Ben Jacobson

In 2019, is inbound marketing becoming less effective, or is it possible that as marketers, we need to change our approaches? In the hours following his recent presentation at the Slush conference in Helsinki, I got the chance to sit down and talk with Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. Along with Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan is the figurehead of the inbound movement. Among other things, Halligan and I discussed inbound’s longevity and evolution. Here are some of his insights.

Did you #DeleteFacebook in 2018? Caring about our online privacy might be popular right now, but on a wider level, it’s not as easy as we think to escape the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. And even if we were deleting our Facebook accounts en masse, would it be anything more than a symbolic gesture in terms of our own online privacy?

Sure, you can (and should) spend time on content promotion and SEO to help new readers find you, but it can take months for those tactics to start showing real results. With content syndication, on the other hand, the content itself becomes a mechanism for promotion and can get you in front of new audience members a lot more quickly. Let’s look at the basics of content syndication, what it is and isn’t good for, and some tips f

Committing to video marketing is no small undertaking. That’s why simplifying and streamlining your video marketing efforts is critical to achieving success. Fortunately, mining your content archives to repurpose different types of content as videos is relatively simple. Whether you’re turning other formats into engaging videos, or extending the reach of your production clips, you end up with a diverse content library that can empower your audience regardless of their format preference.

There’s a fine line between focus and tunnel vision, and a north star metric seems to fall right on the border. That level of focus has obviously helped startups in the past, but with certain situations and goals. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that ignoring most of your data will yield major business growth.

Many view neuromarketing as a type of “dark art,” designed to force consumers into doing a brand’s bidding. And there’s been a lot of tech blog “echo chamber” coverage of it being newfangled, unscientific, nefariously manipulative, and a host of other unflattering adjectives. The reality is that neuromarketing helps marketers get past some of the human barriers in traditional market research, penetrating surface emotions to the subconscious, and measuring emotional markers in real time instead of during recall.

In news media jargon, an “echo chamber” is a situation where information, beliefs or ideas are reinforced or amplified through communication and repetition inside a defined system. When you’re in an echo chamber, whether you’re aware of it or not, you don’t question your sources, and perspectives that deviate from the status quo don’t have any way to get in. Brand publishing is no different, especially when marketers get so focused on ROI that we start over-relying on flawed performance data.

You’ve just batched an entirely new keyword list. There are tons of great potential terms and audiences to target. Until you look at the metrics: $50 for a click?
Instantly your momentum drains, and your campaign ideas are thrown out the window.
I see marketers give up at this point all the time. It’s simply not viable at such a high CPC, right? Wrong.
Here’s why over-reliance on CPC is causing massive downfalls in your marketing potential and why you should stop benchmarking it once and for ...

Since no one knows what your audience wants better than the consumers themselves, companies often go directly to their customers for shaping the future of their products. And this can work great when used right. Giving users a personal stake in the product’s future and getting them excited for what’s to come can increase the chance they’ll stick around for the release. But sometimes listening to customers can steer you in the wrong direction, especially when you become too eager to please.

“More content” won’t solve your problems on an ongoing basis if you continue to follow the same misguided processes as a default. Why rely on patchwork to fill in the gaps when you can plan to achieve goals like these from the get-go? A strategy and process refresh can be a great quarterly housekeeping item. If any part is misaligned with your business’s current priorities, now is the time to correct it before your content veers too far off track.

Retention marketing is often discussed as a whole with the same strategies suggested for every type of business. You rarely see it broken down further to different tactics and tools for different businesses, like B2B vs. B2C. And that’s where we start to go wrong.

Let’s take a look at five simple but powerful tools to help marketers ease into the world of automation. These tools can be great matches for just about any business looking to grow their leads, engage their audiences and do so in a more efficient manner.

In my experience, a lot of the people who say that PPC doesn’t work are the ones making mistakes with the way their campaigns are conceived, set up, and managed. Their own efforts aren’t working, so they conclude that the whole exercise is folly. But studies show that there are plenty of marketers getting the results they want. If you’re not seeing that same success from your campaign, step back and look at your strategy to pinpoint where you could be going wrong.

Silicon Valley was once known for its innovation and progressive attitude. The tech explosion of the last two decades has transformed the area, turning many of its neighborhoods into some of the richest in the world. And as the money, power, and influence of the tech ecosystem reach new heights, Silicon Valley is gaining a reputation — some of which ain’t pretty. is the Silicon Valley mystique over? Say what you will about its resilience and being “too big to fail” – it’s definitely been under assault in recent months.

Of all the things that B2Bs are focusing on this year, it might surprise you that customer retention is the number one priority around the world. We have to get much better at the key challenges associated with customer retention: listening to our customers; engaging with them across touchpoints; gaining a clearer picture of their entire journeys; supporting them throughout their experiences with our brands, and striving to understand where exactly we’re failing to meet their needs. This got me thinking about how tools can help us solve some of our most pressing retention problems.