The 6 Top Marketing Talks From 2015's Biggest Events [Limited Time Videos]

November 18, 2015 at 09:00AM

Every year there are tons of amazing marketing events held around the world. Inspiration is shared, knowledge is dropped, and marketers have a chance to geek out over the lineup of speakers.

Trouble is, time and resources can often hold many marketers back from attending these events. So rather than let you miss out on the value, we've secured the recordings of the best keynotes from six of the biggest marketing events from around the globe and we're making them available for one day only.

Join us today, November 18th, and watch six of the best keynotes of 2015 from marketing events like INBOUND, Moz, SearchLove, BrightonSEO, SydStart, and Learn Inbound.

Click here to gain access to the videos, and check out the impressive lineup of speakers below to learn more about each talk. 

6 Top Marketing Talks From 2015

1) "Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO Strategies"

Lexi Mills, Head of Digital at Dynamo PR

In this session, Lexi Mills shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.

2) "Reverse Engineering Successful Content"

Paddy Moogan, Founder of Aira  

In this session, Paddy Moogan will show you a process for reverse engineering successful content in your industry and how to feed what you learn into a content strategy.

3) "The Four Corners of Conversion: Understanding the Intersection of Copy, Design, Interaction, and Psychology"

Oli Gardner, Co-Founder at Unbounce 

In this session, Oli Gardner will show you how to combine the four corners of conversion in a data-driven optimization framework that will change how you use landing pages to deliver delightful and high-converting campaign experiences.

4) "9GAG's Secret Sauce to 2 Billion Page Views: Being Funny is a Serious Business"

Ray Chan, Founder at 9GAG 

In this session, Ray Chan explains the art of using humor in your marketing. He also brings you through building trust, delivering more than expected, and becoming meaningful to people on an emotional level. 

5) "Enterprise SEO Link Strategies for Busy Marketers"

Wil Reynolds, Director of Strategy at Seer Interactive

In this session, Wil Reynolds provides content ideation strategies for busy marketers, and explores tactics to help you streamline your link building efforts. 

6) "Practical Advice for the Future of Search"

Will Critchlow, Founder at Distilled 

In this session, Will Critchlow focuses on the real-world changes you should be making right now to your web presence and campaigns. From making the most of new ranking factors to creating content for mobile, Critchlow has you covered.

Remember: We're releasing these videos for 24 hours only today, November 18th, 2015. Don't miss out. Click here to gain access to this exclusive offer.

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10 Tactics Marketers Can Take to Improve Their Relationship with Sales

November 17, 2015 at 07:00PM

Marketers and salespeople are the most critical links to a company’s customers. And the moment inbound marketing was implemented into your organization, your marketing department merged with the sales department. They are no longer separate, working on different islands. And they must work together at each stage of the sales funnel.

Aligning your marketing department with sales can make all the difference to the success of your inbound marketing strategy. The effectiveness of the alignment will determine how well your organization attracts leads, converts them into customers, and closes deals. Your relationship with sales isn’t just about a simple lead hand-off—it’s the foundation of your company’s revenue growth.

In order to improve your relationship with sales (and vice versa), you should consider using these ten tactics.

Top-Funnel Tactics

At the top of the funnel, your leads have just been introduced to your company. You haven’t contacted them yet. In fact, you don’t even know if they’re qualified at this point.

1) Align the Marketing Message with the Sales Message

Your messaging should be consistent throughout all of your content, your campaigns, and your marketing channels. All of your messages should mirror each other. But that’s not all. Your messaging should also be consistent with the sales message at your organization for great results.

This needs to be discussed with all relevant parties before a strategy is implemented. The direction, the target market, the tactics, voice, and style used, and the basic messaging of how your company adds value must be consistent. This will increase your brand awareness and allow for clarity.

If your marketing message is different than the sales message, you’re only going to confuse your customers and frustrate your sales team. By aligning your marketing message with the objectives of the sales team right from the beginning, your marketing department can successfully attract the right kinds of leads and the sales department can then talk to the ideal buyer personas.

2) Create Buyer Personas Together

More often than not, marketers create buyer personas on their own, without the input of the sales team. Unfortunately, this widens the sales and marketing gap and often leads to messaging that isn’t targeted to the right buyers.

Salespeople are trusted advisers and they could be extremely helpful in developing buyer personas because they have built relationships with your customers. They know who the buyers really are because they’ve had one-to-one interactions with them.

The result? You’ll receive unique insights into your buyer personas, and this will help you craft your messaging more effectively in order to target the right audience. Your sales team will appreciate this, as all sales people know all too well how frustrating it is to waste time and effort on the wrong prospects who aren’t likely to buy.

3) Ask for Feedback about Customer Interactions

The sales team is interacting with customers each and every day. Through these customer interactions, they learn a lot about their wants, needs, desires, and pain points. They get a first-hand look into the behaviors of your buyers and know what they are and aren’t looking for from your products or services. This added visibility can be incredibly helpful to you while you attempt to create strategies that target other buyers just like those customers. Simply asking your sales team for feedback about customer interactions can enable you to do your job better and open up the lines of communications with sales. You can even suggest listening in on their sales calls to hear the conversations first hand.

4) Collaborate On Content Marketing

Content is key at the top of the funnel. Your marketing team is tasked with creating relevant, buyer-focused, interesting content that will get web visitors interested. But you don’t have to do it alone. The sales team can collaborate with you to create blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, videos, and more.

Because sales people are talking to customers, they will inevitably notice trends in pain points, challenges, and opportunities that marketers can then use as topics for content. For example, sales might notice that many customers talk about a common industry problem or have a frequent objection, and marketers can work on developing new content to answer common questions and target common issues.

Mid-Funnel Tactics

The middle of the sales funnel is where you have solid prospects who are qualified and will likely purchase, but aren’t quite ready yet. In the middle of the funnel, the goal is to work with sales to nurture these prospects in order to help them move down to the bottom, where the sales department can do its magic.

5) Collaborate on Creating Lead Nurturing Templates

Lead nurturing is about providing leads with the information they need to choose you as a provider of solutions over the rest. It includes writing nurturing templates that will move leads further down the funnel. When sales and marketing work together to create these nurturing templates, they can ensure that they’re both in agreement in that the content being sent out is relevant for the separate buyer personas and their unique interests and needs.

In addition, it can help sales understand what type of content got the leads to the bottom of the funnel, so they can prepare for their sales calls more effectively. If you’re keeping sales in the dark about your lead nurturing templates, they might waste time and fail at the time of the sales call because they won’t know enough about why that person is ready to buy, what they know, and what they still need to learn. It only makes sense to include both departments in the creation of content for the middle of the funnel.

6) Creating Case Studies, Reviews, and Testimonials

Case studies show prospects what your company has accomplished in the past, using specific examples and numbers. Reviews and testimonials allow your past customers to tell their own success stories. Case studies, reviews, and testimonials can help you gain trust and credibility, which will effectively nurture leads and make it easier for your sales people to close deals.

Since case studies are created based on successful experiences with past customers, it can be extremely valuable to get your sales people involved—to get their perspective of how the sale went and why it was successful. It’s also easier to have sales people—the customers’ trusted resource and contact person—to ask them to write a testimonial or review instead of the marketers that they have never had contact with. In return, you’ll be able to create more compelling and factual case studies and you’ll get plenty of reviews and testimonials to share.

7) Perfect the Feedback Loop

When your department thinks that a lead is qualified, you pass it on to your sales team. Unfortunately, not every lead you pass on will in actuality be ready. Some might still need more time. But if your sales team just gives up on those leads, they’re missing huge sales opportunities.

Both departments need to come up with an effective way of passing leads back to the marketing nurturing mid-funnel, with feedback from the qualifying contact. Open lines of communication are critical here. This will give your marketing team the information it needs to properly nurture the lead. And it will ensure that the lead doesn’t just get put into a black hole, never to be spoken to again, so your sales team can have another crack at the sale once the lead has been nurtured a little bit longer.

Bottom-Funnel Tactics

Effective bottom-funnel tactics are critical. You’ve worked hard to turn your leads into prospects and nurture them to this last step of the process. Your sales people have to close the deal here in order to make the sale. And you can help.

8) Share Stories of Customers’ Pain Points

As a marketer, you are at the front of the action. You are there the moment leads realize they have a pain point and begin to look for a solution. This information, knowing your customers’ pain points, can help you better nurture leads and move them down the sales funnel. But you shouldn’t be keeping this vital information within your department. You should be sharing these stories with the sales team, because it can also help your salespeople close deals more effectively.

Knowing their customers’ unique pain points, needs, and questions can help them have more meaningful and relevant conversations that end in sales. Your sales team will be sure to appreciate your help in sharing these stories.

9) Provide Analytics to the Sales Team

Marketers shouldn’t keep their analytics reports a secret. Sales should know where prospects are coming from, what types of offers they’re downloading, whether or not they’ve looked at the pricing page, and other key data that could help them close deals more effectively.

This type of critical information can help the sales team understand where prospects are in the sales cycle and where to focus their communication efforts. Share your analytics openly and willingly, and you’ll start to improve your relationships with sales.

10) Work on Lead Scoring Together

Lead scoring involves both sales and marketing. It is the methodology that determines leads’ sales-readiness. Naturally, marketing has to make sure that leads are qualified before passing them on to sales, but what if sales and marketing don’t agree on what actually makes a lead sales ready? What if marketing is always passing off leads too soon? This can be avoided if both departments work together and come to an agreement on the definition of a qualified sales lead and the activities that need to take place before that label is placed.

When this happens, marketing will be better able to nurture leads to the perfect degree and sales will only spend time following up on the prospects who are actually ready to buy., increasing the chances of making the sale

Organizations that have a strong alignment between sales and marketing have a higher success rate during each stage of the sales funnel. Actively improving your relationship with your company’s sales people and collaborating with them can allow for better lead generation, a higher conversion rate, and higher sales. Quit the finger pointing, put aside your egos, and learn to work together. 

http://bit.ly/1YfdLYW

How Images Make Content More Shareable on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter [Infographic]

November 17, 2015 at 06:00PM

It's no secret that visual content is dominating the social web right now. Facebook's News Feed update that made images much larger and more visible is a great example of this. After all, people are naturally more attracted to images than they are to text -- making visual content highly shareable and engaging.

Posting compelling visual content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media strategy.One study found that Facebook posts with photos saw the most engagement over any other type of post, accounting for a whopping 87% of total interactions. Another found that tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

To help marketers understand more about how images make content more shareable, StoryBox created the infographic below. Check it out to learn tips and examples of how other brands are leveraging visual content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

http://bit.ly/1Mkg5IN

17 Ways to Guarantee Nobody Misses Your Next Webinar or Webcast

November 17, 2015 at 02:00PM Here at HubSpot, we know a thing or two about webinars. We’ve set the Guinness World Record for largest online marketing seminar, hosted webinars with partners such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Unbounce, and we’re able to host and promote in-house because of the modern marketing team we've built.

No matter how great the content of your webinar is, though, it doesn't mean much if there's nobody there to hear it. So what do you do to ensure people actually, you know ... show up?

Turns out, there's at least 17 things you can do to get people aware of, excited about, and attending your next webinar. Here's a guide to making your next webinar a rousing success.

Download our free webinar checklist here to make sure your next webinar or webcast is a success.

What Is a Webinar/Webcast?

A webinar (also known as a webcast) is a live, online seminar or workshop that's delivered over the internet. A host -- that's you -- organizes the event and invites attendees. The beauty of a virtual event? The host and the attendees can be located anywhere in the world.

The most successful webinars are ...

... educational.

Education is one of the most powerful tools you can use to make change happen. Webinars need to have some type of educational component to it -- whether you're educating your audience about a product, a service, a new piece of content, how to use a tool, and so on. 

... clearly communicated.

Webinars are great ways to scale your communication. Provide value to your audience by communicating your message clearly. This includes how you organize the content of the webinar, how you present it verbally, and how you present it visually in your PowerPoint deck.

... entertaining.

Finally, a great webinar needs to be entertaining. Otherwise, your attendees might as well think of your webinar as 40 minutes to catch up on email. After all, that verbal component is what makes webinars so unique: There are few other mediums where you can deliver content that lets your personality shine through to such an extent.

It's really easy to create webinar content with only your end goals in mind -- that point you want to get across, or those things you want to talk about -- but that won't keep your audience engaged. Think carefully about who your audience is while crafting your webinar content, because at the end of the day, your webinar is about building connections and relationships with your audience so they trust you that much more.

17 Ways to Get People to Show Up to Your Webinars

1) Pick a killer topic.

It's really, really hard to get people to attend your webinar if your topic stinks. Try to select a topic that's broad enough to attract a large audience, yet targeted enough to provide actionable advice that attendees can implement the second they hop off your webinar.

For our recent webinar with Unbounce, for example, we decided that we wanted conversion rate optimization to be the overarching theme (because what marketer doesn’t want to optimize?), but with a focus on landing page copy and design.

When titling your webinar landing page, do some SEO research to see which keywords you want to rank for. Use that same title for subsequent blog posts and SlideShares, and you'll end up with a slew of assets to back up that keyword ranking.

2) Set a registration goal.

Having a goal will inspire you to hit it, and help you measure success. In order for us to break the Guinness World Record for webinar attendees, for example, we knew we had to hit almost 50,000 registrants. You should track performance on at least a weekly basis to see whether your marketing efforts are moving the needle. That way, if you need to dial up your promotion due to low initial registration numbers, you'll know what to do to fix it. 

Note: Just because people register for your webinar does not mean they will attend your webinar. Which brings us to our next tip ...

3) Set an attendee goal.

Webinars typically get a 25% attendance rate. To determine how many registrants you need, you should think ahead to how many actual attendees you want.

Continuing with our Guinness World Record example, we knew we needed 12,500 attendees to break the record. So doing a little backwards math, we took the 25% attendance rate into account and figured out that we needed at least 50,000 registrants in order to hit 12,500 attendees.

You will see the word “remind” quite a bit in the rest of this post. That's because getting people to attend your webinar requires lots and lots (and lots) of registrant reminders. People often sign up for webinars weeks in advance, so it's critical that you're making an effort to keep your webinar top-of-mind during that time.

4) Give attendees something special.

Try to think of things that will get people excited, feeling special, talking with colleagues, and remembering their experience on your webinar in the future. Excited registrants turn into excited attendees.

At HubSpot, we’ve given away tickets to events, free marketing assessments, and ad spend coupons to Facebook and LinkedIn. We’ve also inspired the audience by asking them to be a part of something huge, like breaking a world record.

Another example of a contest you could run? Ask them to tweet something related to the webinar a week in advance, and pick the winner at the beginning of the webinar. At HubSpot, we held a #WorkRemote hashtag challenge to support our webinar on working remote effectively, and we built this landing page to explain the rules and how a winner would be picked. (Note: Be sure to work with your legal team when planning any challenge or contest.)

You could note in the promotional and reminder emails that "attendees are getting a special 25% discount on X," and include that discount code in the final slide of your webinar.

5) Choose the right day of week.

Don't host your webinar during the weekend. Okay, you probably knew that one. But did you also know that it's best to host your webinars on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday?

Monday and Friday always seem to get filled up with “catch-up” and “last-minute emergency” happenings around the office. In WhatCounts poll, the data suggested that their audience preferred Wednesday or Thursday for webinars -- and we tend to agree. 

6) Choose the right time of day.

HubSpot typically runs webinars at 1 p.m. EST or 2 p.m. EST, because it's the most convenient time for the largest chunk of our audience. But if you have a huge audience in ... I don't know ... Jakarta, you might want to reevaluate your timing. Right? Right.

However, like any variable in marketing, the best time (and day) will depend on your audience. Which time zone(s) do they live in? Do they work nine-to-five jobs, or are their daytime schedules more open? To maximize attendance, experiment with different days and times, compare attendance rates and conversion rates, and tweak your timing accordingly.

If you're just starting out or have no clue what time works best, you can always ask. Include a field on your registration form that asks attendees to confirm the time slots that work best for them, and schedule your webinar based on that feedback.

7) Create an informative landing page.

Be clear. Be honest. Set expectations. Take a look at the landing page we created for our webinar with Rajan Kapoor of Dropbox (which you can view on-demand here):

On this landing page, we’ve clearly outlined a few things:

• Who? Introduce presenters on the landing page, with brief bios that explain who they are and why they matter. (Well, why they matter for this webinar, at least.)
• What? Include an explanation of what the webinar is about and some of the topics it will cover. Bullet points are best. Pick a dedicated hashtag for your webinar and include it, too.
• When? Seemingly obvious, but ensure you provide a date and time so people can mark their calendars.
• Where? Clearly explain when and how the webinar will be accessible. Typically, webinars are accessible via links, and can be joined 30 minutes prior to the start time.
• Why? Explain the value of your webinar. What will people be able to do after they leave your webinar that they weren’t able to prior to attending?

8) Send a thank-you email and registration confirmation.

Sending a thank-you email isn't just good manners -- it also gives you a chance to confirm your attendees' registration (so they know that their form submission worked) and, you know, remind them about your webinar. Some people will delete it. Some people will save the email in their inbox, serving as a periodic reminder of your webinar. Some people will take the details in the email and input it on their calendar. If any of your registrants fall into those last two groups of people, you're sittin' pretty.

We recommend including a call-to-action to "Add this webinar to your calendar" as the #1 CTA in both your thank-you and follow-up emails. (More on this later.)

9) Send value-building reminder emails.

Send these two weeks in advance, and one week in advance on your webinar. They not only serve to remind registrants about the webinar's date and time, but rebuild the value that you established with them on your registration landing page. Many of your registrants may have not only forgotten that they registered for your webinar ... they may have forgotten why they registered in the first place.

Include relevant blog posts or previous ebooks or webinars that cover similar topics. You might frame this as content your team has recently updated, which they can learn more about in the webinar. Include the webinar's hashtag and tell people to tweet if they have any questions.

10) Send two final reminder emails.

People forget. Things come up. Last-minute reminder emails -- specifically, one the day before, and one the day of -- give people enough time to finagle attendance around meetings and other items on their to-do list, but also not too much time that they'll forget about the webinar. It's only a day (or less!) away, after all. Again, include the webinar's hashtag and tell people to tweet if they have any questions.

11) Market your webinar using social media.

You know what's awesome about social media? It's much more difficult to oversaturate your social audience than your email audience. And there's a really, really good chance much of your email audience is connected with you socially, too. That affords you the opportunity to use social media to remind your audience about your webinar.

If you're using a social media publishing schedule, you can pepper in updates for every social channel that remind your audience you have an upcoming webinar. Increase the number of reminder updates as the date approaches, particularly the day before and day of. Make sure you pick a dedicated hashtag for your webinar and include it on the landing page, in your emails, and everywhere else you're promoting it.

TOMORROW: HubSpot + Twitter join forces again to bring you #beyondmarketing in this Webinar http://bit.ly/1kC4MTr http://pic.twitter.com/9qeUFTfidF

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) November 3, 2015

12) Market your webinar through your speakers.

Of course you'll be promoting your webinar, but what about the presenters? You know, the ones with a different audience than yours right at their fingertips? Are they leveraging their personal connections, social accounts, and email lists to make sure they have a giant audience? If they're not, they sure-as-shootin' should.

13) Don't be afraid of paid media.

If you’re looking to drive more attendees to your webinar and have the budget, a little paid media to supplement your organic efforts can always help. For instance, you might run a PPC ad on Google for a search term that aligns with your webinar content in order to get the word out and drive attendance.

By bidding on a long-tail term such as “aligning sales and marketing” you can also keep your PPC costs low, promoting your webinar in a cost effective way. Just make sure your paid media team and organic team are aligned, so your company is organically publishing terms like "aligning sales and marketing" while you bid on the same term, resulting in total dominance in the SERPs for that keyword phrase.

For more detailed tips, download our free guide to social media advertising.

14) Blog about your webinar.

Use your blog (and other blogs if you have the relationships) to promote your webinar and the topic it covers. Create a "launch blog post" for your webinar indicating the excitement of new content/data in the webinar. Obviously, you'll want to provide links to the registration landing page within the blog post, too -- including a webinar-specific CTA to include at the end of your post, like we did in the post below:

You can also get your audience warmed up to the topic of the webinar by creating blog content that discusses that topic at different angles. Include the webinar CTA in these posts as well, but be sure to swap it out with a different CTA once the webinar is over.

Bonus: If you start writing posts about the webinar topic far enough in advance, you can use the questions readers ask in the comments section to beef up your presentation, too.

15) Set calendar reminders.

Some uber-organized people will put your webinar right on their calendar, but there are tools out there that let you take it a step further. 

My colleague Christine White, manager of co-marketing demand generation here at HubSpot, uses AddEvent and WorldTimeBuddy to create add-to-calendar CTAs.

16) Partner up.

If you want more people to attend your webinar, you can always consider working with another brand. But while additional attendees is one benefit, it shouldn’t be the main focus of partnering up -- relevancy, however, should be.

HubSpot has partnered with numerous partners specifically for co-marketing purposes because we believe that two well-aligned brands have the power to be truly amazing together -- much more amazing than they can be apart. It's also helpful for your audience if they can hear another perspective once in a while, particularly when that perspective comes from a specialist's point of view.

17) Leverage your homepage.

Your homepage is likely one of the most visited pages on your website. So why wouldn’t you leverage your homepage real estate to promote upcoming webinars?

It's a great way to show people that your entire company is behind the webinar and sees the value in it for site visitors. Don’t hide behind your webinars; get them out in public and show people that your company believes in the initiative. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to create smart CTAs for your homepage here.)

What do you do to ensure registrants don't forget about your upcoming webinars? Share with us in the comments.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2012 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

http://bit.ly/1YeMdTu

5 Charts That Summarize The State of The Publishing Industry

November 17, 2015 at 01:00PM

The state of digital publishing is in flux. After years struggling to monetize, the industry is realizing that it needs an overhaul. 

The good news? Publishers are optimistic and resilient. Instead of capitulating to industry change, they’re carving out new revenue streams and testing new products to connect advertisers with readers. What’s working and what isn’t? What are the biggest changes that are on the horizon? HubSpot’s Digital Publishing Benchmark report explores these questions in-depth. Here’s a look at the media landscape, summarized in 5 charts.

1) Over the Past 6 Months, the Amount of Email Publishers Have Sent Has Increased 

Roughly half of the respondents in our survey reported having increased their email newsletter frequency. Why? More and more media companies are realizing that their mailing lists are a win-win, with readers getting content right to their inboxes and publishers gaining valuable real estate for distributing publication content, banner ads, and sponsored content.

Over the past 6 months, the amount of email publishers have sent has: 

Over time, the value of publishers’ email lists and contact databases will continue to rise. Newsletter marketing is one of the most effective channels for reaching audiences 1:1—a value proposition that only a small number of advertisers have the capabilities to build upon in-house. Media companies can open up their email lists as valuable engagement drivers and connection-building opportunities for audiences. 

One caveat: more is not always better. When deploying an email marketing program, publishers should be careful not to flood inboxes. Use segmentation to make more opportunities with fewer touchpoints. 

2) Subscription Revenue Isn’t All that It Seems 

With media companies like Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times launching paywalls, it’s easy to assume that subscriptions are the future of monetization in digital publishing. But the reality is the opposite. In our Digital Publishing Benchmarks Report, only 13% of respondents said that paid subscriptions were their greatest sources of revenue. 

The percentage of publishers who cite paid subscriptions as their greatest source of revenue: 

The takeaway? Don’t assume that paywalls are the solution to media’s monetization woes. There’s an urgent need for media companies to explore new ways to drive revenue. It’s important to experiment with a wide variety of products and services as alternative solutions. Get started by talking to your advertisers and studying the patterns of your audiences: as a digital publisher, it’s up to you to build connectors between the two groups—that’s your core value proposition.

Find creative ways to bring these two groups together. Monetize the solutions that stick.

3) Publishers Are Dealing with Option Overload 

When it comes to delivering value to advertisers and readers, digital publishers have a range of value to offer. While the majority of respondents (83%) in our Benchmarks report found that selling banner ads, sponsored content, ecommerce, lead gen, and classified options were also a part of the mix.

The digital products publishers are currently offering: 

The key takeaway from this trend is that publishers are still deciding where to dedicate their efforts. Publishers who have stuck to the status quo are now re-evaluating their monetization streams and advertiser value.

Now is a better time than ever to run more business experiments and to test new approaches to driving revenue. The market is quickly changing, and publishers need to sprint to keep up with changing advertising and reader engagement dynamics. Expect a completely different media economy from what you see now. 

Download the full Digital Publishing Benchmarks Report now >> 

4) Print Is Still a Strong Revenue Driver, but It’s on Its Way Out 

Print advertising is far from dead: it’s very much a dominant revenue stream for the majority of respondents in our Benchmarks report. But this trend is unsurprising—print has been the norm for centuries (literally), and it’s going to take time for companies to find new, steady sources of digital revenue. 

The revenue streams publishers predict will decrease most in value over the next two years: 

But times are also volatile. Only 10% of respondents in the survey see print advertising increasing in value over the next two years. Meanwhile, 46% expect the value of print advertising to decrease.

The status quo won’t be the status quo for long—media companies will either need to adapt or exit the market altogether. The industry has reached a critical inflection point. Signs point to sponsored content and native advertising as two of the best steps in the right direction.

5) New Technology Adoption Is on the Rise 

Respondents of our Benchmarks survey reported that they’re implementing new tech at all reader experience stages of the marketing and sales funnel. They’re investing in social media monitoring or publishing tools, email marketing, and search engine optimization. At the bottom of the funnel, they’re investing in marketing automation (54% B2C and 45% B2B) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. 

The technologies marketers are plannig to adopt: 

What’s interesting to note is that these reported areas of investment span all stages of the conversion funnel—mapping to precise advertiser needs ranging from brand visibility lead-gen. Through marketing automation, CRM, and continued attention to web analytics, media companies are in a strong position to adopt an inbound strategy—to build a dedicated and highly engaged audience.

What’s Next? 

With change comes opportunity. Media companies might be nervous about their future monetization—but there’s more to the story. In a nutshell, uncertainty opens doors for innovation. It’s up to you and your company to study the market, test solutions to revenue pain points, and forge your own path forward. The media industry is giving itself a ‘reboot,’ and you’re a key part of the change.

http://bit.ly/1N8Kj4Q

Is Your Website Ready for Black Friday? 7 Last-Minute Tips to Prepare

November 17, 2015 at 12:00PM

Does your website have what it takes to survive Black Friday?

Last year, $1.5 billion in sales were generated on Black Friday -- a new record for the post-Thanksgiving shopping holiday, according to Comscore. In addition to the impressive growth in sales, IBM stated that 51.2% of all ecommerce browsing was from mobile, and 28% of purchases came from mobile devices. 

While the scale of opportunity presented by Black Friday is no joke, many businesses -- specifically ecommerce -- fail to adequately prepare their websites for this uptick in traffic. So with the shopping holiday quickly approaching, we've put together a few last-minute tips to ensure your website is ready to handle the influx of traffic and potential sales. 

These tips are mainly directed towards ecommerce, however, most of them can be used by any business looking to strengthen their website for instances of high traffic. 

Traffic Management 

One of the big concerns for marketers and respective IT folks around this time is a surge in traffic. Many websites can see multiple-times the traffic that is standard during other times of the year, and it all happens over the course of a few days. So how do you ensure your website is ready for all of the impending visitors? 

1) Contact your CDN provider.

If you utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN), check with your IT team to ensure they have reached out to the CDN provider and planned for the increased traffic. 

If you don't utilize a CDN, talk to your web hosting provider and inquire about the traffic limitations and cost of an upgraded server. Generally a better server can help handle increased traffic and sustained volume. Before you agree to anything, make sure you ask about the time it will take to get the new server and any procedure to move over. You will want to be sure your website and content is on the new server before Black Friday to avoid any potential problems on the shopping holiday.

HubSpot customers: If you use the HubSpot Website add-on, you're covered. We have automatically built-in scalability to handle increased traffic and sustained volume over-time.

Website Speed

After analyzing 26,000 websites through Website Grader, we found the average time for a website to display was 3.9 seconds. If your visitors are waiting any longer than three seconds for your website to display, you could be losing some of them -- especially on mobile. 

So, how should we ensure our website loads as quickly as possible? There are a few last-minute things we can all do to recover lost milliseconds, which add-up.

2) Compress and resize images.

If you have any images -- especially on your homepage and popular product pages -- make sure they are sized appropriately. For example, if you uploaded a high resolution image of one of your products, but it's only displaying as 500 x 500 on the page, the browser still has to load the entire original image.

If you don't have time to check through your entire site, we'd recommend at least going through your homepage and your top product pages to ensure they are optimized. For more tips and tools to help you reduce your images, check out this post on page weight from my colleague, Carly.

3) Reduce or remove unnecessary third-party snippets.

Third-party snippets that display content from another service take up valuable time to load. If you have any scripts on your website from a service that you're no longer using, remove them. To do so, talk to your IT team about ensuring these are no longer on your website.

While there are more complex, longer-term changes you can make to improve the speed of your website, the above changes should be relatively quick and help measurably improve the load time of your website for Black Friday.

Trust & Security

One of the key concerns for shoppers online is ensuring their personal information is going to stay safe. We've covered a few key elements of trust below to help you ensure conversion rates are as high as possible for Black Friday.

4) Display content that proves it's safe to shop with you.

Many ecommerce websites display safe shopping badges, and as long as you have this guarantee and service, it's wise to display it. For example, Zappos shows a lock icon with their "safe shopping guarantee" at the bottom of every product page and also during the checkout process. 

5) Ensure your return policy is clear and easy to find. 

Some shoppers like the added peace of mind that they can return an item if it doesn't meet their needs. This can especially true with categories such as clothing home decor. To ease any concerns, make sure you have the return policy clearly stated on your website. For example, check out the return policy Pottery Barn includes on all of their product pages:

6) Enable SSL. 

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a technology that encrypts the connection between your visitors browser and your website. At a minimum SSL, which can be seen when the URL contains HTTPS instead of the traditional HTTP, should be enabled for your checkout process to ensure the users private information remains safe, and the confidence they have shopping with you remains high.

HubSpot customers: Anyone that hosts their website with HubSpot automatically gets SSL included at no additional charge. 

Search Engine Optimization

Organic search can help generate additional sales from visitors looking for a specific item, but unsure of where to find it. While an SEO strategy takes time to implement, this audit is meant to address any significant omissions that could help contribute to more organic traffic and sales on Black Friday.

As we mentioned before, many shoppers are carrying out their Black Friday errands on mobile devices. To help optimize your website for those visitors, check out this free mobile SEO guide.

7) Optimize for specific keywords.

If you don't have time to go through all your assets and ensure everything is perfect, you should aim to make sure that your homepage and key product pages are optimized. To optimize for specific keywords, focus on including them in: titles, descriptions, headings, body content, alt text, and URLs.

If you utilize a lot of imagery on your product pages, alt text is very important. To improve your site's crawlability, be sure to go through all of your images to add alt text that is relevant to the item and ties back to the keyword(s) you're optimizing for.  

For more on keyword optimization, check out this post on SEO 101 from my colleague, Lisa. And for a more advanced dive into on-page optimization, download this free SEO template to help organize your strategy.

What are you doing to prepare your website for the holidays? Let us know your best tips in the comments section below.

Want more helpful tips to improve your ecommerce inbound marketing? Subscribe to receive HubSpot's ecommerce blog articles delivered right to your inbox.

 

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Is User Experience Worth the Investment? [Infographic]

November 16, 2015 at 06:00PM

Whether you're designing your website, a product, or another part of your business, great user experience is a key to creating value for your customers. Designing with your user in mind from the very beginning will not only make your customers happy, but it will help grow your business.

For example, StubHub saw a 2.6% increase in purchase rate when they replaced a text link with a button. Zillow boosted their conversion rate by providing geographic context to home listings. Not to mention, every $1 invested in user experience will bring $2 to 100 in return, according to the folks at UserTesting.

What else have businesses done to increase conversions and sales by improving user experience? And what are some tips for marketers looking to do the same? Check out the infographic below from UserTesting to learn how choosing to invest in user experience affects your company's bottom line.

http://bit.ly/1MxwkjF