To paraphrase Seth Godin’s latest book, marketing is, at its heart, about building trust. It’s something I’ve thinking about deeply lately. Is the work we’re doing for clients, for their clients, helping build trust? Suggestion: think about this next time you prepare an ad, an article, an email, a campaign, a strategy – perhaps even when you write your next blog post...
Grow with HubSpot Event in Sydney
HubSpot runs a bunch of events around the country each year (I’m specifically thinking of Australia, but it’s likely true in most countries). If you’re in Sydney, you may be interested in their next event. It’s on Tuesday 06 August, and you can get a 50% discount on tickets using this link. Would I recommend attending? I’ve thought about this a bit, and...
Artificial Content Intelligence
A good example of what artificial intelligence can knock out theses days – consider this blog, which is almost* entirely ‘written’ by artificial intelligence. The content, the authors, even their photos, are all fake – generated by algorithms. Ian and I chat further about this in Shot 1 of episode 163 of HubShots. *Almost everything – the post titles are created by a...
Why we pretend to know things, explained by a cognitive scientist
New research explains why we pretend to know more than we do - and it's kinda worrying.
Content repurposing
Episode 71 of HubShots is up – in it we chat about content repurposing, and in particular:
three HubSpot tips for identifying content on  your site that is working well
an overview of different formats to repurpose to
two key ideas for syndicating repurposed content on
Plus I have a rant about popups.
BloomBerry
Potentially useful tool for analysing the types of questions people are asking about a topic:
BloomBerry is an ever expanding database containing millions of real questions from across the web.
Questions are then intelligently grouped into topics for easy analysis.
But heavily weighted with Quora posts it seems – for example.
Who the hell uses QR Codes?
I was reading through Belle magazine this morning – this is a higher end magazine covering interior design and beautiful apartments/homes. One of the early ads (ie expensive placement) was this double-page spread: My eye was caught by the QR code in the bottom right corner. I’m always amazed when companies promote a QR code – seems like a waste of good call-to-action real estate...
You’re on the waitlist
Kinda strange how some companies start promoting a new product, get you excited and then after you signup they tell you you’re on the waitlist. Worse, they then hit you with an email followup sequence that typically: congratulates you for being on the waitlist promises to advance you on the waitlist if you tweet about them tells you about the founders and what their hopes are for the...
Email marketing to people who gave you their business card
Just going to put this link from Legal Vision here for future reference. I come up against this all the time with customers – they collect business cards at tradeshows and events and immediately add the contacts to their email newsletter list. It can be a bit of an awkward discussion, but it should be clear: The question is whether a person providing their business card is consent to...
Facebook ad reporting is likely bogus, but does that mean we shouldn’t use them?
In a word: no. It’s hard to dispute the findings that Facebook’s measurement and reporting of ad stats (especially video impressions) is anything other than inflated. But that just means you need to focus more closely on ‘real’ goals. The days of reporting just on impressions are hopefully rare for you these days. Instead aim to think in conversions and (ideally) revenue...