Justin Levy» Hubspot

19 Marketing Experts Share Tips and Insights – Inbound Marketing Summit 2010 Preview

Justin Levy — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:09:35 +0000

As we get closer to the Inbound Marketing Summit on October 6-7th (you can save 50% off using source code EBOOK50), Mike Volpe of HubSpot and I teamed up to conduct a survey of the speakers. We had a total of 19 speakers respond, including Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Dharmesh Shah, Steve Garfield, Scott Stratten and more. We gathered all of the responses, analyzed all of the data, and have released a free ebook with the results of the research.

We were interested by some of the data including the prediction that social media will drive more business value than SEO by 2013 and that over the next 3 years Google and Facebook will decline in importance while something new (and currently unknown) will emerge as the most important website or service.

Want to see what else these experts had to say? Here is the complete ebook as a presentation. If you want your own copy, you can download it.

What currently drives the most business value for your company? How do you think that will change over the next 3 years?

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The ABCs of Startup Marketing

Justin Levy — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:34:00 +0000

Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company. Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support. For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing. Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

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Email or RSS: Which Do You Prefer

Justin Levy — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:13:35 +0000

In a recent survey of their customers HubSpot found that their customers preferred to subscribe to blogs via email subscription nearly 12 times more than their preference for RSS. HubSpot serves mostly small and medium businesses in a cross-section of verticals. Therefore, the results are not surprising. In doing educational seminars and speaking to a variety of different groups, I usually have to describe what RSS actually is. Most will admit to see the RSS logo on websites that they visit often but not knowing what it was. Those of us that live and breath technology and digital marketing channels such as social media tend to take for granted that we integrate technologies into our lives well before mainstream society.

Comparing email and RSS subscribers of this blog reveals the exact opposite trend. Only 5% of you choose to subscribe via email. What’s interesting about this is that if you take a look at this blog, you’ll notice that the email subscription call-to-action is larger and more prominent than the 2 calls-to-action to subscribe via RSS. While there are many reasons why this may occur, I think it boils down to a couple of reasons:

1. This is possibly due to topics that are covered around here and the subscriber that attracts.
2. It could be that many of you feel overburdened with email and therefore do not want yet another email to have to read on a daily basis.
3. Some may not like providing their email address due to a fear of spam and feel that if they subscribe via RSS it is easier to opt-out.

For those that are in the 3rd bucket, I can assure you that on this blog your email is held confidential (see my pledge to you on my Newsletter page). But, I can understand the hesitance to provide your email address especially since every big box retailer, restaurant chain or other business asks for your email address.

I only subscribe to a couple blogs via email, mostly blogs that I manage to ensure that everything is working properly. There are only a few others that I subscribe to via email because they provide a daily digest of the news within the vertical that they cover. Otherwise, and more often, I prefer to subscribe via RSS. Currently, I’m subscribed to 200+ blogs and read, in general, between 400-600 articles per day. If I was to subscribe to even a portion of these blogs via email, I would have a full inbox at the start of the day before business and personal emails began to fly in.

Where do you fall? Do you prefer to subscribe via RSS or email to blogs? If you use both methods, what factors weigh in your decision?

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Photo Credit: HubSpot

Inbound Marketing – Video Book Review

Justin Levy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:58:23 +0000

Are you trying to figure out how to develop an online presence and just how Google, social media and blogs will help with that? Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone gave you a task list that that would help you “get found” online? What if there was a book out there that helped to make to explain how all of these online tools work together to help YOU? Lucky for you, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the co-founders of HubSpot, have published exactly that book. Their new book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
(affiliate link), is an excellent, tactical read that I think many of you would benefit from. Not only are Brian and Dharmesh friends but this book helped push me to go do a few more things that I hadn’t been doing.

Check out my video review of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
(affiliate link). If you can’t view the video, check it out over on YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve already picked up a copy of the book, what did you think of it? Did it give you a list of things to go do?

Disclosure: HubSpot provided me with a review copy of this book. HubSpot is a sponsor of many events run by New Marketing Labs and Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, is a member of the HubSpot B oard of Advisors.

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Facebook in Real Life

Justin Levy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:44:20 +0000

While catching up on my RSS feeds tonight, I came across a new cartoon from HubSpot. The title of this new cartoon is: “Facebook in Real Life: Throwing Sheep”.

This cartoon made me laugh a lot and reminded me of this video that I came across last year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you haven’t checked out the series of cartoons that HubSpot has been producing lately, take a look at them….they’re pretty funny

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Marketing to Buyer Personas and Inbound Marketing – David Meerman Scott’s Keynote at Inbound Marketing Summit

Justin Levy — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:41:05 +0000

This past weekend I started re-reading David Meerman Scott‘s The New Rules of Marketing & PR. As you know from previous posts, I’m a huge fan of David because of his thought leadership in the space of inbound marketing. As I was reading I realized that I hadn’t shared his keynote from the Inbound Marketing Summit with all of you. This keynote was excellent and definitely a “must watch”.

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader, you can view it here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you marketing to different buyer personas? What are some of the ways that you are executing an inbound marketing campaign? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Learning How to Use Twitter Effectively

Justin Levy — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:50:27 +0000

This past Friday, the inbound marketing gurus over at HubSpot presented a webinar on How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR. The webinar was hosted by their marketing team: Mike Volpe, Rick Burnes and Ellie Mirman. They covered a lot of the basics for using Twitter including how to get started, thoughts on personal vs professional use, how to measure and analyze activity, and some of the various tools and resources which can be used to extend Twitter. HubSpot has already posted the recording as well as the slide deck for the webinar. Also, Laura Fitton posted an excellent review as well as notes.

Heavy users of Twitter tend to forget that only a very small amount of the population are actually on the service right now. Twitter directory, TwitDir, pegs the current number of users at approximately 3.1 million. For everyone else who is not using it yet or does not understand Twitter, take a minute to watch this video from Common Craft:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently the team at EpicFu helped explain Twitter as well as many of the available tools and resources:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Many businesses tend not to understand Twitter, or social media in general, so they don’t realize that whether or not they utilize the service, that there are millions of people (and growing rapidly) who could be talking about their company and/or products/services. Not too long ago, social media expert Chris Brogan explored the 50 ways on using Twitter for business.

I’m curious to know the ways in which you utilize Twitter and other social media. If you aren’t on Twitter, and/or shy away from other social media platforms, I’d also like to know your thoughts in the comments section.

Oh, by the way, for anyone not following me on Twitter…you can find me @justinlevy

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