I think this is a really pivotal time for
marketers, but it's also presenting a lot
of challenges and questions. So, I do hope to play a small part, at
least in helping marketers think about how they navigate this new and challenging,
but very exciting environment. [MUSIC] Hello, my name is Cat Warboys, I'm the
APAC Marketing Director at HubSpot, and I'm here today to answer
your marketing questions. So, first one, the digital creative
landscape is more crowded than ever, how do I make my work more visible online? Great question, this is definitely
a trend that we are seeing, when I speak to brands,
when I speak to marketers, many of them are saying that it is
definitely hard to get cut through, and the tactics that were once working for
them just aren't as effective anymore.
So I'd actually start with,
what is your growth objective? So, an easy example we can think about is
maybe new inquiries from clients, right? Once we know what that
growth objective is, we can then think about conversion rate. So the way I think about this, and will
keep it simple, if you get 1000 visits to your page and 100 of those turn into new
inquiries, your conversion rate is 10%. If your objective or your growth
objective is to get 200 new clients per month inquiries, you know that
you need probably 2000 visits. So now we know what good looks like, you can then start to have a look at
what is currently working for you? Where is most of that traffic? Where is that most of that
visibility coming from? Is it coming from paid? Is it actually your email subscribers? Is it social media? Now, I could tell you what works
really well for us at HubSpot, but really the key to success here
is understanding your audience, knowing where they hang out, what they're
into, what they're gonna find interesting, how they want to be engaged with? If you can't answer that, I highly encourage you to rethink
about your audience, who are they? There's a really great tool called
makemypersona.com that will guide you through the exact
questions you need to know, to create that sort of one
pager on who your audience is.
And this is what you wanna use every time
you think how do I reach my audience? How do I get my work out there? I have a small but loyal audience, how do
I grow that audience and appeal to a wider demographic without straying from what
my existing audience already likes? When I take a look at most brands or
content creators' websites, their assets, they're really speaking to people who are
already at what we call the consideration stage, these are people who are aware of
the solution that they're looking for. So there'll be searching for things like, if you're selling website
templates, they'll be searching for the best 20 WordPress responsive
templates, something like that. And when I look at brands, the chances are a lot of your content
is talking about website templates. There is a whole other layer of your
ideal audience who are a great fit for your product, but aren't yet
aware of you as a potential solution.
So what I mean by that is they
are searching for things like, how do I generate more leads? Why isn't my website performing? So when we change our content strategy to
help our customers answer those questions, you might create content such as how X
brand 10x their business through a website redesign. So it changes your angle, it changes your
approach to content, and so it's the same audience but you're actually able to
unlock a whole other layer to people who don't yet know that you and your product
have a great solution to their problem. Next question, an easy one,
how do I balance creativity with strategy? Creativity without direction is probably
not gonna yield the best results in terms of business growth, and I think that's
really the role that strategy needs to play, it needs to be very directional
to help you focus creativity.
In terms of the balance or
that time split, I would actually say, if you're spending a lot of
time revisiting strategy, you probably didn't get your
strategy right from the get-go. So for me, and for many brands, strategy
really happens more periodically, so I would put a lot of time and investment in
the start of the year into your strategy. It should be really clear, articulate,
with maximum two to three things on how you're actually gonna execute on that,
any more and you're gonna lose focus. If you get that piece right, the rest of
your year should really be about alignment to that strategy, and you're putting a lot
of your time into the work, the execution, the production, the creativity part. >> Struggling for a spark? Fire up the largest unlimited
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go supernova with Envato Elements. >> How do I create a successful marketing
campaign to promote my creative work and grow my audience? What are the key steps? All right, so with a campaign I would
think about the overall strategic marketing objective first.
So that could be you have a new product or
service to launch, maybe you would love to get 50 new inquiries
from a client as a result of that. Step two, define your audience, is this
new product or service a great fit for your existing customers, or are you actually targeting a new
type of customer with this? I'd also encourage you to
think about segmentation. So, for example, if your product or service is currently tailored to B2B
marketers, can you go by industry, B2B marketers in hospitality, or
marketers in finance, for example? So really define your audience and
your group of who your product or service is for. Step three is actually
more tied to the question, here you wanna think
about your channel mix. Again, it comes back to something I
said earlier, know your audience first, know where they hang out,
how they like to be engaged. So when we think about this, we think
about pay channels, so paid advertising, paid social.
You want your owned channels, these
are things you own such as your website, your own social community,
your own email newsletter. Then we have earned,
if you're not doing things like media, it could even be as simple as
reaching out to Industry bodies or associations who might be willing to
collaborate with you or promote your work. We then have shared, this could be
marketplaces that are gonna help amplify and help you find places to get your
work into in front of more audiences. So channel mix is really,
really important, a mix of earned, owned, paid and shared. The next step is to
think about content mix. For each of those channels,
you'll probably want a variety of formats, think about video, blogs, social posts,
audio, podcasts even if you're feeling particularly ambitious and
maybe even leveraging your community. And the final step is to set
a time frame for your campaign so you can accurately monitor progress and
performance. And don't be afraid to pivot, if
a channel isn't working for you, kill it, reinvest in one that is working better for
you.
Next question, personalization is now
integral to connecting with an audience. As a creative freelancer, how can I leverage the benefits of
personalization on a smaller scale? So, if we break down personalization,
we're really talking about the ability to create an experience, or tailor your
product or your service or content even to somebody in a way that makes it feel like
it was created specifically for them, and is directly relevant to them. The level of personalization you can
achieve will depends on the access and volume of data that you have, and also
the technology that you have to execute. But on a smaller scale, a really great
place to start can be to tailor or personalize the experience based on where
your buyer is currently at in their lifecycle stages. In lifecycle stages, we're referring
to the awareness stage, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. At the awareness stage you wanna think
about tailoring content that's really gonna help build credibility, and
attract your buyer to your brands. Segmentation can help a lot here, so
if your target audience are B2B marketers, an SME company who don't have
internal creative resources, break that down into further segments.
Once you have your segment, you can think about the type of content
that is suitable at the awareness stage. This could be how to for
the hospitality industry, it could be example templates and
designs that you have for FinTech. At the consideration stage, your buyer
needs to become more educated about how you may be uniquely
positioned to help them. So think about an email campaign
that could showcase your product recommendations for them based again on
their industry, you could showcase how other customers have been using
your work in the wild as well. At the decision stage, we're really
personalizing content to make our buyer feel confident that you are the right
person to do business with. Think about surfacing reviews
from previous customers.
Our last stage is post purchase,
do not forget about your customer, it's really easy to focus on getting
new ones that we forget about the old. We wanna tailor and personalize our content to this group by
keeping them up-to-date with your work. If you can stay top of mind for
those existing customers, they have no reason to go anywhere else. What's the most valuable marketing advice
you think every creator should know? I think for creators and
content marketers, what we're really, really good at doing is creating great
content, great storytelling at the top of the funnel, videos, blogs,
website assets, social communities. What we don't wanna forget is making
the entire process easy and delightful for your customers. Think about how you're moving them down,
if I engage with your website, if I engage with a social post, what is the next
logical step I can take to get in touch? I think many creators and content
marketers miss a huge step here where they don't think about how they're progressing
that engagement so it turns into action.
Had to be a question on AI, how do you
think the advancement of AI will affect how creatives promote and
make money from their work? We are seeing such an interesting shift
in the type of marketing that we need from the advancement of AI. If we think about history,
a little history lesson here, before digitalization, we really relied a lot
on brand marketers and content creators. With the digitization of marketing,
that kinda shifted more into the scientific area, so
we needed deep technical expertise to work out how to make channels like
SEO and paid work for our business. AI is going to commoditize a lot of that
and really level the playing field for brands to have excellent world-class
paid and SEO strategies, that's really gonna help
all brands get discovered. This means the role of creators is
gonna become increasingly important and emphasized. What AI cannot do is replace
humans' ability to be creative, to bring unique perspectives,
to entertain, and this is where creators are going to be extremely
important, so I think it's a great time.
Another big piece of AI is actually how It
is taking away a lot of those manual tasks that we don't love to do. I think many creators may be thinking,
is it gonna replace their role? I think it's gonna make us more efficient,
so think about AI as more of an assistant to you to take away some of that manual
repeatable tasks that you do, so you can focus on more
of the creative work. What are your top three marketing
trends predictions for 2024? Okay, well obviously generative AI,
companies using this and integrating it into their daily
processes is definitely gonna be one. Second, video, in a recent state of
marketing report run by HubSpot, we found that our
audience rate YouTube and short form video as one of their highest
ROI performing content channels.
Thirdly, and it may surprise you, but messaging, I think in Australia we are
quite behind the rest of the world in how we think about engaging with our audience
via SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. These channels offer instantaneous
connections with our audience, and it's what buyers want moving forward. Really great use cases for these channels
include reminders of meetings that you've booked, keeping your audience up to date
with new products, content, and offers. That's it, we're back to one. >> Amazing. >> Right.
>> Impressive job. [MUSIC].