media Shares Social sharing is another indication of content quality, and also helps your organic search strategy. If you need to fill the top of your marketing funnel, identifying which content garnered a lot of social media shares and replicating it will help you score another success. Conversion Rate you can get a conversion rate on just about anything -- a landing page, a thank-you page, a blog post call-to-action. Measure the conversion rate across different content assets to see what correlation you see between content topics and formats, and the channel on which it lives. For instance, you could compare the conversion rate of a CTA promoting the same offer on a blog, versus on social media, to assess if one audience is more interested in the content asset than another. www.Hubspot.com

54 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE Conclusion. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison If you’ve made it this far, you might feel like you can attain some of this ... but you don’t have the time, budget, or staff to create a content creation machine that can do all of this. you’re not expected to. If your content creation machine is running on fumes, the tricks and tactics in this ebook will help you get up and running again. And when those tricks and tactics come to you naturally, you’ll find you have a little bit more resource to invest in the next step up. you won’t build an epic machine overnight, but discipline and dedication will yield something amazing. www.Hubspot.com www.Hubspot.com

55 HOW HUBSPOT DOES INBOUND: CREATING A CONTENT MACHINE lET US HElp YOU IMpROVE YOUR CONTENT MACHINE . In order to create a better content machine, you need to first assess how your current content is performing. Talk to one of our marketing specialists today to receive a free consultation on your content strategy. TAlK TO US TODAY. HTTp://BITlY.COM/IMA_HUBSpOT www.Hubspot.com