Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.

(If you are looking for the Content is King post by Bill Gates it is here)

I’m involved with three agencies in Sydney:

  • The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their sales and marketing strategy, including implementation and training in HubSpot 
  • The second is XEN Create. We provide premium graphic design services to companies, with a focus on using the latest AI tools, including Midjourney
  • The third is XEN Solar, where we help high quality solar companies (dealers, installers) with their sales and marketing processes.

I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.

Craig Bailey presenting

Latest stories

Email: Relevance versus Frequency

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One of the most common questions/myths I run into is about email frequency. “How often should we send emails? We don’t want to bug people and have them unsubscribe…” My answer is always the same: you’re asking the wrong question. The question you should instead be focussing on is: How can we make our emails more relevant. Although frequency is a factor, a much bigger...

Temporal subscriptions: This Old Marketing Podcast is back

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What a pleasant surprise – one of my favourite marketing podcasts is back (after an 18 month break). Welcome back to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose with their This Old Marketing podcast. One of the key insights from their return episode (212): thinking through the idea of temporal subscriptions. That is, the increasingly common behaviour where people subscribe to a service temporarily with the...

Pushing into Pinterest. Yes, for B2B

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When I mention Pinterest, what’s your initial reaction in terms of marketing for B2B?  Not a fit? Our audience isn’t there. It doesn’t convert. etc? If so, then here’s a little prompt to ‘test and measure’. We started running small tests on Pinterest in November last year, with the aim of seeing whether we could use Pinterest to build awareness in the B2B...

Privacy: CCPA – it’s GDPR all over again

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You remember the panic around GDPR right? Even if you weren’t targeting audiences in Europe, you were across the privacy changes this new regulation ushered in. What about CCPA? It’s going to be GDPR all over again, but this time in the US, slated for 01 January 2020. Technically it’s limited to California, but in practice this will be an important consideration for...

Attribution, AI and Data – The Marketer of the Future

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As a marketer, you might think your role is just about planning campaigns – after all, that seems to be where our time gravitates to. Some days it seems like all we’re doing is chasing down assets, thinking about targeting, messaging and deadlines. But is that what we’ll be doing in our roles in 5 years time? I tend to think not. Instead I think we’ll be increasingly data...

Facebook Location Targeting gotcha

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If you do a lot of location specific targeting with Facebook ads then you may have experienced an issue with leads coming from outside your targeted area (eg you target Sydney, but get leads in Canberra). Not only does it waste ad spend budget, it also wastes time following up the leads and qualifying them out. Turns out this is a known problem, and after discussing with Facebook Support...

Marketing = Building trust

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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

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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...

HubShots episode 163 is live

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In episode 163 of HubShots – the podcast I co-host with Ian Jacob – we discuss HubSpot’s approach to using AI in its product, plus dive into attribution reports, and then chat about paying $130 for a mug to keep your coffee warm.

In particular we chat about the $130* ember mug.

*130 AUD, your pricing may vary

You can also listen here on Soundcloud:

Gating content rethink

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As always, a good post from David, where he thinks through the right approach for gating content (ie making you fill out a form before you can access a piece of content, usually an ebook or whitepaper). A few thoughts that stood out for me from his post: don’t gate crappy contentdon’t ask for more than you need make it easy to sign up The crappy content point is interesting –...

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