Jose Martins, Sales Manager at Hubspot, shares his insights on Customer Acquisition and how you can turn your website into a lead-generating machine.
He highlights three questions every founder should ask in order to design their customer acquisition strategy:
- How do you do marketing today?
- How do you attract, engage and delight customers?
- How do you build the strategies to execute?
How do you do marketing today?
Before we look at the new playbook in marketing, you need to understand what the old playbook means. In the past customers have been on the receiving end of marketing efforts such as cold emails, spam, and TV advertisements. In today’s world of streaming platforms, nobody sees ads unless you’re watching the Superbowl.
Although we don’t have ads, we have emails that we don’t want and calls from people trying to sell us something - that’s the old playbook where the thought process was in order to get a customer’s attention you had to get in front of them. Old marketers would tell you that you have to interrupt a customer 15 times before they react. That’s not what we want as customers.
In the world of connectivity, people have all the resources to find the information they’re looking for and conduct the research prior to going to the store, if they ever go to the store. When they do get to the store they already know what they want. Buyers are in control - they do a lot of research before they engage with sellers and vendors. They’re good at blocking any sort of interruptive ads and have high expectations.
Customers expect the buying process to be easy and where possible they want to be able to do it online. Jose shares the example of having to book a dentist appointment. Customers don’t want to call the office only to find the receptionist is on lunch and they have to call back later. They want to be able to go to the dentist’s website, see when there’s a slot available, book, and go.
In the new playbook or Inbound Marketing, you need a lot of product marketing as a marketer and seller to optimize for the buyer experience. This is how HubSpot was built, it was built on the concept of getting people the information they need as they do their research. And if you get information from them as they do their research, you’re already winning the competitive game.
When you’re watching your favorite TV show and they run an advertisement right at the cliffhanger, that’s an interruption. Or when you’re on your way home and you get a call from the bank that’s another interruption. As marketers we don’t want to interrupt, we want to help provide information that is already available on the web. The good news is that if you can provide the information people are looking for you become relevant to them.
Who is your buyer persona?
The first thing you need to understand is your buyer persona. A buyer persona isn’t only a segment - it’s also getting to know the actual persona. It will guide you through some of the important things you need to know about your customers - what they need, what are their feelings, what are their frustrations, where they go when they’re online, and whether they are on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook? This will help you know how to connect with them.
Jose shares two examples of a buyer persona, one for HubSpot for startups called Growth Gary and another for HubSpot called Marketing Michelle. Check out HubSpot's Persona Tool to create your buyer persona.
The Customer Buying Journey
The next thing you need to figure out is the buyer's journey. Once you know the persona you have to recognize that your specific persona is at different stages of the buying journey.
Jose shares an example of a HubSpot buyer who can be a founder who’s interested in understanding if they need a CRM platform for their business. Not everyone who would interact with HubSpot’s content or go to their website is a founder who already knows they need marketing tools and they need automation because they need to do email marketing. That’s an example of an advanced buyer. Some people might be coming to HubSpot to compare it to another CRM tool before they decide. Those are decision-stage buyers that are at the end of their buying process - about 5% of buyers are at this stage. About 15% of buyers are people in the consideration stage deciding what solution they need. That’s why HubSpot’s content helps customers understand whether they need a CRM platform or whether they should use Google sheets or just a normal notebook. Jose shares that the rest of the people are in the awareness stage. They're experiencing a problem and trying to better understand it.
The idea is to have content for your buyer persona at every stage of the buyer's journey. So when you’re thinking of your marketing strategy, keep that in mind. The most common mistake companies make is only creating content for the decision-stage buyers and not addressing awareness and consideration-stage buyers. E.g. Buy now, book now - which is great for the 5% of people on your website who are ready to buy, but not that great for the other 95%. Jose highlights the importance of ensuring that you consider all three stages of the buyer's journey when developing your website, your content, and other assets.
Marketing Strategies (Flywheel - Attract, Engage & Delight)
Jose shares that he views a marketing strategy as taking the whole concept and breaking it down into more manageable pieces using the Flywheel framework. This framework breaks down strategies into attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.
Attracting strategies define how you connect with your customers for the first time - how do you bring someone to your website to learn more about you or how can you get them to engage with more of your content?
Engaging strategies are those mechanisms you use to engage with people on an individual level once they’re on your website, Facebook page, or LinkedIn page. When people visit your website they're anonymous. Engaging strategies help you understand who they are and gain information from them so you can continue building that relationship until they are ready to buy.
Delighting strategies are how you ensure people’s entire experience interacting with your company is delightful. Some of the questions you can ask yourself here are: is it hard to connect with our team or get support as a customer?
How do you attract customers using SEO?
The number one thing for attracting people is understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
SEO is about two things; relevance and authority. Relevance is when you're in a bookstore, are you looking for fiction, or non-fiction or travel books? If you’re looking for travel books, relevance is all the books about travel and travel destinations.
If you go to the travel section at the bookstore you know what you’re going to find. Harry Potter is not going to be there, but you will find the ultimate guide to Greece or Italy. That's relevance.
Authority is when you're in the travel section and you want to learn more about traveling to Greece - there are maybe 50 books about Greece, but which one is actually the best one, and which one is the most authoritative? So you think about that and you think of Fodor’s Travel Guides. When it comes to travel, this source is the most respected. That's what we call authority.
In the world of SEO, relevance is that Google knows what your content is about. The second part is how can you help Google understand how much of an authority you are on that topic.
So how does it work? On-Page SEO is how you make sure Google understands what you're writing about. For example, HubSpot writes about inbound marketing. So if someone's asking about inbound or digital marketing - Google knows that HubSpot's content is strong, and relevant for that topic.
Jose shares that they use topic clusters to increase their rankings. Topic clusters are when you decide on a topic you want to rank for, for example, entrepreneurship. You then write a piece of content on entrepreneurship, like “the ultimate guide to entrepreneurship”. Once you’ve written that you write subtopic content or long tail topics related to entrepreneurship, e.g. “the types of entrepreneurs” or “how do I finance my startup?”, “Should I get money or self-fund?”
These are examples of subtopics that you want to interconnect. HubSpot has a tool that does this for you, that links one piece of content to another.
The idea here is that you're not ranking for a specific keyword, so you’re not ranking for sole proprietorship and then that article is fighting for ranking alone or alongside another article that you wrote. What HubSpot does is they put them all together so that they’re all fighting together to get shown on Google. This is called a topic cluster strategy that will help you win on-page SEO.
The next part is the off-page SEO. That is how we make sure that Google not only knows what we're writing about but that we are actually one of the most important sources for that information.
That's where link building comes in. Basically what you want is someone else to reference your content. Jose shares an example of writing a piece of content about starting your business, and then Y Combinator writes a piece of content and references his article. He’ll get a lot of brownie points with Google because Y Combinator is well-known for starting a business and if they’re talking about this article that Jose Martins wrote, it probably means Jose Martins is pretty good.
If we go back to the library, think about when you look at the back of the book and you see it's recommended by Bill Gates and the Oprah Winfrey Club. So these people that I respect are saying this book is good, and the same with the internet.
If someone else writes a piece of content and links back to yours you're going to get a lot of SEO points. That's what link building is. The main mistake companies make is that they invest a ton of time in developing content and they spend very little time getting people to reference their content.
Jose suggests an opposite approach. You have to write good content, but you should spend most of your time getting that content referenced by authoritative sites and media outlets so that every single piece of content that you have gets a lot of SEO authority and you show up in the rankings. The best way to rank on the first page is to do link-building.
How do you get others to reference your content?
Jose shares that the best way is to learn about link-building strategies.
Creating content is really expensive. One good way to do it is to create content that you think other people will need. For example, if you wrote about how digital marketing works in web 3.0 on the blockchain revolution - that's a really hard thing to write about. So if you write about that and reach out to HubSpot to post your article to their blog and link back to another article you wrote, that’s a good way to get your content referenced.
That’s the trick to SEO, blogging, and getting your content referenced on guest blogs or other authorities in your industry. It's not about how much you blog. It's about how you actually create content topic clusters, and then use link-building strategies.
How do you attract people using Social Media?
Depending on whom you're selling to, going back to that buyer persona, it will define which network you need to be on. Jose shares that his wife has a family photography business, and she spends all her time on Instagram because that's where her buyer persona, moms, are. So those are the networks she uses. Jose himself spends some time on Twitter and LinkedIn as both startup founders and investors are more active there.
It’s relative to whom you're trying to sell to, not whether you like that network or not. It's about where you can connect with your buyer persona.
The next thing is to learn what works for that network. What works for Facebook does not necessarily work for Twitter or LinkedIn. So you have to determine which formats and types of content work best for the networks you’ve chosen. And if it's working, don't be shy to put some dollars behind it. If you have content that is getting good traction, it's a good idea to just add a few dollars to expose that really engaging piece of content to more people.
Remember there’s a thin line between interrupting and engaging. So be very careful with that. If you're noticing that people are actually reading and replying to you and they're converting and it's becoming valuable content for your buyer persona, you can filter your audience when you add an advertisement and it becomes a very valuable strategy.
What happens once people have come to your website? You’ve done SEO, you’ve written blogs, you’re on-page and off-page SEO is done and you’re attracting people through your social media. Now what? Jose remembers speaking to marketing agencies he used to work with and they would say they’ve increased website traffic from 1,000 to 10,000. That’s great, but unless you’re generating more leads or interactions from it, it’s just an ego statistic. At the end of the day, you want to generate interaction. Many of you want to create a sale, but you need people to sell to.
How do you engage people on your website?
One of the most up-and-coming methods that have existed forever is live chats and chatbots. People don't want to engage with another human being, because usually when a chat has a human being behind, they're trying to sell you something. But if it's a chatbot, people trust them a little more. So implementing a chatbot on your website is a great way to do it.
And the good news is with Hubspot chatbot tools are easy to use and there’s no code involved. So there's really no excuse to not have a chatbot on your website. You can get it for free.
The other way to convert people to your website goes to the core of how HubSpot was built. HubSpot was built on the idea that people are looking for content and resources to help them navigate a problem and reach a solution. And we call these lead magnets. What it means is you're creating those resources to help them as well as engage with them to get information from them. Jose shares that the number one rule they’ve always had at HubSpot is that they add value before they extract value. The more value they add, the more value they can extract.
For example, if I'm giving you the ultimate guide to building and executing a marketing strategy for your small business, I may get away with not only asking you for your email but maybe your name, the domain of your company, how many employees you have and what's your business income. I may get away with asking you for much more personal information or detailed information about your business if I'm adding a ton of value.
It goes back to what is the resource I'm building for my buyer, to what stage in the buying process am I targeting, and then what can I ask for in return? So add value, and then extract value. This is another mechanism for converting people who come to your website and you want to at least know who they are.
At the least, you need an email to know who visited your website so you can send them more valuable resources. Maybe you’ll send another email to someone in the awareness stage so you can continue to be helpful. That’s what email marketing is. You’re going to continue to add value, and maybe ask for more information in return. Every time you send them more resources, they’ll eventually start giving signs that they're ready to engage with your sales team or going to purchase.
You use lead magnets and you use content to start building your relationships. Then you use email marketing to build on that relationship and what you're doing within the market is you're moving someone from wherever they are in their buyer journey, all the way to the decision stage. By just providing helpful information. E.g. Are you trying to understand if you need a sales process - here's how you build a sales process. Here's how you hire salespeople. And then we'll go into should you still use Google sheets or should you move to a CRM platform? Then you’ll start sending emails with information like that. You can see how that sequence of emails progresses as they progress through the buyer journey, which is why your buyer persona and buyer journey are core to your marketing strategy.
With email marketing, you want to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Everything else you do is trying to fulfill that goal. For example, if you were just on my pricing page, opened my emails and read blog posts, I'm going to send you a message saying “Hey, do you need more help? You can connect with me to learn more about how we can help BonBillo reach their goals”.
Now doing that at scale is hard. That's where marketing automation comes in. What you're trying to do is you're trying to send the right message to the right person at the right time at scale. So what you do is you start creating a bunch of system rules in a platform that executes for you.
How do you get started with marketing?
Start with the buyer persona and the buyer's journey.
The real core of all your marketing is to be very clear and specific about who your buyer persona is and to understand your buyers. Then decide, where are you going to invest your time? This is key as a startup when you don't have the bandwidth to do it all. So focus on one buyer persona and then focus on one strategy.
Ask, what am I going to focus on this week or this month? Is it attracting or engaging customers? That's it. And go all in for a sprint and then figure out which of the specific places for attracting or engaging, or even delighting you want to use. Once you start doing these things, you'll see it becomes tangible when you need automation.