Episode 241: The one with the Kevin Bacon animated gif in it

Welcome to HubShots Episode 241: The one with the Kevin Bacon animated gif in it

This edition we dive into:

• Whether you actually read these notes
• HubSpot Public Product Roadmap
• HubSpot SEO tool revisited
• Core Web Vitals resources
• HubSpot Dashboard Annotations
• A gotcha with HubSpot popup form targeting
• How to spot LinkedIn outreach spam emails
• Google Search Console adds regex support
• How to actually use regex without losing your mind
• What content to put on your B2B website (that visitors actually want to see)
• Social media channel use in 2021
• SEO Checklist for 2021

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Recorded: Monday 12 April 2021 | Published: Friday 16 April 2021

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Does anybody read these show notes?

I’m (Craig here) genuinely interested in whether you find these show notes (or emails - if you’ve signed up) useful - would love you to let me know.

You might be interested in the process for putting these together. During the week I read and bookmark most of the items noted below - and then each Sunday I spend a few hours fleshing them out and putting together the wonderfulness you’ll read below.

Here’s a reasonable likeness of me working on the notes (image via Giphy):

I tend to find most of the cool resources via Twitter (it’s the only social channel I’m on these days) with a bit of bias towards SEO related articles, since they are historically the people I follow.

In addition to Twitter I check the HubSpot Product Updates notes (in your portal it’s under your Profile in the top right) as well as anything I notice using HubSpot in day-to-day activities. I also read a select set of (usually paid) newsletters including Benedict Evans, Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Marie Haynes, as well as being a member of Traffic Think Tank.

After I’ve put together the draft in Google docs I send it over to Ian, who then adds his own items and insights, as well as cleaning up some of my sections. He usually handles the HubSpot Sales and Service Hub related items, whereas I tend to focus on the Marketing Hub items - each of us playing to our strengths. Ian usually adds the Quote of the Week - which I know is one of the favourite parts of the show (according to feedback we’ve had).

We usually record on Monday nights and send the raw unedited recording  to our producer Chris. He does his magic and sends it back all beautified. At the same time the XEN team are turning my Google doc into a nice formatted post on the HubShots site (and later the XEN site), with the aim of having the show published on Friday morning. They also take care of sharing on social and ensuring the email goes out.

But enough about that, back to you and the question - is this actually useful to you dear reader? Do you get value from these missives?

If so, we’d love your thoughts. And suggestions - how could we make this even better for you?

Here’s me celebrating when I receive a reply from one of our beautiful readers:

Onto the shots...

Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• Increased limits on Sales Hub tools 5x
• HubSpot has added their Product Roadmap decks to the site on their New page. This is the page that usually gets updated after product announcements at Inbound - good to see it getting used to mention upcoming plans. I love how they are just simply an embed of Google Slides decks. Slide 5 in each of the decks is where you’re likely interested in looking:

Aside: Programmable Email Content is going to be awesome - I can’t wait.

Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Revisiting the HubSpot SEO Tools. Again.

I thought it was worth checking in on the SEO Tools - since there are some interesting improvements in the works. We chatted about this recently in episode 234 (see shot 2), when we noticed that you could run SEO Audits on any domains (ie not just your own sites).

We’re happy to notice that there’s been continual, incremental improvements (my favourite kind of improvements) with the audit tool adding in support for checking page experience metrics - which as you may know is a focus of Google’s upcoming Core Web Vitals algorithm changes in May.

We’ve mentioned Core Web Vitals a few times on the show (including episode 212, see shot 6 ), and there’s plenty of useful guides available (eg from Brian Dean, and ContentKing).

Back to the HubSpot SEO audit page. You can easily kick off a rescan from the page:

You’ll see a bunch of recommendations, including some new user experience tips:

BTW HubSpot has a nice knowledge base article walking through a bunch of the different SEO recommendations.

Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Setup & use HubSpot calling.

Instructions to setup calling.

Tip: make sure you set your call from number to a number people can call you back from.  Mobile/Cell number is the best.

Shot 5: HubSpot Dashboard Feature of the Week

Adding video, images and text annotations to Dashboards

This is a nice feature that I wasn’t aware of - the ability to add annotations to HubSpot Dashboards. It’s available under the Actions menu:

(It’s actually been available for a while, so the ‘New’ label is a little misleading - it’s actually just new to that place in the Actions menu.)

Essentially it’s just a rich text editor:

But does have a nice option to @mention people in your portal:

Nice one.

Shot 6: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Fully specify Popup Form Location Targeting

This one has caught me before, but I still re-learn the lesson every year or so…

As you may know I have a number of different brands (for example: XEN and XEN Solar, and of course HubShots) running on our HubSpot portal (we have Marketing Enterprise and CMS Hub). Which means the same HubSpot portal script is running on all of them.

Which in turn means (and this is really powerful) we can run a Popup form on any of the sites - we just target it in the Popup Form targeting screen.

You can guess where this is heading…

I wanted to run a popup across one of the site’s blogs - on every page, as part of a week long promotion. So I simply set the targeting as ‘/blog/’.

Yes, you guessed it - it showed not only on every page on the particular site I was aiming for, but every other one of our sites! Yikes - people on the XEN site were seeing a popup for something totally unrelated.

So, the lesson learned (yet again) is to fully specify the targeting:

Note: this only affects you if you have multiple sites your HubSpot script is running on - if you only have a single site it won’t be a problem.

Shot 7: Marketing Tip of the Week

How to spot automated LinkedIn outreach emails

We mentioned this tip a while back (and I can’t remember where I first saw it) but it’s a useful tip for spotting the automated outreach activities based on your LinkedIn profile.

Simply add an emoticon in front of your name in your LinkedIn profile (I’ve added a waving hand)

and you’ll immediately know when you receive an email that has been automated eg:

You’ll also see it in LinkedIn InMail messages.

Shot 8: Insight of the Week

What B2B website visitors want versus what B2B websites give them

This is a useful study from Andy at Orbit Media in collaboration with Ascend2 (a B2B research company) investigating the gap between what B2B buyers are looking for versus what most B2B websites provide.

To be clear, it’s a small study (with roughly 400 total respondents) so don’t consider it conclusive - instead consider it food for thought.

Here’s some of the findings from the survey:

• Visitors value quick access (ie navigation) to quality information (answers & insights)
• They also like beautiful design and Team bios (but to a lesser extent than the access to answers)
• Less important are brand story and social proof
• Visitors want a search box (function), chat bot (that works) and dates on blog posts
• Less important are CTA and gated content
• Note: gated content is fine with visitors provided there is a fair value exchange (ie their email for your gated content)
• Visitors like testimonials (especially in-content as opposed to on a separate page) and research backed insights
• Less important are case studies

Here’s the summary in a nice image (from the post):

As noted above, the study is small, so don’t read too much into it, but for me the interesting findings that I’ll be actioning are to embed more reviews and testimonials into our sites, and spend more time thinking about IA (information architecture) having a good search feature.

What’s your thoughts?

Shot 9: HubShots Throwback of the Week

Via the HubSpot product updates blog.

This time a year ago HubSpot was adding functionality in the HubSpot App Store to leave ratings and reviews. Yes, they’ve only had reviews and ratings for a year now… don’t ever get discouraged if you think it’s too late to add a feature to your offering.

Shot 10: Resource of the Week

Social Media Use in 2021

Speaking of surveys, and again taking things with a grain of salt, here’s the latest Pew Research survey on social media use. The survey was smallish (at 1502 US adults) but the funniest part is they were surveyed via telephone - which in itself will skew the results to a certain type of person (ie the type of person who answers phone surveys - who are these people!)

Anyway, putting that aside, some of the trends are interesting.

In particular the growing use of YouTube and Instagram. Facebook is still strong but flat, and equals all the others combined (Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, etc). Interestingly WhatsApp is in there as a social media option.

But YouTube is the standout here. And even more so when digging into demographics - with 90% of the most affluent users ($75K+) saying they use YouTube.

You can read the full study here.

My takeaway: I need to get over my reluctance to do video.

Shot 11: Optimisation of the Week

Loom

Loom is a really easy to use video recording tool. Record quick videos and screencasts. Send to your team, contacts and clients.

Watch one we created.

Shot 12: Quote of the Week

“If your dreams don’t scare you they are too small.”

• Richard Branson

Shot 13: Bonus Links of the Week

Google Search Console added Regex

Google Search Console has added support for Regex expressions in filters. Who cares? Lots of people it seems. Most marketers (if they’re honest) will tell you they love the power of regex, but hate the pain of trying to work out how the hell to fix a regex that isn’t quite working the way they expected (which happens most of the time!).

BTW, if you’re confused about regex (that’s most of us) - Annie Cushing has you covered - her guide to regex is just wonderful. Includes full explanations, plus examples (and videos).

This image from her guide is spot on:

Copy.ai and Snazzy.ai

In other news I’ve been experimenting with copy.ai this weekend. It’s a tool that uses AI to generate content - simply feed it a topic or bullet point and it will churn out copy. There’s a number of these tools now, and they are getting better every month as their algorithms get smarter (and more data to use).  

Just a short year or so ago these tools were lame at best - belching out lacklustre content - but now the quality is surprisingly good. I was quite surprised at some of the entire paragraphs it created. They have a 7 day trial if you want to check it out.

Snazzy.ai is another I’ve been playing with - and they have a free tier.

Learning SEO

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but always worth another mention - here’s the Learning SEO site that Aleyda created and maintains.

Shot 14: Big Shots of the Week

SEMrush Complete SEO Checklist

This SEO checklist from last December is well worth bookmarking and reviewing. It has an excellent checklist to follow - plus this fancy graphic:

Even if you don’t ever intend to be across all of this yourself it’s worth skimming through. If you work with an agency on your SEO they will likely follow a similar process (we do for example), even if they end up repackaging it as their own special sauce (we kinda do this ourselves actually - focussing on some parts more than others, and removing parts that aren’t relevant to the particular business).

Shot 15: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel 
• HubShots Spotify channel 
• HubShots iTunes
• HubShots Facebook group 
• HubShots Twitter 
• HubShots Twitter Show Notes
• HubShots Instagram 
• HubShots LinkedIn 

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn 

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

Please share this with colleagues - it helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of HubShots Episode241

- Hi, everyone. Welcome to HubShots Episode 241. In this episode, we talk about the Kevin Bacon animated GIF or GIF as Craig would say it, some public roadmaps that HubSpot has released, the HubSpot SEO tool, and much more goodness with SEO. And some interesting things about social media channel usage in 2021. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focus podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, service and marketing results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found. And with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you, Craig?

- Look, I'm well Ian and you're right. Is it GIF or GIF? We could start a whole debate around that. I know my preference, but we'll move on.

- That's right. And listeners, if you haven't signed up for the show notes, I recommend you do because there are some great GIFS in there from Craig.

- That's right. You kind of have to check out the show notes to get the title of this episode. We thought we'd try it out. Speaking of show notes, Ian, I'm really interested to know from our listeners who actually reads them. So, first of all, if you're listening to this and haven't signed up, please sign up just to get them into your inbox because I put a lot of time into them. And in fact, in shot one of the show notes, I've gone in depth explaining how we put them together and our process each week. So you can go and read that if that's of interest to you. But I'm especially keen to know if people get value from them and further, what else can we do? How can we make them better? How can we help you grow better, Ian.

- That's right. Now Craig, I do know there is one person that I was talking to two weeks ago that said that they love our show notes from the UK. So there is one person I know that reads them.

- Oh, thank you. I'll take one. That's great.

- That's right. So listeners reach out and let us know. We'd love to hear your feedback. All right, Craig, onto our quick shots of the week. The first one is, they have increased the limits on sales hub tools five times. So what's really interesting with templates, sequences, documents, snippets and playbooks. They've increased it to now 5,000 of those items that you can have.

- I can see that there. Do you reckon that's because that's what they use internally in HubSpot. Oh, we've hit the limit. We better increase it. Oh, bonus, we'll do it for everyone.

- I mean, what was interesting, those limits were all different before the pandemic and now they're all in line based on what's happened. But also if you look at the features, not available in certain editions, it's quite interesting, like those usage limits increasing and then increasing again.

- You know what I find interesting is how you said, yeah, they're all aligned with the same 5,000 like playbooks. Can you imagine having 5,000 playbooks?

- That's right.

- That's insane. Templates though. More snippets, 5,000 of those. Imagine a large team getting to that quickly.

- Sequences, I dunno, we're pushing my luck but you never know. But you know what, a great feature and a great addition to have more stuff in there. Now the next thing is product roadmap decks which I thought was interesting because we have seen this from a partner perspective but here it is available to everybody.

- And they've just put it on their new page which is typically the pages they use when they're after inbound, announces here's the new stuff. Well, they've decided to actually use that year round and just put product roadmaps on there. So listeners, what you wanna do is go and check out those and slide five in each of those decks will be the ones you want then have the forward-looking statements, forward-looking statements, Ian. So they may not come to pass but some of them look really good.

- That's right. And okay, this is more to do with transparency of what's going on as the product grows and as new things come along so well worth a checkout. All right, Craig onto our HubSpot marking feature of the week and this is revisiting the HubSpot SEO tools again.

- That's right, I mean, we first covered this back in, well, we've covered this many times, but most recently in 234. And I thought it was worth jumping in again because they've got incremental improvement which is my favorite kind of improvement. Just continual incremental improvements. So you can go, you can run an audit. By the way, it doesn't have to be a website in your portal, can be any URL. So you'll remember in the last time we talked about this, we actually ran the audit on the HubSpot site itself which we thought was funny, but it was actually quite illuminating as well. Anyway, they've added a whole section this time about page experience. So you can check out those. And that's actually to coincide with the upcoming core web vitals rollout that Google is gonna be using as part of their ranking algorithm, which they've mentioned coming in March. So this is all good. The tool gets better and better. And especially for agencies, I think going around this, very easy to rerun a scan and we've got some screenshots in the show notes, which kind of cover some of the areas and what it looks like.

- Now, Craig, a little tip to our listeners is, we use this to run it against competitor sites so we can understand what we're doing well and what we're not doing so well in. And it's a great way to keep a track of things. So don't be afraid to rerun stuff after a certain period. It does take a bit of time. I was doing this for the customer the other week and it didn't finish particularly fast. I think I had to wait for quite a number of hours before it all ran.

- Yeah, that's my experience as well.

- But well-worth it. All right, onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week, Craig. Now we've been getting lots of great feedback from the HubSpot Calling. So the first thing I wanna say is you need to set up HubSpot Calling. Once you've done the setup and you've connected your account, you then need to make sure you're calling from the right numbers. And there's the tip of the week listeners. Because just think about when you get a call, are you more like a callback or like a mobile or a cell number? Or do you ignore a private number and landline, for example. I'm not a hundred percent sure why people are afraid for people to call them back. It makes no sense.

- Oh, I can give you a little bit of an anecdote on this. Cause this is actually a real example with a client where their salesperson was calling from a private number and wondering why they were getting no responses, no one was answering. And then the business owner actually said, well, why are you running? Why aren't you calling just from your mobile? And the sales guy was like, well I don't want them to know my number and be able call me back. And I'm like, and as you said it's awkward. But isn't that your whole job? Why wouldn't you want someone calling you back? Anyway, it goes to the larger point though that if you're calling from private number, do you ever answer a call from a private number? What about a landline? Probably not. Mobile is the most likely that you're gonna answer. Oh, it could be a friend of mine calling on the mobile. And so you pick up. So there's the sales tip, call from your mobile number.

- And you know what, it's really annoying because I have called back landline numbers and if it comes from a switchboard, then you call up and you go, oh, I'm just returning a call. And they're like, oh, who are you? And unless they've got a smart system that knows who called you, they're like, I've got no idea. Like do you know somebody, what's their name?

- It's just a bad experience. And you know what? Then the salespeople come back to marketing. All those leads you gave us are terrible. It's like, no--

- That's exactly right.

- Your sales prices is wrong, so yeah.

- And here is the evolution in the whole lifecycle journey of HubSpot, isn't it Craig?

- Sure is.

- All right, now onto our HubSpot dashboard feature of the week Craig.

- You know this one slipped past me. I saw it in the product updates which by the way, folks, in your portal you can go and go up to the top right under there and you can see product updates. And so they talked about this adding basically annotations to dashboards. I thought, oh, this is great. And I've got some screenshots that actually insert images text or video. It's got a nice green new button. But as you informed me, this has actually been there for awhile. And if you knew about this as the label left foot under the actions menu.

- So Craig, it was in the pre-made dashboard widgets essentially. It was there. It was like a text widget.

- And thank you for calling them widgets. They call them reports. I've always struggled with this HubSpot report or is it a report or is it a widget?

- It's a widget.

- I should just call them widgets.

- I've used it a couple of times and probably more so now but when you put this in, I was like, oh, hang on a second. Have I used this before? And sure enough I have. But the big thing here is you can do text images. And I think now maybe what wasn't available before is the video part.

- So that is the new part--

- Which I think I didn't see before which has now become available.

- And what about mentions, the ad mentions?

- Yes, I think they were there before. So I think it's well worth using. We've started using this. So this is so you know, we started using this with a customer of ours where we weren't reporting on call data, which are from Google ads. And so we were manually sticking this into one of these widgets that was showing them call data on a monthly basis. So they could actually have a holistic view of what was going on. Because what we've discovered with quite a few clients over this last year people's habits seem to have changed. So people would have previously filled out forms, expected a call back. Now people are happy to pick up the phone and call somebody directly off the ad and almost get help instantly or ask for whatever they want now and then, which I think is a really interesting shift in that market of what's happening. So you might be thinking, oh, gee my form fills are going down. My conversions are going down and my cost per click's going up, what's going on? But when you look at the picture holistically, it's probably similar even better now because people are more likely to call you straight off the bat.

- So this is really cool. And by the way, regardless of whether it's new or not, I had missed it. So maybe listeners maybe you'd missed it as well. So I think that's a really handy feature. Two comments on it to make, you know, how you can set up a scheduled email to go out. That include this annotation--

- Actually it should. Now I should actually check.

- We put a whole, and you could put a really nice image with your branding and everything as the very first report, I wanna call it a widget, at the top and then it goes out in the email. So there's a bit of branding you put out there and set up automated, that'd be nice.

- No, I did stick an image in one of the tests ones I did, Craig. And if the image is not resized correctly, it doesn't resize it nicely like it resizes and it just looks like one big blob. So there's something to watch out for.

- Now there's your gotcha of the week. Now the second thing I want to say, I would love to be able to insert IFrames. And basically then pull in from other tools right into the HubSpot dashboard. I wonder if that's coming. I mean, maybe there's too many security problems with having that kind of thing come in but wouldn't that be handy?

- Exactly, it would be. And I think this goes to show, it says little things that make a big difference. Ain't they, Craig? All right, now talking about our HubSpot gotcha of the week Craig. It's about fully specifying pop-up form location targeting.

- All right, I've been caught by this before. Probably if we went back through shows, I've talked about where I got caught by this.

- I think we have got caught, both you and me.

- Yeah. And so this affects, by the way, this is just for people that have a portal that's running multiple sites. So we've got an enterprise portal. We've got a whole bunch of different sites of my companies that we run through it. So I was doing a popup form and I wanted it to show on one particular site, but every single blog post of that site, it was a promotion just for a week. So what did I do? I'll be really smart, I just said, targeting if contains the word blog. All right, so you know what happened. All my other sites are suddenly seeing this pop-up form which was totally irrelevant. So if you happen to visit HubShots or XEN site, or our XEN soul site, you would have seen this promotion for a totally different brand and product, very embarrassing. And I looked at the stats, it had a thousand views. Anyway, that's the gotcha. And the answer is just of course not to do those partials, but just to a fully qualified.

- That's right. So you wanna put WWW dot your domain slash blog in this instance to fix that.

- That's right.

- And listeners, one thing I would suggest you do when you try these kind of things, make sure you test them. Because we've had the same thing.

- No, but here's the thing, because it was targeted and also exclusion lists, because if someone had already filled it out, they were excluded. It's a really nice thing from targeting. Of course, I've tested it before, so I'm excluded--

- So you didn't see it.

- So I didn't see it. It was only when I happened to be visiting, actually our XEN site incognito, that it suddenly popped up, I was like, what the, what's this? And that was like, again.

- And there you have it. All right, now Craig, onto our marketing tip of the week, how to spot automated LinkedIn outreach emails. So this is a cracker, you shared this in a chat that we were having and I just couldn't help myself but laugh.

- How much LinkedIn spam do you get? And by that, I mean, people that are sending you emails where they've obviously got your details from LinkedIn.

- That's a good question actually. So you're saying that they scraped it off LinkedIn then used email marketing to--

- Well, it was a whole bunch of different tools that would do it, I think I won't mentioned some of them, but yeah, it's very easy to automate. And so just gets your name and--

- Your first name, last name and then--

- Anyway, so there's a tip that I heard and I can't remember who I originally saw it on but it was probably a year or so ago, is to put a little emoticon or emoji in front of your first name. So if you've got the show notes, you'll see my screenshot. Or if you visit my LinkedIn profile, before the name there's a waving hand. And the reason I did that is because then when I get all these automated outreach things and also automated messages within LinkedIn, I see the little waving hand I go, oh, they haven't even looked at it, it's just been automated. They just sent it through. So I've got some screenshots about how to check that. And an example of one, quite a well-crafted email except there's a waving hand wave through it where they've tried to personalize it and haven't checked it. So yeah, anyway, that's great. Cause the moment I see them, bang archive, I just ignore them.

- So what made you look at this one, Craig, that made your list?

- Well, it came in and I saw a couple of those, Ian. I thought I'll share this with you another example of how it just saves you time. It's an efficiency hack by the way. When you're scanning through all those emails. And the great thing is when they do it in the subject vine and the stripe before your name. Now just to be clear, you might actually want to find an emoticon, is it an emoji or an emoticon? I always forget which one this is. I think it's emoticon. You might wanna choose one that's not popular because people do put them in subject lines. So it's quite often you see that, oh, is that from my LinkedIn profile or is that just them dressing up their subject line? But anyway, there's the tip. I just want to save on my inbox viewing.

- Onto our insight of the week, Craig. And what B2B website visitors want versus what B2B website gives them. And this is a little study.

- This is from Orbit Media. We've mentioned them before in the show a number of times. Cause Andy there puts out really stuff and the team as well, actually. Really good stuff I really like. Anyway, this was a study, the caveat, it was only around 400 respondents. They surveyed 200 B2B marketers and then 200 B2B visitors. And they asked them a bunch of questions. So small sample size and the usual caveats, people would answer surveys or skewing one way kind of thing. So don't treat it as a general consensus. Just treat it as interesting ideas to consider. Anyway, the premise is they'll ask the marketers what they think is important in the site and then they'll ask visitors. So they asked a bunch of things. I've got a few takeaways and I'll just mention some of them. So one of the things that visitors really value is quick access to information. So that's thoughtful navigation plus a search box. They just wanna be able to search and get the stuff. And then they want to get information that actually answers their questions. Now that could be research insights, FAQ's whatever, but they want that. Less valuable to them, but of course still part of it is the design of the site. Things like about pages, your brand story. People don't care about that. Well, according to this survey, they do care about team bios. And of course the sites still has to have good design. It's not the compelling feature. Whereas marketers often think, oh, I've got to have the best looking site and we've got to have our story there and all this kind of thing. No, people just wanna navigate to get answers to their questions--

- They want to solve their problem.

- They wanna solve their problems. So it's kind of common sense in hindsight but a few other things. So visitors, they're not worried about your calls to action. You know how marketers are like, oh, I've got to make sure there's call to action there. And the one at the bottom and you know, visitors don't care. Cause they'll just searched for what they want or the navigation. Interesting one, visitors like testimonials, especially when they're in content versus case studies. Again, small numbers. So take it with a grain of salt but I thought it was interesting. One of the differentiators was they don't go to a testimonials page. So if you've got them all collected over on a testimonials page, no. But if you've got testimonials within the content product page, that kind of thing, that they do find useful. So beef that up. And so then at the end I've got a little table which I actually took from their site from the Orbit Media site. And so yeah, I think that's it. So I was thinking about that and I was like, right, what's the action we'll take away from this because I think there's useful stuff. It's one look at your IA, your information architecture, navigation, make it really clear, make sure there's a search box there. And also when you search, you actually get a good experience. You know those searches where it's like, pulls back junk and it's all form and can't find anything? So that's gotta be good. And then also just embedding more reviews and testimonials throughout the content. Just those proof statements that don't get in your way and don't require a lot of engaging with.

- And I think you're quite right Craig, if you think about ease of use Navigation and getting the answers, look at what Google does. And they've hit the nail on the head when it to that kind of stuff. So there's a lot that we can learn from what Google tests out.

- You know what, I just thought of a classic one is the pricing page. Any good SaaS tool now has pricing right in the top menu. Whereas I remember, it was only a year or two ago, people were hiding it or you had to go to the footer to find pricing. What do people want at the site? They wanna know the pricing.

- That's right.

- I know I'm still really frustrated when I go to some tools and they won't--

- Then they won't tell you the pricing.

- Or you go to the pricing page and it says fill in this form and some little contact, just like higher. They're obviously either too expensive or too frustrating to work with. So gone, you don't have to get it.

- And you're quite right, Craig. And I think another thing to watch is the flow of everything. So when I was talking to somebody today, it was a friend of a friend inside. I said, okay, I'm happy to help them out. And I just went through the flow of their site just to see. And I was, I got confused because they, it was kind of like a directory of listing for people that were looking for holistic health. I was confused with the language, I said, I wanna make a posting that I don't know how much it costs because I get taken to another page. Like I was just really confused. I'm like, I wanna know the price, like make that really apparent what the price is. So yeah, you're quite right in what's being displayed here is that you just need to make it really simple for people to get to what they want. All right, our HubShots throwback of the week, Craig.

- Speaking of refused, do you know it was a year ago that HubSpot added reviews and ratings to the App Store, HubSpot App Store? Just a year ago.

- It seems like forever.

- It seems like forever, but I think the take away for me is well, don't think it's too late because reviews and ratings they've been on every other site for decades. And HubSpot, in their priorities CMRI, we put it in, again it's incremental improvement, bang, bang. Almost a year ago, everyone was probably, takes it for granted down.

- All right. And here's our resources social media use in 2021, Craig.

- You and I both found this article separately and we're gonna talk about it in the show. And it's the latest from Pew Research talking about social media use. Now again, the caveats. It's a smallish survey. I think it's around 1500 US adults. And here's the funny thing, you know how they survey them? Phones survey. Who answers a phone survey? I wonder if they were calling from a mobile number? I'm like who answers? Anyway just that alone will skew this to a certain type of a person.

- So in saying that, Craig, do you think that these were organized surveys that people wanted to instead of getting a digital survey questionnaire, maybe they organized a time where they said, okay, we need half an hour of your time where we can ask you some questions?

- I'm not sure of the format, but if you follow the link, if you go to page two, it actually has their whole methodology of how they did it. I didn't actually read that--

- I didn't know they did that.

- To work out how they take the--

- We were just watching the trends.

- Well, that's right, the trends. Now 1500 US adults who answered a phone survey. So there's a certain demographic there. But the findings, this is what I thought was interesting. So Facebook of course has always been good, but you know what's killing it?

- YouTube, I was shocked. I was like, what are we doing? So listeners, we are actually recording this episode as we speak to post on YouTube. I'm not saying there's a production quality here, recording it off our phones. And we're gonna test it out because--

- I mean, we've known video for ages. But there's lots of video and video, but then there's YouTube as a channel. And even over the last year, I've noticed I watch so much stuff on YouTube and--

- You're not wrong, we had a discussion about this.

- We've discussed this. And well, to the extent that I buy YouTube Pro because I don't like ads. I don't wanna be interrupted by ads. So I've got YouTube premium, ad free, and it is such a strong source of information and learning for me. My takeaway from this is as you know I'm setting up a new office. I'm actually gonna set up a studio where we record our recordings and do it professionally and commit to a YouTube channel. I'm 10 years too late to this, of course, but--

- You never too late, Craig.

- I'm hardened by HubSpot App Store. You're never too late to get into it. And as long as the quality is good, it's kind of like saying, oh, should I start a blog now, cause I'm too late, no start a blog because it's providing useful content. YouTube, I'm gonna do the same.

- That's right, you know what's interesting, Craig, is that we see a lot of things like Facebook have been on the roadmap since about 2012. Had increase over time but has relatively since 2015 seem to be quite flat. What's interesting with YouTube, it's first featured in 2018 and then pretty much '19, 2021 has just taken this upward trend, which apart from, what is it? Is it Reddit, WhatsApp? I can't tell what that is. I think it's Reddit with a similar trajectory and maybe even Pinterest, to be honest, that have a very similar trajectory upwards. So I thought that was very interesting.

- Yeah, agreed.

- Also interesting given the launch of more video on Instagram and other platforms to still see YouTube just have that same growth is really, really impressive.

- Yeah, and by the way this is the percentage of US adults who use it. So Facebook is sitting around flat at 69% of US adults use it but 81% US adults using YouTube, it's compelling. Everyone's there. And this goes into advertising as well, because you know how we always say to our clients, everyone's on Facebook, even if you don't think they are or you're in B2B, oh, they're not on Facebook. Just test it because everyone's on Facebook. Well, except me, Ian. You know, I'm not And it's now like I know, YouTube, everyone's on YouTube. We've got to do a lot more YouTube advertising. I know you do a fair bit of YouTube advertising. We don't do a lot of it ourselves. So it's just something we've got to do.

- And listeners I think also thinking about it from the perspective of availability of YouTube. So I think I've been testing different devices out. So I bought the new Google TV device, for example.

- Which ones, the Chromecast?

- Yes. So I think they call it Google TV now.

- Oh, do they?

- Yeah, they changed the name of it. So it was Chromecast, now Google TV, has a really nice interface, works really well, but what's one of the buttons on the remote, YouTube. The accessibility of YouTube is so great. And I even watch my kids and other young adults use it. It's like one of those apps that gets used all the time. It's like, that's where they go for entertainment. It's not like we go to Netflix. They go to YouTube for entertainment.

- I think that's right. And I mean, we have talked about it, YouTube number of times on the show. So listeners, this is not like, oh, wow, and we've only just discovered YouTube, but I think it's about how significant--

- The shift.

- The impact is. And that's not only backed up by these studies but also our own behaviors and your kids' behaviors. So how many social platform, well, I dunno if I'd call YouTube social network, but how many of these channels cover such a diverse range of age groups and cater to them all? And the other thing that this Pew study talked about was demographics. And in terms of affluence like the highest income demographic, plus 75K a year demographic, 19% of US adults in that demographic are on YouTube. So they see it as a main source compared to Facebook. It's 70%. So yeah, it's compelling.

- So listeners, your takeaway from this is you need to go read the study and look at opportunities that you can utilize in your business. All right, so here this week we have our optimization of the week, Craig.

- Our new shot you've added, Ian.

- That's right. And this is from a discussion listeners we've been having together. It's like, what are we doing as we've observed lots of people, what do we do and what do we take away from HubSpot that is constantly optimizing their product. What are we doing in our daily lives that are optimizing the way we work and the way we interact with people. And one of the tools that came to mind was Loom. And we've spoken about this before, but I was telling you before, was that, I think I use this pretty much every day.

- Agreed, we use it so much. Now we were early to this. I was one of the beta users of Loom, long before it launched. And I bought a pro license really early, as soon as they offered a pro plan, I bought it because it was so good. And it's such a good tool. And the reason we're mentioning this in the show by the way folks is, because I actually had a friend who actually asked me the other day, said, oh, have you heard of this tool Loom? I'm like, oh, I thought everyone knew about it. Cause we just use it day to day. Listeners, if you haven't used it, you've got to try it. It's just--

- It's life-changing.

- I reckon HubSpot should try and buy Loom. I wonder if did try to buy Loom and Loom knock them back and that's why they went down the video path and their own built-in thing. But they should have bought Loom.

- When it comes to usability, even the new transcription beta that they're running, it is just so good, Craig.

- It's such a good tool.

- All right, onto our quote of the week, Craig. It's from Richard Branson. If your dreams don't scare you, they are too small.

- Just one of those classic quotes. I think it was Richard Branson. He gets the attribution for this but I'm sure many others have said it. I think that's good.

- It is.

- I'm trying to think bigger, bigger goals.

- I love how you challenged me to think bigger, Craig. So thank you.

- All right, we've got some bonus links of week, Craig and this is to do with the Google search console adding rejects which is regular expressions for those who don't know. And why is this important, Craig?

- Well, it allows you to do filtering on your Google search console data. And so it's quite handy. It got a lot of interest when I was on Twitter because Twitter is really the only place I hang out and yeah, lots of excitement. And it's been rumored for a while but if you're kind of confused by rejects, then Annie Cushing's got the article for you. We've linked to it in the show notes. I've got an image from it. It's great. She explains all the rejects, scenarios and examples, she's even got videos. It's so good.

- I love that picture in the show notes. And then we also got something about copy.ai and ceci.ai.

- Have you seen some of these AI content tools lately?

- Yes, I have.

- They're getting so good. Compare that to a year ago and the content that they were belching out was just garbage but now they're so good. So yeah, really getting into those tools. And by the way, shout out to Justin for putting me on to this, I don't know, months ago. And just using these tools for fleshing out bullet points, they'll expand them, they'll write product descriptions. You can actually use them to write entire blog posts if you want. They're not ideal for that, but yeah, they'll flesh out things and use AI to create. It's amazing.

- All right, and we've got something about learning SEO as well.

- Latest site on whole bunch of tools. Most of them free, I think and education resources for learning SEO. So if you wanna get into SEO, that's great set of tools there.

- And even if you don't want to get into SEO, I think it's really important to understand what it is and how it can benefit you without having to do it. Because I think like for us, Craig, we're both learning constantly and we are doing SEO training and really it's constantly evolving. And I think if you are running a business, if you're running the business, you're in charge of marketing, even in charge of sales, I would say it would pay to learn this because you will find opportunities that other people are totally missing in their market space.

- I think so. And my comment on that is we're pushing back into SEO. I think most listeners, if you've been listening for awhile you know I actually started my whole marketing career as an SEO consultant more than a decade ago. And I've kind of moved away from it in the last five years but I'm actually pushing back to it. And that's because we're lucky enough now that we're getting the bigger kind of longer term clients who are prepared to put in the time, six, nine, 12 months and have a budget for content and all the SEO pieces around it. And the value is there. And so we're still doing a lot of the paid stuff that we've kind of moved to the last couple of years, but I'm actually pushing back and we're gonna have a big focus on SEO. It's still really relevant. It feels our SEO data if we missed the buy, it's all just pay to play. Yes, but there's so many clicks that you can still get for free from Google. So it's worth optimizing for.

- All right, and finally listeners there is the SEMrush, SEO checklist for 2021.

- Speaking of SEO, SEMrush put out so many good articles and this is an excellent one. It's quite long, it's a checklist, can get technical at times. And it's about using their tool. So if you don't have SEMrush, you might find half of it not that relevant. We use SEMrush, I actually have some bunch of other tools, but SEMrush really put out great guides and this checklist is excellent. So even if you're not using their tools or you're not really into SEO, cast your eye across however many it is, 41 best practices or something like that. And just be aware of them. They're really good. Because then when you're working with your agency, if you've got an SEO agency or marketing agency doing SEO, you can at least be across the main components that are part of SEO these days.

- Yes, and you know what? It is a great tool. And I would actually print this and stick it on your desk or have it available because not only has it got the checklist, got things to do with SEO basics, keyword research, the technical part in the on page, but also talks about certain tools that you can use like search console analytics, Yoast, if you're using WordPress. Talks about different keyword research tools, about technical SEO tools. So they've actually given you not just using their tool but they're giving you an option to go, hey, I might have some of these things. Am I actually looking in the right places to get the right data? But well worth the read. And it's really well done. Well, listeners I hope you enjoyed the show and please watch the videos, subscribe to the show notes and connect with myself on LinkedIn or simply reply to the email you get from Craig every week on a Friday with the show notes in it. And we would love to talk to you. And Craig, I forgot one last thing. Coming up is our HubShots challenge.

- Marketing challenge, 28-day marketing challenge. That's right.

- That's right.

- Details of that will be available next show.

- Well, catch you later, Craig.

- Catch you later, Ian.

- Hey there, thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. To get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and resources, sign up at hubshots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better with HubSpot.