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April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (which has 2M downloads). 

She helps businesses streamline their messaging, and loves teaching business leaders to leverage the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they’re trying to say. 

Keep reading to learn her three tips when it comes to storytelling, selling what you love, and making the customer the hero. 

1. Lead with what you love.

If this sounds a little too similar to the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to marketing.

Don’t “do what brings you the most money”… Just do something for the joy of it. Plain and simple. 

“You need to be selling the products that bring you the most joy. Why are you pushing something you hate doing? Don’t do that,” Hawkins tells me. 

“I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who are in a rut because they’ve backed themselves into selling something they don’t actually like selling,” she says. 

That doesn’t mean you need to stop offering those products entirely, especially if they’re keeping the lights on. 

But when you care about what you’re selling, Hawkins says, your customers can feel it. Lean into the stories or values that matter most to you, and you’ll find yourself connecting more deeply with your audience.

Now how do I make a career out of reading rom-coms and drinking frozen margs? 

2. Your customer is the hero. Not you. 

Hawkins sees too many marketers position their brand as the heroes, and she says it’s one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.

“Everybody wakes up the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you’re trying to draw in… The story needs to be about them.”

In other words, you’re not Batman — you’re Alfred.

Take a recent example: Hawkins was working with a jewelry brand that creates products in Malawi and pays their workers 3-5X the minimum wage. Naturally, they wanted to shout that from the rooftops. Who wouldn’t?

But Hawkins stepped in and pointed out that the brand isn’t supposed to be the hero. The customer is. 

“We rewrote the campaign to ask, ‘How can these pieces help people celebrate a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?” 

Suddenly, the jewelry wasn’t just jewelry; it became a badge of a customer’s big (and small) life moments.

Have you ever landed on a website and read the first few sentences and thought, Wow, is this person in my head? That’s the end-game: For your customers to feel like you get them. 

“When we can position our products to align with what our customers are feeling, it creates that ‘ding, ding, ding’ moment — ‘That’s me! This is for me!'” Hawkins says. “That’s what we’re looking for.” 

3. Marketing is just storytelling. 

April Sunshine Hawkins is, as it turns out, exactly what you’d expect — bright, warm, and exceptionally joyful. 

She also loves a good story, which is why she works for a company (StoryBrand) that helps businesses sharpen their messaging through a provided framework. 

“It’s just nice to have a framework to go to, so when you’re like, ‘Oh no, there’s a blinking cursor again. What am I supposed to say?’ You have a framework to work off of,” she tells me. 

Here’s the nugget of wisdom: As marketers, we don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. If marketing is really just storytelling, then it’s vital to treat your messaging the same way you’d write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable challenge, and a triumphant ending. 

More companies than ever are using Instagram for business — over 200 million businesses, to be exact. 

Instagram has proven to be a worthwhile investment for marketing purposes. We surveyed 650+ global marketers in Jan. 2024, and they were more likely to rate Instagram as having high ROI than any other platform, and it’s the platform that will get the most investment from them in 2024. 

If you’ve only ever used Instagram for personal use, it might seem daunting to start using it for business purposes. Here, we’re going to explore how you can be using Instagram for business to promote your business on Instagram. 

Table of Contents

• How to Use Instagram for Business
• What is a business profile?
• How to Create a Business Profile on Instagram
• How to Switch to Your Business Profile
• Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2024 [Data]

How to Use Instagram for Business

Let’s delve into the six strategies you’ll need to employ to get the most out of Instagram.

1. Add value with your content.

First and foremost, Instagram is a visual platform. To attract an audience, it’s critical you spend time delivering high-quality, thoughtful content.

To succeed on Instagram, it’s essential you create valuable content that attracts an audience and encourages them to engage with your business. Consider how you can delight your customers while staying true to your brand.

For instance, Hot Pockets sells microwaveable pocket sandwiches. Admittedly, I wasn’t much of a fan of Hot Pockets — until I began following their business’s Instagram account.

There are only so many times you can post a picture of a sandwich. Hot Pockets goes in a different direction. Instead, it appeals to its audience through humor, often posting relevant memes or funny quotes.

For instance, in response to @ShallowDivers’ claim that Hot Pockets aren’t sandwiches, Hot Pockets responded with this:

Ultimately, it might take trial and error to find the content that works best for your business.

While Hot Pockets relies on humor, other brands like The North Face use impressive adventure images to appeal to its demographic.

The point is, brands need to add value to Instagram’s community rather than using the platform for advertisements alone. This is critical for your long-term success.

Looking for a few more tips on how to use Instagram to positively impact your business? Check out these Instagram hacks in the video below.

Put these tips to work, and update your marketing mantra from “content is king” to “valuable content is king.”

2. Maintain a consistent theme.

Imagine each Instagram post as an individual page of your website.

While each post should be good on its own, ideally, you’ll need to create a cohesive theme to maintain an audience’s loyalty. In fact, using a consistent voice and aesthetic across your Instagram page is the #3 strategy Instagram marketers are leveraging this year. 

It’s important to note, I mean “theme” in the broad sense, as it relates to everything from hashtags and captions to pictures and videos. You’ll need to create a consistent tone of voice and a unified feed aesthetic.

Ultimately, the more specific and consistent you are with your posts, the more likely you are to attract your most authentic audience.

You might think it’s better to appeal to more people through various themes, but ultimately, staking your claim in a specific niche will help you create stronger, more genuine connections.

For instance, consider MVMT. Its feed is undoubtedly consistent, with similar filters and color palette, and an emphasis on darker, edgier images:

Its consistency is equally obvious in its captions, with phrases like “Create a life you can’t wait to wake up to,” and “Unexplored paths lead to undiscovered stories.” In every post, you’ll see the same hashtag: #jointhemvmt.

Undoubtedly, its followers both expect and prefer this type of content, or they wouldn’t have followed in the first place. To continue delighting customers, it’s essential MVMT keeps true to its theme.

3. Engage with your audience.

Engaging with your audience helps your followers feel valued and, as a result, more connected to your business.

There are plenty of ways to engage with your audience. You might reply to comments on your posts, participate in comment threads, run contests or giveaways, use Instagram Stories polls feature, or give shout-outs to followers on your Stories, particularly if they post something relevant to your brand.

Halo Top Creamery does a fantastic job of engaging with its audience.

It frequently posts cute ice cream pictures with the caption “Ice cream is better with friends. Tag a friend you’d like to eat this with.”

A simple “tag a friend” caption is an effective strategy for growing your audience since your followers will then tag friends who might not know about you yet.

Additionally, Halo Top often does contests and giveaways, like this one:

By tagging winners in its posts, Halo Top incentivizes other followers to engage with the brand in the future. Additionally, Halo Top’s giveaways demonstrate genuine commitment to connecting with its audience.

4. Consider influencer marketing.

As a consumer, you’ve likely seen the recent influx of influencer marketers on Instagram — and for good reason.

Social media marketers we surveyed in 2024 said that Instagram offers the second-highest ROI of all platforms when working with influencers/creators. 

By leveraging the power of an influencer, who is already authentically connected with her audience and seen as a trusted source of information, you’re able to spread brand awareness and drive sales.

Micro-influencing in particular is a strong opportunity for brand endorsement.

You could use your budget and resources to invest in traditional advertising, but it’s often easier to create a more targeted, effective marketing campaign through influencer marketing.

Ultimately, influencers have already cultivated an engaged, loyal following — by identifying the right influencers for your niche, you’re much more likely to find followers who will truly enjoy and support your products or services.

5. Build an ad campaign.

There are two reasons you might use Instagram ads: to spread brand awareness or to increase sales.

It’s critical you focus on one goal when creating an effective ad campaign. An Instagram ad aiming to sell a product will look vastly different from one intending to attract followers.

For instance, consider this Greenchef ad that showed up on my Instagram feed.

With various images of delicious food and an enticing “$40 OFF” discount, it’s likely a high-converting ad. It’s very clear what Greenchef’s goal is: to get people to buy their product.

YouTube, on the other hand, invested in Instagram ads for an entirely different reason.

Its advertisements, featuring well-known singers like Camila Cabello, entice followers to simply follow YouTube Music’s Instagram channel (and, ideally, YouTube’s music channel itself).

To implement an effective campaign, it’s essential you decide what you’re hoping to achieve before you begin creating it.

Once you’ve chosen a goal, you’ll want to create the ad creative. Similar to what we discussed in strategy one, you’ll need to create high-value visual content if you want your ad to be successful. Take a look at other ads on Instagram and consider how you might emulate them.

Additionally, A/B test multiple variations of the same ad (changing the copy, image, or targeted audience for each version), to figure out what works best for your business.

When you’re ready to create your ad, you’ll need to use Facebook Ads Manager. Among other things, Ads Manager lets you narrow in on your target audience (including location, age, and various interests of your ideal demographic), choose your ad objective, and analyze ad performance.

6. Utilize shoppable posts.

If you’re using Instagram for business, then, Shoppable Posts is one feature you’ll want to know well.

It allows you to create posts and tag your products and/services to create a seamless shopping experience directly on the platform. It creates less friction for your followers, increasing the odds of turning them into customers.

Before you begin executing these strategies, you’ll need one thing: an Instagram Business Profile.

A business profile legitimizes your Instagram account and enables you to add critical information like your company’s business hours, location, and phone number.

Pros and Cons of an Instagram Business Profile

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might be thinking. “I don’t know how I feel about committing to all that.”

Here are some helpful pros and cons so you can determine if a business profile is right for you before jumping in:

Pros

• Access to metrics on how your posts and stories perform.
• Ability to track how your followers engage with your content.
• Access to features necessary to run ad campaigns.
• Gain feature for adding URLs to Stories so you can send warm traffic to your site.

Cons

• Being labeled as a business.
• May experience less organic reach and visibility.
• Must also have a Facebook account to access ad features.

For most brands, the benefits of a business profile outweigh the cons due to the additional features and analytics. However, it’s important to consider your goals before taking action.

How to Create a Business Instagram Profile

In order to create a business profile on Instagram, you must first create a personal Instagram account and then switch it to a business profile.

If you already have an Instagram account, skip to the next section for instructions on making the switch.

If you don’t already have an Instagram account, there are two ways to get one:

• From the computer
• From a mobile device (IOS and Android)

For detailed steps, check out our comprehensive article on how to create a business account on Instagram.

How to Switch to Your Business Profile

When you have an Instagram set up, follow these easy steps when you’re ready to make the switch:

1. Go to your profile on the mobile app and select the hamburger menu (three stacked horizontal bars) in the top right corner.

2. Scroll down to “Your insights and tools” and tap “Account type and tools.”

3. Under “Account type,” select “Switch to a professional account.”

4. Click “Continue” in the pop-up menu.

5. Select the best category descriptor for your account, like blogger or digital creator, then click “Done.”

You can also toggle the “Display on profile” button so the category you choose is visible to your profile visitors. The button is pictured below. 

And here’s what the button looks like on a profile:

6. Next, choose whether you’re a creator or a business. 

The descriptions under each type let you know what’s most applicable to you based on the category you chose. Once selected, click “Next.”

If you do not have a Facebook Business Page, you will need to create one before completing this step. If your Facebook page is already linked, move on to the next step.

7. Follow the prompts to continue setting up your account and customizing your profile. 

8. Select Done.

You’re now ready to begin implementing your social media strategy on Instagram.

From here, you’ll want to determine the audience you want to target, the aesthetic and tone you want to convey, and the content you want to create.

Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2024 [Data]

Here, we’ll review some of the top Instagram promotion tactics gleaned from our 2024 Instagram Engagement Report report.

Audience Interaction

Marketers’ primary goal on Instagram in 2024 is increasing engagement, so it makes sense that the most popular Instagram marketing strategy is interacting with audiences. 

Interacting with your audience offers so much more than just engagement. It helps build a sense of community with your followers and allows you to get to know them better.

Content Engagement

Audience interaction takes the #1 spot for the most popular strategy, but survey respondents say they plan to invest the most money in creating content that encourages engagement on the platform. 

What’s more is that 44% of marketers say that creating content that encourages engagement offers the highest ROI. 

Engagement on social media signals that your content is resonating with your audience. Whether it’s an in-feed post, a Story, or a live stream, engagement can be a great indicator of your page’s health.

Wondering how to make your content more engaging? Try creating content that champions your products/services. Our research shows that this type of content performs the best on the platform. 

You can also try the funny route. It offers the second-highest performance, which adds up because funny content tends to be relatable and usually gets someone to stop scrolling and pay attention. 

The format also influences engagement, with most marketers posting images more than anything else. Seventy percent of marketers surveyed post Images on the platform saying it has the highest ROI of all content formats. 

Videos are another effective tool, and the data shows that sharing video content brings in the most reach/impressions of all other formats.

Product Advertising

As Instagram shopping continues to grow, it’s no surprise that marketers’ #2 goal for 2024 is advertising their products/services. 

Our research shows that running advertisement campaigns is among the top five Instagram strategies, getting the most investment in 2024. And, as mentioned above, sharing content that showcases products/services offers the highest ROI of any content type 

Instagram shopping tools are still evolving, but 71% of social media marketers who sell products in the Instagram app say the features have high ROI. Most survey respondents also say that 25-50% of clicks on shoppable and linked posts lead to purchases. 

Over to You

Whatever your goal is, whether it’s increasing brand awareness or generating more revenue, using Instagram for business gets you one step closer to achieving it. While not all of Instagram’s tools will offer a high ROI, they are all worth trying to see what works best for your audience. 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

It’s no secret that AI is driving marketing industry growth. As a writer in the marketing industry, I’ve seen it myself.

AI can help with everything from brainstorming to content creation. But another marketing task that AI excels at? Personalization.

I’ve received plenty of personalized marketing assets, and it’s obvious when something uses surface-level personalization and when something is tailored to my specific interests and behaviors — and the latter always grabs my attention.

If you’re interested in using AI personalization in marketing to reach your customers, I put together this guide to help.

Table of Contents

• Why use AI for marketing personalization?
• Benefits of AI Personalization Marketing
• Challenges of AI Personalization Marketing
• Top 5 Use Cases for AI Personalization Marketing

Why use AI for marketing personalization?

In my experience, the biggest reason to use AI to personalize your marketing is that it enables you to scale your personalization efforts.

Marketers are no strangers to using marketing automation tools to personalize emails, generate leads, or set up workflows. Automation tools are great for streamlining recurring marketing tasks.

The difference with using AI for marketing personalization, however, is that AI is dynamic. AI can gather and interpret data, identify opportunities, and adapt to the data being presented.

This means that rather than being a tool to help streamline personalizations, AI can help you personalize your marketing on a deeper level.

Not only does personalization help increase sales, but 96% of marketers also say that a personalized experience increases the chances of buyers becoming repeat customers.

Benefits of AI Personalization Marketing

If you’re like most marketers I know, you already have reliable marketing automations set up. But if you’re curious about taking your automations up a notch, consider adding AI personalization into the mix.

According to marketers I spoke with, here are just a few of the benefits.

Personalization at Scale

According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 77% of marketers who use generative AI say it helps them create more personalized content. On top of that, 56% of those same marketers say their AI-generated content performs the same or better than their fully human-created content.

This demonstrates that AI isn’t a replacement for your current personalization efforts but rather a tool to help you scale them. When you provide the right prompts and have a clear vision of what kind of data you’re looking for, AI can help you reach more customers in a personalized way.

As James Brooks, marketer and founder of Journorobo, puts it: “AI gives us the opportunity to scale the unscalable.”

Brooks adds: “The key is using this creatively, thoughtfully, and putting the effort in upfront. If you put the effort in on the front end and create a great, thorough prompt, it will serve you for months or years to come, every day, on autopilot.”

Lauren Petrullo, CEO and founder of award-winning digital marketing agency Mongoose Media, adds to this sentiment: “The personalization that you can leverage with AI allows the consumer or the subscriber to feel like you’re talking to them one-on-one versus one-to-many,” she says.

Improved Marketing Automations

As I mentioned earlier, every marketer uses marketing automations to streamline their tasks. AI tools can improve your current automations by making them more intelligent and data-driven.

For example, say I have an automation that segments my target audience. AI can take that a step further by identifying patterns and predicting the behaviors of that audience.

This can help me make more informed marketing and business decisions.

Greater Customer Value

Finally, with greater personalization comes greater customer value.

The more details you have about your target audience, the more tailored your marketing will be. This results in them receiving more value than they would have through generic marketing tactics.

Challenges of AI Personalization Marketing

AI personalization tools are not without their flaws. Let’s break down a few of the challenges and how marketers can address them.

Crafting Prompts

The most common challenge I hear about when using AI — and have experienced myself — is with prompting.

AI is smart, but it’s still learning. In fact, most tools need time and a lot of practice (i.e., receiving prompts) to adjust to your voice, tone, and requests.

This can be a challenge when using AI for personalization. Brooks suggests being as specific as possible to generate better prompts:

“Look at a language learning model (LLM) as a person — a VERY intelligent and knowledgable person, but still a person,” he says.

“It cannot read your mind. Set very specific prompts. Tell the LLM exactly what you want: how you want them to write, what you want the outcome to be, how you want things formatted, what you do want, and what you don’t want.”

Technical Knowledge

Another challenge marketers may run into is having a lack of technical knowledge.

Marketing personalization at scale requires a bit more technical expertise than using ChatGPT, for instance.

You may need to understand APIs and have a deeper grasp of how AI works to create personalization workflows and automatic outputs.

“Fortunately, with the rise in ‘no-code’ tools, it’s never been easier to tap into APIs and automate your marketing,” says Brooks.

“I recommend checking out tools like Make.com and Zapier that natively connect with your favorite marketing tools and AI platforms like OpenAI. A little YouTube-ing can also go a long way to learning this stuff.”

Top 5 Use Cases for AI Personalization Marketing

1. Email Marketing

Sending personalized emails is nothing new. We’ve all been on the receiving end of a marketing email that’s addressed to us, or one reminding us of the item we just viewed while online shopping.

But AI tools can help marketers take it up a notch.

You can use AI to gather customer details such as their birthday, hobbies, professional expertise, and even passions. Then, enter that information into an LLM before sending your marketing emails.

Doing this allows you to send emails that truly speak their language, suggests Brooks.

“You can do this in an automated way using various no-code tools,” he says. “Personally, I use Bento for my emails. “It can make an API call for each email it sends out, meaning that you can send unique emails, per person, even if you are effectively sending a ‘Broadcast’ to thousands of people.”

2. Thought Leadership

Yes, you can use AI to identify thought leadership opportunities.

Let me explain.

As I was researching use cases for this article, I turned to X to ask marketers for examples of how they use AI for personalization.

Image Source

This tweet is how I connected with Brooks, the founder of Journorobo.

He was notified of my tweet through his AI tool, which looks for journalist requests (like the one I shared) and cross-references its user database to send personalized emails to users who match the request.

It even provides recommended talking points based on the users’ bio.

Using AI tools like this one can help marketers discover thought leadership and PR opportunities instantly.

Rather than waiting around for a journalist to reach out and cover your company or interview your marketing leaders, you can be proactive with your thought leadership strategy.

Pro tip: AI can help you jump on an opportunity way before your competition, too. Brooks was one of the first people to respond to my request, and I have no doubt he was able to get ahead because of the personalized AI email he received.

3. Chatbots

AI can also be used to personalize your chatbots.

Whether you have one set up on your website or for Facebook or Instagram, chatbots are essential for personalizing customer interactions.

You can use AI to create a customizable chatbot, like this one from HubSpot, to scale customer support, generate leads, and book more meetings.

An AI chatbot streamlines this process and, thanks to its dynamic memory and adaptability, makes the conversation even more personal.

“AI provides a memory of the conversation that you can incorporate into future messages,” says Petrullo. “You can also have AI read the tonality of someone’s responses, allowing you to respond at the energy level that someone is inputting.”

4. Landing Pages

Another great opportunity to use AI is for programmatic SEO.

Programmatic SEO involves creating landing pages (usually hundreds, sometimes thousands) to automatically target keywords. This process is done in bulk, which means it can take hundreds of hours if you were to do it manually.

AI can help you do this at scale. You can use AI to create hundreds of programmatic landing pages that meet search terms based on industry or location.

Upwork is a great example of this. You can search for any type of freelance service in any city, and Upwork will have a landing page. For example, I searched for “freelance graphic designers Austin,” and this is what showed up.

Image Source

I then searched for “freelance copywriter los angeles,” on Google and an identical landing page from Upwork showed up in the results.

“I‘ve got websites with broad audiences with many different niche interests,” says Brooks. “I’ve used AI to build thousands of landing pages that speak very directly to those niche audiences, making relevant cultural references and using the colloquial language of those niches (even if I know nothing about them!).”

5. Localization and Translation

If you’re expanding into international markets, you can use AI to localize your content by translating it into different languages for your various target markets.

This can be done for programmatic landing pages, as mentioned above. You can also localize ads, product marketing assets, and SEO content.

You don’t necessarily need to be expanding to different countries to take advantage of localization. If your audience is global and you want to personalize the ads or landing pages to their language, AI can automatically translate for you.

It can take years for someone on your team to learn a new language to the point where they can translate marketing content. Even if you have translators on your team, it’s difficult to scale personalized content when you’re manually translating.

“While AI is not equipped to do full empathy mapping and empathy matching, it does have a strong command of language,” says Petrullo. “You can use it as an intersection of common language at scale.”

Scale Your Marketing Personalization With AI

After speaking with marketers and researching different use cases for AI for marketing personalization, my biggest takeaway is that it’s essential if you want to scale.

Personalizing your marketing efforts goes beyond addressing your audience by name in emails. Marketing personalization is about getting to know your customers on a deeper level.

It’s about understanding their interests, behaviors, and how they speak so you can market your products or services in a way that resonates with them more.

Using AI personalization in your marketing means being more data-driven. AI tools will help you identify marketing opportunities, predict customer behaviors, localize your content, and tailor your messaging.

And if you want to do this at scale, employing AI is a must.

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

Technology offers new ways to communicate, but real human interaction remains the cornerstone of building trust and fostering genuine relationships.

This is where event organizers play a crucial role — not just in coordinating logistics or securing speakers, but in creating environments that encourage meaningful connections among attendees.

From industry conferences to corporate retreats, the true measure of an event’s success is often found in the connections made and relationships built.

By intentionally designing spaces and experiences that foster authentic interaction, event organizers hold the key to transforming a standard event into a catalyst for personal and professional growth.

Now more than ever, facilitating these connections isn’t just a bonus — it’s a necessity for attendees seeking value beyond the agenda.

Although technological advances often take center stage, nothing beats connecting with people IRL. We’re literally wired for community and deep human connection remains the cornerstone of building trust and an activated community.

In a time when people are feeling lonelier than ever before, event marketers are tasked with creating and nurturing an environment that fosters authentic connections.

Intentionality is key in designing experiences and spaces and event organizers can reimagine what it means to build an event that provides deep value and resonates with attendees in a meaningful way.

Maya Angelo said it best, “People remember how you made them feel” and when people leave events, having made meaningful connections — it’s an incredible feeling. Here are three ways marketers can nurture connections at their events to create connections and form lasting relationships.

Relationship Cultivation Strategies For Your Next Event

1. Create Both Structured + Passive Networking Opportunities

Remember the first day of school? Your teacher likely had some sort of ice-breaker activity set up that each student was required to participate in. Perhaps it was two truths and a lie or the classic ‘fun fact’ reveal.

We all rolled our eyes but secretly, we loved it. Why? These structured activities established common ground, leveled the playing field, and took the edge off having to make cold introductions. Because we all had to participate, there was a veil of safety that surrounded us.

Structured Networking Opportunities or “Icebreakers” alleviate the awkwardness and social discomfort that come from being in unfamiliar places and meeting new people for the first time.

Examples of structured networking include themed bingo cards, fun prompts that categorize people into small groups, and hot-take questions that guests will likely have an opinion on.

In addition to setting the tone with structured networking opportunities, it’s also great to create space for more passive ways for people to connect.

Too much structure can feel rigid and stale so spice things up with activities that attendees can interact with on their own time. These activities catalyze meet-cutes and people love a reason to find commonality.

At CultureCon, we love sprinkling passive meet-cute opportunities all around the campus — from the ‘Leave Your Fears’ wall where attendees can leave any limiting beliefs on the wall and take an affirmation with them to our “What Are You Working On” monument — a large scale passive activation where guests can share what projects they are currently enjoying and others can add how they can support the effort in their own way.

From film projects to job hires — tons of connections have been made from the “What Are You Working On” wall!

2. Prioritize Play

I’m not sure exactly when it happens, but as we venture into adulthood — play fades into the background. As if there is an age limit on it, we lean into our careers and responsibilities and put the idea of play on a shelf.

However, prioritizing play as an adult is incredibly essential. Play isn’t only a childhood playtime, it offers amazing benefits that can increase creativity, productivity, and imagination. Play invites guests to tap into their inner child by encouraging spontaneity and refusing the notion of taking oneself too seriously.

We can suspend the realities of adulthood and instead, lean into joy and novelty.

Remember when we talked about the importance of making people “feel?”

Playtime activates the release of endorphins, reducing stress and overall improving your mood. For attendees who are constantly prioritizing work and life stress, inviting them to be playful at your event can nurture their inner child, invite curiosity, and lay a strong foundation for connection.

You can infuse play into your event in a myriad of ways. One of my favorite techniques is to ask 9-year-old Imani what she would like to do at this event. Sometimes she answers, “A bingo card would be fun” or “What if you had a coloring station?”

Play is inherently social. Whether creating friendship bracelets or coloring — playful interactions deepen relationships and help strengthen social bonds. Play fosters a sense of belonging and happiness. It’s absolutely necessary to facilitate an event where you want attendees to leave feeling seen and valued.

Trust me when I say your guests will be so surprised to see the juxtaposition of an adult event prioritizing the needs of their inner child. The result? An event steeped in joy and connection.

3. Bookend Your Programming with Free Time

Although it can be tempting to prioritize time to mingle at the top of the event as guests settle, event marketers should also leave ample time post-programming for guests to connect.

There’s nothing worse than finally settling into an event — ready to say your first hello and having it end abruptly, just as you’ve gotten comfortable.

People are usually more ready to connect post-event so as you plan out the run of show, sprinkle in coffee and networking breaks at the top, middle, and end of the event to allow guests to connect throughout the day.

This will allow guests to dip their toes in the water throughout the event and enjoy all of those passive activities you’ve created.

If you are planning a tighter event like a dinner, versus an all-day conference, think about planning out breathing room at the top of the event with a cocktail hour and time post-dinner for photos, smaller-group chats, and connection-building.

I’m so excited for you to use these strategies as you look to infuse your event with mindfulness and encourage your attendees to leave more connected than when they came!

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

A habit that has woven itself through many facets of my life, like parenthood, my health, and entrepreneurship, is a consistent check-in I like to do with how I’m growing.

I often call it a ‘life inventory’ where I scoop up everything I’m working on, learning, and feeling, and ask myself about what’s going well and what needs to shift.

Inevitably, I spend a little bit of my check-in time wandering back down memory lane to the beginning stages of starting my business. With over a decade’s worth of experience, successes, trials, and a whole lot of teachable moments, it’s normal to wonder what I might’ve done differently if I knew then what I know now.

While I could wax poetic about all the things I wish I could share with my 20-something self, the advice I would give for starting my business is rather simple.

‘Keeping it simple’ might be the best way to summarize what I’ve learned about almost everything in life. So, take a step back with me to those early days while I share what I’d do first, without overthinking, if I was starting my business over today.

Maybe you’re looking for a fresh start in your business or a little insight from a seasoned entrepreneur as you start on your own business journey. I hope this advice helps not only give you that clearer starting line you’re looking for but also combats that pressure to start perfectly.

I know you want to mitigate risk and avoid as many pitfalls as possible. But the learning curve is part of the journey. In the meantime, let these five insights guide your vision and keep that process as light, fun, and adventurous as possible!

The First Things I’d Do If Starting My Business Over

1. Start an email list.

Starting an email list has to be my first piece of advice for you because I cannot count how often I’ve guided new business owners and entrepreneurs to do this over the years.

I learned how much easier growing a business can be when you don’t have to count on platforms you don’t own and can’t control to deliver your valuable messages to the people you’re creating for.

While social media is important it can also be a space where you waste time, money, and creative energy trying to engage your audience that lives on the other side of a strict, ever-changing social media algorithm.

My advice? Start an email list as soon as possible before any of those resources are spent in places that won’t deliver tangible results. A nurtured email list means you’re showing up in the inboxes of people who want to hear from you, buy from you, and stick around for your stories and growth.

On social media, they might tap that follow button, but from there, they might not see your content for weeks, months, or even years.

And unlike your social media pages, your email list isn’t one hacking incident away from being totally erased, it’s an asset that you own. That’s a powerful difference from what any other platform can offer you online.

As you create new offers (paid or free), you’re able to see if what you’re serving up is irresistible enough for people to want to exchange their email addresses for it. As a new business owner, this is an easy, free way to start gauging what your audience wants most from you.

2. Find a mentor.

Mentorship can feel like a big move for a new business owner … with an even bigger price tag. We crave answers and guidance in the beginning, but usually with a beginner budget, we tend to keep mentorship on the back burner.

I spent a little too much time piecing together my own plan out of stubbornness and feeling like I needed to earn all my advice.

But, as someone who eventually would become a mentor to many, I realized how much mentors want to give their advice to newbies! And not all mentorship needs to be one-on-one or costly. There are mentorship opportunities all around us if we know where to look.

First, look for free learning pathways. Tune into a podcast, like Goal Digger, my business and marketing podcast, where I share not only what I’m learning in business but open up conversations with amazing thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to pull out their insight, too.

Plus, I even drop episodes that are live mentorship and coaching sessions with all kinds of people who are at their own starting lines or turning points in business.

Learning from other leaders who inspire you can also be as easy as taking a digital course. They can teach you through their course that can come at a more accessible price point while delivering their brilliance right to your screen.

Find someone who’s gone before you and is doing something similar to what you want to do or how you want to do it. Look for people who align with the kind of business owner you want to become. If they have a course, take it. If they have a book, read it. If they host live classes or have an online community, grab a seat.

Eventually, whenever you’re ready, you might even go out on a limb and ask them to mentor you in whatever capacity they can. You might just land your dream mentor!

3. Share your focus and goals.

This can be a tough part of starting a business because the pressure to be impressive or show off our success can keep us from showing the building process.

The journey doesn’t always look ‘pretty’, and it can be tempting to hide those parts (like when we clean up our entire house before the house cleaner comes over.)

But looking back, I regret those moments when I hid my learning process, waiting for everything to be ‘perfect,’ keeping me from growth because when is anything ever perfect? Letting people in on my journey is when my business completely shifted and growth started building in huge waves.

My audience responded to these seemingly messy or incomplete glimpses into my process with a resounding “This is so real!” We related on a whole new level and more people wanted to work with me, trust me as a client, and buy into my new offers.

Beyond ‘being relatable’, here’s why sharing your process and focus is so effective: you want your offers to make sense to the people you’re making them for. The only way they’re going to get the clearest picture of your offer is to let them in long before you finally share the ‘tada!’ moment.

Surprise drives way less results than anticipation. Show your people what you’re working on and allow them to support and champion you!

4. Get clear on your brand vision.

Starting your business is already a massively pride-worthy moment.

I was so proud to finally get out of my corporate, windowless office and launch into my career as a photographer and then as a digital marketer, but what I needed to get grounded with was my brand. Early on, I genuinely didn’t know the difference between my business and my brand.

An easy way to boil it down is that your business is simply your offer. It’s the solution you give your clients, the service you sell, the products you produce! But your brand is your personality behind every offer, service, and product. Sure, Audi makes cars, but how a person sells them makes all the difference, right?

From your social media, your website, your ads, your blogs, and everywhere else you show up online, your personality should be visible. Don’t hide behind your offers or think that they speak for themselves.

In fact, you’re their best advocate. Your excitement and confidence in what you’ve created is what resonates with your audience!

Your personality can show up long before you even have something to sell. Think about how you show up on social media.

• Do you know why you’re posting or creating?
• When you take a step back, is your brand vision clear with everything you post?
• Can you see your own unique perspective, flavor, and approach woven into your captions and images?

If you’re struggling here, I’ve coined a social content approach called the JK5 that might help keep your creative flow simple.

Every time you go to create a post, choose one from your five unique content pillars that guide your content creation and show your brand personality to your followers. It could be parenthood, pets, style, interior design, poetry, or anything that shows who YOU are!

If you want to learn more about the JK5 and your brand pillars, listen to this episode of my podcast!

5. Choose your tools wisely.

I learned this analogy through my experience as a photographer, juggling a variety of lenses in my camera bag. I felt this pressure when I was just starting out to have every single lens for every possible scenario.

As my business grew, I bought new lenses but learned that there were just a few that I would reach for over and over again. I didn’t need all the shiny tools right away, and in many cases, never needed them at all.

When you’re just starting your business, you’ll probably be inundated by all the options for the best tools and platforms out there. It’ll make your head spin.

But most of them aren’t necessary for what you need on day one. You don’t have to spend your time and money merely looking like a business when that could easily distract you from being able to do the real work.

Take a few steps back and analyze what your biggest needs are. Differentiate between the ‘nice to haves’ and the ‘need to haves’ to keep your growth moving forward.

A key to helping yourself know the difference is by looking at the tasks that are already on your to-do list vs the ones that you’re looking forward to doing in the future.

For instance, you might need to invest in accounting software before the bells and whistles for your website. In fact, I’ll fully admit that I didn’t have a real branded, designer-made logo until THIS year.

You can go farther than you ever imagined with much less than you think!

Honor Your Own Journey

Overall, the biggest surprise to me is that I don’t actually want to redo any of it.

As someone who takes so much joy in the learning process itself, it’s only through the hiccups, the guesses, the mistakes, and the early days that I was able to awaken the unrelenting life-long learner and educator in me.

My learning journey is the only reason I can have hindsight enough to meet people at their starting lines or messy middles and be able to help them skip some of the confusion. I love helping smooth out the starting lines.

You’re so much more capable of amazing things than you might know, so any chance I get to help people like you get there is a joy.

So, while these are in some ways insights born out of moments of ‘regret,’ I would say I have a much greater appreciation for them as transformative experiences.

Honor your own flubs and challenges along the way! They’ve not only helped YOU become who you are and the skills you carry, but they’re also a pathway for you to help others make it through the mess as we’re all out here just trying to figure it out as we go.

Happy fall, MiM-ers! Grab your pumpkin-spiced latte, settle in with Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and get ready to hear from a paid marketer who’s all-in on influencers, storytelling, and AI-targeted ads.

(I’m sorry I can’t offer up a more recent fall-inspired album. To be fair, I’m still obsessed with my “Summer 2019” mix.)

Keep reading to learn why Zapier’s head of paid ads thinks the golden age of paid ads is over. 

1. Fully embrace the influencer buzz. 

James de Feu says the golden age of paid advertising is over. And he’s okay with it. 

He’s also the manager of paid ads at Zapier. 

(I’m currently imagining Mad Men’s Don Draper rolling over in his TV grave.)

De Feu is so confident about influencer marketing that he negotiated to bring it under his paid ads team. He succeeded because, moving forward, “we see that as our brand motion.” 

In fact, when I asked how he’d spend a hypothetical $1k, de Feu tells me he’d put a hefty 40% into influencers. 

But don’t delete your Google Ads account just yet. De Feu says he’d still give 50% of that hypothetical budget to paid ads. (The other 10% would go to SEO, if you got stuck trying to add this up to 100.) 

As he acknowledges, “Paid ads will always be on, and we’ll still spend a ton of money there. But paid ads live and die in that spending month. It’s not getting us the reach it once did.”

That’s why de Feu isn’t putting all his eggs in one basket. Paid is still a good egg (err-basket?), but he’s excited to seek out influencers who thrive on the same platforms where Zapier’s customers hang out. 

“I smirked when you mentioned influencers, because that’s the name of the game — even for those of us in the B2B space,” he tells me. “It’s no longer just about glossy teenage products anymore.”

2. Storytelling is the bread and butter of marketing.

“In the world of paid ads, we get fixated on one single, siloed experience, and we just keep trying to optimize it until it’s perfect,” de Feu says. “But one thing we’ve learned is that storytelling is huge.” 

“Storytelling is huge” is exactly the same pitch I gave my parents when I was trying to convince them that majoring in creative writing was a sound financial decision — but de Feu isn’t wrong. If there’s one truth that remains consistent in the world of marketing, it’s that humans have always, and will always, love a good story.  

“Stretching something out, building a story, creating use cases, highlighting testimonials — I let go of that over the past couple of years, and I’m just grateful now that we’ve reset ourselves. Storytelling has always been, and will continue to be, our superpower as marketers.” 

So if you’re unsure of where to start in the world of paid ads, try this: Talk to your customers, learn their pain points, and then communicate your solutions through a good ole-fashioned tale. 

3. Get used to cha-cha-changes. 

David Bowie preached it: You’ve got to keep up with all the changes happening in the advertising industry or risk throwing precious cash down the drain. (Those are the lyrics, right?)

For de Feu, that means doing tons of tests to learn how to use AI to personalize Zapier’s ads — not just in creating assets, but in audience targeting, too. 

“You have to be really on top of all these recent changes or you’ll end up wasting money,” he says. 

An example could be an athletic brand that uses AI to target yoga apparel ads to their vinyasa-loving consumers while ensuring their golf apparel is sent to every guy on Wall Street. 

In other words: The future of ads will look a lot more like high-intent, targeted content, and less like the generic, all-purpose ads we’ve come to know and hate. 

I remember my first day at HubSpot. I was so nervous and had a million concerns swimming around in my head. How long will it take for me to get the hang of things? Can I manage my workload and connect with my coworkers?

Fortunately, my outstanding manager at the time prepared a comprehensive checklist that followed the rhythm of a typical 30-60-90 day plan. It helped me slowly but steadily adapt to HubSpot.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m a rockstar at my job.

To help set your new employee, or yourself, up for success, here’s what you need to know about crafting the best 30-60-90 day plan.

Table of Contents

• What is a 30-60-90 day plan?
• Benefits of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

• When To Make a 30-60-90 Day Plan
• How long should a 30-60-90 day plan be?
• Parts of a 30-60-90 Day Plan
• How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan
  • For Managers
  • For Executives
• 30-60-90 Day Plan Template
• 30-60-90 Day Plan Examples
  • For Team Leaders
  • For Marketing Strategists

A good plan is imperative to the success of a new employee. I know because my onboarding plan helped me set and reach attainable goals and acclimate to my new position.

One of the many benefits, I’d say. Here are a few more.

Benefits of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

“No one likes showing up to their first day of work wondering what they‘re supposed to be doing or how they should fill the time between onboarding meetings,” says HubSpot’s Senior Manager of Content Meg Prater.

She’s also my former manager.

Prater continues, “A solid plan gives folks a North Star to return to, with readings they can move through during slow periods, colleagues to meet, and training they‘ll receive. Setting clear expectations from an employee’s first day on your team ensures you’re both on the same page and their first few weeks on your team are streamlined and focused.”

And I totally agree. A 30-60-90 day plan helps you:

• Define the parameters of what success looks like for the role
• Outline expectations and drive focus in those key areas
• Empower new employees to effectively manage their workload

Learning the nuances of your new role in less than three months isn’t always easy. But crafting a strong 30-60-90 day plan is your best bet for accelerating your development and adapting to your new work environment as quickly as possible.

When To Make a 30-60-90 Day Plan

You‘d write a 30-60-90 day plan in two situations: during the final stages of an interview and the first week of the job. More on each scenario below.

30-60-90 Day Plan for Interview

Some hiring managers ask candidates to think about and explain their potential 30-60-90 day plan as a new hire.

As a candidate, this confused me at times in the past. But I now understand they just want to see if a potential hire can organize their time, prioritize and anticipate their tasks, and strategize an approach based on the job description.

A well-thought-out 30-60-90 day plan is a great way to help hiring managers visualize you in the role. But how can you outline your goals before accepting a new job? How are you supposed to know what those goals are?

I’ve found that starting with the job description is an excellent stepping stone.

Typically, open job listings have separate sections for a job‘s responsibilities and a job’s qualifications. I recommend working to find commonalities in these two sections and turning those into goals for yourself.

Then, stagger those goals over three months.

For example, let‘s say a job requires three years of experience in Google Analytics, and the responsibilities include tracking the company’s website performance every month.

I would use these points to develop an action plan explaining how:

• I‘ll learn the company’s key performance metrics (first 30 days)
• I’ll strengthen the company’s performance in these metrics (next 30 days)
• I’ll lead the team toward a better Google Analytics strategy (last 30 days)

30-60-90 Day Plan for New Job

The second situation where you‘d write a 30-60-90 day plan is during the first week of a new job, which I highly recommend whether you’re a new employee or a manager working with a new hire.

If you’re the hiring manager, this plan will allow you to learn how the new employee operates, address their concerns or preconceived notions about the role, and ultimately help them succeed.

If you‘re starting a new job and are not asked to craft a 30-60-90 day plan during the first week, it’s still a good idea to write one for yourself.

When I start a new job, sometimes it feels like a completely foreign environment during the first few months. Having a plan in place makes me feel more at home.

Pro tip: Even though 90 days is the standard grace period for new employees to learn the ropes, it’s also the best time to make a great first impression — so use it wisely.

The purpose of your plan is to help you transition into your new role, but it should also be a catalyst for your career development.

Instead of just guiding you over your job’s learning curve, the goals outlined in your plan should push you to perform up to your potential and raise the bar for success at every stage.

Prater suggests having a solid template for your plan that allows it to evolve.

“Anytime I onboard someone, I review all training docs and ensure they‘re up to date,” she says. “I also ask for feedback from the folks on the team who have most recently been onboarded. What did they like? What didn’t work for them?”

She also says moving the plan to a more interactive platform proved to be helpful to new employees.

“One of the most helpful shifts we‘ve made recently is moving our 30-60-90 plan (or 100-Days Plan) from a static Google Doc to Asana,” she says.

“The plan is organized by week, and each task contains relevant readings and links. It’s much easier for folks to move through, and it gives me better insight into where folks are in the plan.”

Meg onboarded me when I started at HubSpot, and I can confirm that my checklist in Asana was a game-changer because it helped me stay on task and visually track my progress.

The checklist below isn‘t mine, but it’s one she set up and follows the same format as the one she created for me.

Parts of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

An effective 30-60-90 day plan consists of three extensive phases — one for days 1-30, one for days 31-60, and one for days 61-90.

Each phase has its own goal. For example, my main goal in the first 30 days of my current job was to learn as much as possible about my new job.

The following 30 focus on using learned skills to contribute, and the last 30 are about demonstrating skill mastery with metrics and taking the lead on new challenges.

Each phase also contains a primer, theme, and goals that help define the desired outcomes.

Primer

The primer is a general overview of what you hope to achieve during the current 30-day period.

I prefer sitting down with my manager to pinpoint a primer that aligns with my goals and desired company outcomes, and I encourage you to do the same.

This ensures you and your manager are on the same page about expectations early on.

Theme

The theme is a quick-hitter sentence or statement summarizing your goals for the period. For example, your theme might be to “find new opportunities,” “take initiative,” or “be a sponge.”

Learning Goals

Learning goals focus on skills you want to learn or improve to drive better outcomes at your job. For example, if you’re responsible for creating website content at your company, you should learn new HTML or CSS skills.

At the start of my career with HubSpot, some marketing trends and jargon were unfamiliar, and I wasn‘t used to the company’s writing style.

As a result, my learning goals as a new blogger were to become more well-versed in marketing and to adapt to HubSpot’s writing style.

Performance Goals

Performance goals speak to specific metrics that demonstrate improvement. These include making one more weekly content post or reducing the revisions management requires.

For example, I was only writing one article per week when I started HubSpot, but it was my performance goal to be able to write multiple articles by the end of 30 days.

Initiative Goals

Initiative goals are about thinking outside the box to discover other ways you can contribute. For me, this meant asking my manager about taking ownership of new blog project or experiment.

Personal Goals

Personal goals focus on company culture — are there ways you can improve relationships with your team members or demonstrate your willingness to contribute?

To reach my personal goal of building rapport with my team, I scheduled coffee chats to get to know my colleagues more closely throughout my onboarding period.

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan

No matter what job level a company is hiring, improving an employee’s skills requires concrete performance goals, so watch out for vagueness in the objectives you set for yourself.

“Writing a better blog post” or “getting better at brainstorming” are terrific ambitions, but they don‘t give you a way to measure your progress.

Set goals that are realistic, quantifiable, and focused. You’ll know exactly how to achieve them and gauge your success.

To write challenging yet feasible performance goals, you need to:

1. Understand your team’s goals.

Try to understand the purpose behind your team‘s goals. It’ll give you more insight into why you and your team should achieve them, motivating you to work as hard as possible to meet those goals.

2. Identify top priorities.

By connecting your responsibilities to your team‘s goals, you’ll know exactly how to align your tasks with the team’s needs, which keeps you accountable and compels you to help your team achieve its goals.

3. Define specific progress measurements.

Tracking your progress helps you gauge your performance and rate of improvement.

To see how you‘re doing, set up weekly meetings with your manager to ask what they think of your work and track the progress of your performance metrics, like the growth of your blog posts’ average views or the amount of qualified leads your eBooks generate.

My weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager were crucial to my success at HubSpot because I got constant feedback and tips on improving.

Reaching your performance goals is one of many paths toward future success in your new role.

You also need to study the ins and outs of your team and company, take the initiative, and develop relationships with coworkers — all things many new hires underestimate the importance of.

Consider setting the following types of goals during each stage of your 30-60-90-day plan:

• Learning Goals: How will you absorb as much information as possible about your company, team, and role?
• Initiative Goals: What will you do to stand out?
• Personal Goals: How will you integrate with your company and team?

Aiming to achieve these goals will help you hit the ground running in all the right areas of your job. And if you stick to your plan, you‘ll notice you’ll be able to spend less time learning and more time executing.

Prater also mentions the benefit of personalizing your 30-60-90 day plan so it’s tailored to your specific needs.

“I love when folks join the team and work with me to move deliverables around or add additional milestones to their plan,” she says. “This is a document meant to help you succeed, of course it will need to be different for each person who joins.”

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Managers

Almost all 30-60-90 day plans consist of a learning phase, a contributing phase, and a leading phase — which we’ll review in the example plan below. This includes plans that are designed to guide people in new management roles.

What sets apart a manager‘s plan from any other is their obligation to their direct reports and the decisions they’re trusted to make for the business.

If you’re accepting (or hiring for) a new manager role, consider any of the following goals and how to roll them out at a pace that sets you up for success.

Featured Resource: 30-60-90 Day Sales Onboarding Template

Download the Free Onboarding Template

Goal 1: Get to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

Everyone is learning the ropes in their first month at a company. For managers, much of that learning happens by talking to the team.

If you’re a new manager, grab time with your direct reports and get to know their roles. What do they like about them? What are their most significant pain points?

Making your team happy is a challenging goal, but it‘s an essential responsibility as a manager. Your first step is to figure out how you’ll manage and coach your employees through their day-to-day work.

Goal 2: Help a direct report acquire a new skill.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

Even though you‘re new to the company, you were hired for a reason: You’ve got skills. And you can bring these skills to the people you work with, particularly those who report to you.

After meeting with and learning about your new colleagues, you might use the second month of your onboarding plan to find skill gaps on your team that you can help fill.

Do you have expert-level experience with HubSpot, and your new company just started using HubSpot Marketing Hub? Teach them to do something on a platform they didn’t know before.

Goal 3: Improve the cost-effectiveness of your team’s budget.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

Managers often have access to (and control over) the budget for their department’s investments — software, office supplies, and new hires.

After you spend the first couple of months learning what the team spends its money on, consider using the final 30 days of your plan to make suggestions for new investments or how to reallocate money where you think it needs to be.

Is there a tool that can automate a task that‘s taking your team forever to do manually? Draft a financial strategy that includes this tool in the following quarter’s budget.

Goal 4: Draft a training strategy that can help guide your direct reports into new roles.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

You won‘t be expected to promote people in the first three months of your new job, but you should still have learned more about your team to decide who’s good at what and how to coach them to where they want to be.

In the final 30 days of your 30-60-90 day plan, you might agree to a goal to develop a training strategy that outlines how to manage your direct reports and, ultimately, how to guide them into new roles in the future.

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Executives

Executives are different from managers in that higher performance expectations come in. As an executive, you’ll need to be highly engaged with the organization from the first day and implement high-impact changes in your role as soon as possible.

At the same time, context is essential, and you’ll need to understand the culture, team, current operating processes, and challenges before you solve them.

Here are some critical steps to include in your 30-60-90 day plan in an executive role.

Goal 1: Soak up as much information as possible.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

It’s only a point in taking action with context, so start your ramp-up period by gathering information and charting the lay of the land.

That means reviewing existing documentation, attending as many meetings as possible, meeting with direct reports and skip levels, and asking many questions.

Goal 2: Create alignment between you and the team.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

You’ll meet new people in the first 30 days and understand their organizational roles. Ultimately, your job as an executive is to set the vision for the organization while removing roadblocks for your team as they strategize and execute it.

One of the best questions you can ask as you familiarize yourself and align with your team is, “In your opinion, what are some existing threats to our business (external or internal)?”

This shows you care about their opinion and trust their expertise while getting unique perspectives from multiple vantage points in the organization.

Plus, if you start hearing some of the same points from various team members, you can identify the most significant pains, equipping you to make the highest impact changes.

Goal 3: Identify the A players on the team.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

An A player is a member of your team that goes above and beyond what‘s expected in their role.

While not every employee will be an A player, you’ll want to ensure that critical roles and teams have at least one A player to lead, inspire, and strengthen camaraderie.

From there, you can figure out the existing gaps in staffing and training, whether it’s team members who need a lot of guidance and must be coached up to performance or empty roles that need to be filled altogether.

Goal 4: Create goals based on what you’ve learned.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

When interviewing or shortly after being hired, you’ll get a feel for the types of pains the executive team has and the objectives for bringing you on.

Once you have more context about how the organization works, you can translate this vision into concrete, measurable goals that will take your department to the next level.

Goal 5: Diagnose process issues.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

Companies of all sizes run into operational issues as they implement processes that are efficient and work at scale. Sometimes, when an executive team isn’t aligned with middle management, operations can become unwieldy.

Learn why things are done the way they are, and then figure out if there are workarounds you can implement to streamline operations. It’s as simple as eliminating bottlenecks or adding automation to specific functions.

Goal 6: Put together and implement a hiring plan.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

You know your A and B players, and you will have a plan to retain, invest in, and mentor them. However, you‘ll likely come across gaps you need to fill and positions that need to be created to eliminate bottlenecks.

From there, you’ll want to create a hiring plan to execute short-term, mid-term, and long-term needs.

Goal 7: Effect changes in operations.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

Speaking of bottlenecks, the final 30 days of your plan should be focusing on the areas of the business that can achieve the results the fastest.

Once you’ve identified these, you can focus on removing these roadblocks to start hitting goals and achieving higher performance.

Goal 8: Contribute to broader company goals.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

As an executive team member, you’ll also be looped in on high-level company initiatives, and the other company executives will be relying on you to contribute your deep discipline, expertise, and experience.

Be ready to lean in on executive meetings and contribute to the vision and strategy of the organization as it moves forward.

30-60-90 Day Plan Template

Free Download: 30-60-90 Day Plan Template

Download Your Free Template

HubSpot’s 30-60-90 day plan template includes space for all critical elements of your plan — primers, themes, and goals — making it easy for you and your manager to see exactly where you are in the plan, what comes next, and how things are going so far.

While our template is a great starting point, it‘s worth cross-referencing this high-level plan with a more detailed description of your goals and desired outcomes to ensure you’re aligned with company expectations.

30-60-90 Day Plan Example

We’ve created a quick 30-60-90 plan example for new employees using our template.

30 Days

Primer

Many new hires are eager to impress, so they dive head-first into their work or try to make suggestions about their team’s process with limited experience in how their new team operates. But have patience.

Understanding your company‘s vision and your team’s existing strategy is crucial for producing high-quality work and making an impact.

You need to know the purpose behind your role or the optimal way to perform to avoid missing the mark, and your early efforts won’t pay off how you expect them to.

It‘s always better to over-prepare than under-prepare. And it’s okay to take time to learn the ropes — it pays enormous dividends in the long run.

In the first 30 days of your employment, your priority is to be a sponge and soak in as much information as possible. Once you do that, you can try to improve more specific parts of your team’s work style.

Theme: Be a Sponge

Learning Goals

• Study my company’s mission, vision, and overarching strategy.
• Read my company’s culture code to learn more about our company culture and why we implement it.
• Read the customer persona and target audience overview to truly understand who our customers are, their pain points, and how our product and content can help them.
• Meet with my team’s director to learn how meeting our goals will help our business grow.
• Read up on our team’s new SEO strategy, editorial process, and traffic goals.
• Learn how to use the SEO Insights Report to plan and structure blog posts.
• Review my team’s pillar-cluster model overview and understand how to match posts to clusters.
• Meet with my manager to learn more about her expectations.

Performance Goals

• Complete new hire training and pass the test with a 90% or higher.
• Be able to write 3 blog posts per week.

Initiative Goals

• Run the Facebook Instant Article experiment that my manager recommended me to do.

Personal Goals

• Grab coffee with everyone on my team so I can get to know them professionally and personally.

60 Days

Primer

By the end of your first 60 days, you should ramp up your workload, start overachieving, and make a name for yourself on your team.

To do this, start speaking up more at meetings. Feel free to share your ideas about improving your team‘s processes.

This shows you’re quickly conquering the learning curve and recognizing some flaws your colleagues might have overlooked. You still have a fresh perspective on the company, so your insight is invaluable.

Theme: Be a Contributor

Learning Goals

• Learn how to optimize a new post from scratch based on the SEO Insights Report and my competitive research.
• Read every other marketing team’s wiki page to learn about different marketing initiatives and how our entire department works together to grow our business.
• Deep dive into my company’s product roadmap and strategy to fully grasp our mission and vision.

Performance Goals

• Be able to write 5 blog posts per week.
• Be down to one cycle of edits per post.
• Understand how to edit a guest post — clean up at least one rough draft.

Initiative Goals

• Share content strategy ideas at my team’s monthly meeting and ask if I can spearhead the project to boost blog traffic.
• Ask my manager if I can oversee Facebook Messenger and Slack distribution strategy.

Personal Goals

• Meet with colleagues on other teams to learn about their marketing initiatives and develop relationships outside my unit.

90 Days

Primer

By the end of your first three months, you should have a firm grasp of your role, feel confident about your abilities, and be on the cusp of making a breakthrough contribution to your team.

Instead of reacting to problems that pop up at random, be proactive and spearhead a new initiative for your team.

You should also know how to collaborate with other teams to improve your processes. By taking on some new projects outside of your primary role, you’ll start turning some heads and catching the attention of the department at large.

Theme: Be a Leader

Learning Goals

• Analyze my highest and lowest-performing blog posts to date. How can I use this information to optimize new content to perform better out of the gate?

Performance Goals

• Be comfortable with writing five blog posts per week
• Edit one guest post per week
• Try to have 75% of my blog posts not require revisions.
• Write at least one new post that generates over 10,000 views in one month.

Initiative Goals

• Ask the SEO team if they want to partner with the product marketing team to brainstorm content topics related to our product roadmap.
• Ask the social media team if they‘re willing to develop a relationship where we can share each other’s content.
• Ask the sales team what our customer’s pain points are so we can write content that our target audience craves and help them close more qualified leads.

Personal Goals

Join the yoga club.

30-60-90 Day Plan Team Leader Example

Let’s apply that template to a team leader role with another 30-60-90 plan example.

30 Days

Primer

During the first 30 days, the goal of a team leader should be to cultivate connections with their team members and discover where they excel, where they struggle, and where they could use help.

Creating these relationships lays the foundation for solid communication over time, leading to better results.

Theme: Cultivate Staff Connections

Learning Goals

• Identify strengths for all team members.
• Pinpoint current challenges in accomplishing team goals.
• Encourage staff connections through honest communication.

Performance Goals

• Reduce project completion times by 25 percent.
• Increase team member output by 5 percent.

Initiative Goals

• Establish a mentorship connection with one staff member looking to advance.

Personal Goals

• Arrange one out-of-work activity for staff.

60 Days

Primer

For the second month, team leaders should focus on putting the connections they’ve made to good use and creating a mindset of success across the department.

This means establishing clear goals and specific metrics and working alongside staff to deliver critical outcomes.

Theme: Create a Culture of Success

Learning Goals

• Understand where previous team leaders have struggled.
• Identify common themes in goals not being met.
• Clearly define starting points, milestones, and end goals for projects.

Performance Goals

• Ensure current project deadlines are met.
• Deliver at least one project component ahead of schedule.
• Take ownership of one complex task to continue developing team culture.

Initiative Goals

• Based on current project goals, brainstorm two new potential projects.
• Integrate current efforts with sales, marketing, or social media teams.

Personal Goals

• Make time for mindfulness practice at work to help improve your focus.

90 Days

Primer

The last month of your 30-60-90 plan may focus on ensuring the framework you’ve built can be replicated on the next team project and finding new opportunities for your team members to excel.

Theme: Identify New Opportunities

Learning Goals

• Convene with staff to see what worked and what didn’t during the project.
• Look for outcomes that exceed expectations and discover what sets them apart to help drive improved processes.

Performance Goals

• Become confident in assigning staff-specific tasks with minimal oversight.
• Create a regular performance review structure that focuses on helping staff achieve their best work.
• Identify areas for reasonable cost-savings that don’t disrupt current processes.

Initiative Goals

• Look for team members with a passion for leadership and encourage their growth.
• Transition into a more hands-off leadership style that demonstrates trust in employee autonomy.

Personal Goals

• Take up a new hobby to avoid getting burned out at work.

30-60-90 Day Plan Marketing Strategist Example

Let’s apply that template to a marketing strategist role with another 30-60-90 plan example.

30 Days

Primer

During the first 30 days, the marketing strategist will analyze current campaign performance to discover what works, what doesn’t, and how strategy can be improved.

The marketing strategist will also work with team members and stakeholders to learn about existing processes. Investigating performance lays the foundation for how strategy can improve in the future.

Theme: Analyze Current Performance

Learning Goals

• Get familiar with the company’s product, mission, positioning, and goals.
• Consult with stakeholders to discuss existing processes, tools, and buyer personas.
• Learn about completed and ongoing experiments and their results.

Performance Goals

• Conduct content audits and competitor analyses to uncover performance gaps.

Initiative Goals

• Meet with sales reps, account managers, and customer support team members to learn more about customer wants and needs.

Personal Goals

• Get lunch with new team members to get to know them better.

60 Days

Primer

By day 60, the marketing strategist will have identified performance gaps based on the work done during the first 30 days and begun work on brainstorming ways to close those gaps.

Theme: Identify Performance Gaps

Learning Goals

• Research and brainstorm potential new processes that will help improve performance gaps.

Performance Goals

• Identify improvement areas based on the performance audits and competitive analysis results.

Initiative Goals

• Meet with the finance team to discuss the budget for new marketing experiments and initiatives.
• Deliver an experiment proposal to improve one of the gaps found during the audits.

Personal Goals

• Join an interest-based Slack channel to connect with colleagues on other teams.

90 Days

Primer

For the third month, marketing strategists may focus on ensuring the research framework they’ve built can be replicated for new projects and launch experiments to close performance gaps.

Theme: Launch New Experiments

Learning Goals

• Identify performance outcomes that exceed expectations and see what sets them apart from results that do not exceed expectations.

Performance Goals

• Develop a system for measuring and analyzing campaign performance.

Initiative Goals

• Launch a new experiment to help close a performance gap discovered during earlier analyses.

Personal Goals

• Join an interest-based Slack channel to connect with colleagues on other teams.

Making the Most of Your First Months

During the first few months at a new job, I always ask myself the following questions: Is the company a good fit? Can I meet (and exceed) expectations? What does my long-term career plan look like?

Over the years, I’ve learned building a robust 30-60-90 day plan can take some of the pressure off by providing a framework for success that combines big ideas with specific goals to help drive success.

If a 30-60-90 (or 100) day plan worked for me, I’m confident it will benefit you too.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Over the last decade, I’ve helped set and track marketing goals for B2B businesses of all kinds — And I’ve come to think of them more as destinations.

They’re points on the map your team wants to reach. And B2B marketing KPIs (key performance indicators)? Well, they’re how you measure how far you’ve gone and just how far you have left.

You can measure trips in miles, hours, or even how many Spotify playlists you’ve gone through. Similarly, there are dozens of KPIs to measure progress toward our marketing goals — but don’t worry; there’s no need to guess and check.

Regardless of industry or audience, there are some KPIs everyone should be tracking, and I’ve compiled them for you here. We’ll define them, why they’re important, and how to track them effectively.

Table of Contents

• What are B2B marketing KPIs?

• Why track B2B Marketing KPIs and metrics?

• B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

• How to Report Your B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

What are B2B marketing KPIs?

As HubSpot contributor Rebecca Riserbato explains, a key performance indicator (KPI) “measures how your company is performing regarding certain long-term goals or objectives.”

That means B2B marketing KPIs are data points marketers use to monitor and measure the progress of their business-to-business (B2B) marketing initiatives (e.g., website campaigns or email marketing).

It kind of sounds like a metric, doesn’t it? But — plot twist — they’re not the same.

B2B Marketing KPIs vs. B2B Marketing Metrics

Every time I’ve set marketing goals, I’ve needed a refresher on the difference between marketing KPIs and metrics. Many people even use them interchangeably, but this is a little misguided.

KPIs and metrics are similar and work together but have very different responsibilities — like sales and marketing, design and development, or forks and spoons.

Image Source

KPIs are focused on the big picture. They relate directly to your business’s larger long-term goals and are the same across departments.

Metrics are related to business goals, too, but they zero in on specific tactics and initiatives used to accomplish them and tend to change by department.

To use our travel example again, your KPI could be visiting all of Italy in a month. However, your metrics would be tracking individual cities or regions you need to visit to accomplish that.

Thinking of business: say you want to increase your number of new customers by 25% this year. That’s your KPI.

Your marketing metrics would be the click-through rate of the social media ads you run to try to generate new leads or the open rate of the email campaigns you run.

But why do we even need to track any of these things?

Why track B2B marketing KPIs and metrics?

Simply put, B2B marketing KPIs tell you what your team is working toward and where everything it does needs to lead. They give you direction.

They help guide your strategy by giving you something to point to and ask, “Is this going to help get us to that goal?”

Marketing metrics go even further. These measurements can help you:

• Track progress toward your goals
• Gather customer/audience insights
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your work/creative
• Improve conversion rates
• Plan more effective future campaigns
• Prove return on investment (ROI)
• Incentivize teams
• Make better business decisions

I’ve always liked to say that marketing is a happy marriage of creativity — and science and metrics are the keys to this.

B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics to Track

Now that you know why tracking B2B marketing KPIs and metrics is important, which ones should you focus on?

Specifics will depend on your organization’s specific campaigns and company goals, but here are 24 of the most important based on some of the most popular marketing initiatives.

Need help tracking your KPIs? HubSpot’s KPI Software can help you build dashboards, create and send automated reports, and track KPIs to measure your teams’ performance and drive improvement over time.

Website Performance KPIs and Metrics

According to our 2024 State of Marketing report, company websites/blogs/SEO have resulted in the biggest ROI for marketers in the past year, which likely comes as no surprise.

For many, your website is the center of all your content marketing and even sales. Website KPIs and metrics help you make sure it’s performing to the level you need it to.

1. Website Traffic: This is the volume of users visiting a website.

Why is it important? Your company website is the hub of many modern businesses. Even if it’s not where people are making actual purchases, it’s where they come to learn more about what you do and often even initiate sales conversations.

Understanding traffic helps you gauge interest and potential for sales activity. In terms of specific metrics, you can track:

• Unique Visits: Total number of unique individuals who click on one or more web pages in a visit.
• Page Views: Total number of web pages viewed, including individually refreshed pages.
• Traffic Source: Where your website visitors come from (i.e., email, social media, search engine)

How to calculate and track it? You can track your website traffic through a number of different tools. In my experience, a combination of HubSpot Analytics and Google Analytics is most effective for businesses using HubSpot tools.

In HubSpot, you can easily view your page views and sessions filtered by time frame or source.

2. Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of website visitors that click on one page and leave.

Why is it important? Bounce rate can help you gauge if your website is delivering what it needs to achieve your goals. If your bounce rate is low, that could mean that people are interested and engaged in your website.

They’re staying and clicking around.

If it’s high, it could mean either your website is not what someone was looking for or didn’t deliver what they wanted, or they immediately found what they needed and could leave.

How to calculate and track it? This is another KPI you can track for specific website pages, landing pages, and blogs in HubSpot. Here’s how it can appear in the analytics of a blog article.

3. Conversions: How many visitors took your desired action on your website, like subscribing to your newsletter or making a purchase.

(It’s also the most important marketing metric if you ask me.)

Why is it important? Leads and new contacts are fuel for your marketing and sales funnel. When someone fills out a form on your website, they’ve shown an active interest in what you offer and want to connect with your business.

It’s a crucial first action to put the rest of your marketing and nurturing activities into motion. People can convert on several different things, so this may mean tracking:

• Form Conversion Rate (or visit to form submission): This is the percentage of website visitors that submit a form. (Formula: Form conversion rate = (total form conversions / total visitors) x 100)
• Number of Form Submissions: This is how many times forms were submitted on your website.
• Number of New Contacts: How many new contacts has your website generated.
• Visit to New Contact: This is what percentage of visits to your website resulted in a new contact.

How to calculate and track it? HubSpot or any tool you use to host your forms or landing pages should provide you with calculated conversion rates automatically, but even if they don’t, you can calculate yours with this formula:

Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions /

Number of visitors (or submissions, clicks, etc.) x 100

Sales and Marketing Pipeline

Once someone fills out a form on your website, they enter your sales and marketing pipeline to be nurtured toward making a purchase.

63% of B2B marketers report tracking their marketing/sales funnel as KPIs and metrics, and with their direct correlation to revenue, they should be.

4. Number of Leads (or Leads In): This is the total number of contacts generated by your campaigns that could buy from you.

Why is it important? Similar to your number of new contacts, this tells you how many new people you have to nurture towards a purchase. However, they’re different in that these contacts have the qualities that signal it could turn into a customer.

Think of it this way: If you sell enterprise software, a college student could become a contact after downloading a report on your website for a class project, but they can’t buy from you. That said, they are a contact but not a lead.

How to calculate and track it? What criteria actually makes someone qualify as a lead is up to your business, but once you have that set, you can use HubSpot Lead Scoring to identify these contacts.

From there, you can create an active list in HubSpot to automatically segment these leads and keep an eye on the size of that list.

5. Cost Per Lead (CPL): This is the total number of dollars it takes to acquire a potential customer.

Why is it important? HubSpot’s Jay Fuchs explains, “Generally speaking, [CPL] is used to gauge the efficacy of individual campaigns — via channels like Google ads, email marketing, or social media — but it can also help you understand whether you’re getting the most out of your marketing spend as a whole.”

In other words, this can help you determine if your marketing campaign is cost-effective. If it costs more to bring in a lead than you’ll make off it, that campaign was not worth your time.

How to calculate and track it? You’ll need to calculate this on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Cost of Lead Generation/Total Number of Leads = Cost per Lead

Fuchs explains this formula in detail in “How to Calculate & Apply Cost per Lead (CPL).”

6. Close Rate (or Lead to Closing Rate): This is the percentage of leads that eventually become customers.

Why is it important? Your close rate can help gauge the quality of the leads you’re bringing in as well as your sales process.

If your close rate is high, things are going well. If not, you may need to re-evaluate your lead criteria or sales behavior.

How to calculate and track it? This is another KPI you’ll need to calculate on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Close Rate =

(number of leads that closed as sales / total number of leads) x 100

7. Number of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads): The number of leads engaged with your company’s marketing and have the potential to become a more serious prospect.

Why is it important? MQLs help your marketing team understand how many leads they’re bringing in and if they’re quality leads.

How to calculate and track it? Like number of leads, you can use a combination of HubSpot Lead Scoring, an active list in HubSpot, and workflows to automatically segment these leads and keep an eye on the size of that list. Learn more about MQLs.

8. Number of SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads): Number of prospective customers ready to talk to someone on your sales team.

Why is it important? SQLs have usually expressed enough interest in your product or service to be ready to move into your sales process. Tracking this number lets you know how many people your sales team is currently working with.

It also provides valuable insight into which marketing efforts generate the most sales activity.

How to calculate and track it? Once again, you can use a combination of HubSpot Lead Scoring, an active list in HubSpot, and workflows to automatically segment these SQLs and keep an eye on the size of that list. Learn more about SQLs.

Pro Tip: If your marketing and website are hosted on HubSpot, our Dashboard & Reporting software is a user-friendly, single source of truth for all this data.

9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The amount of money it takes to convert a potential lead into a customer.

Why is it important? Like CPL, CAC tells you how cost-efficient your marketing and sales processes are. You don’t want to be spending more on getting customers than you are making from them.

How to calculate and track it? Information from HubSpot can help guide this calculation, but ultimately, this is another you’ll need to calculate it on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

CAC = marketing spend/number of new customers resulting from campaign

10. Customer lifetime value (CLV): The total amount of revenue a business can expect to make from a single customer.

Why is it important? Knowing how much you’ll make from a customer is helpful when determining how much you can spend trying to close them. In other words, this is a useful metric to compare to CAC. If your CAC is higher than your LTV, you’re likely spending too much money acquiring customers and need to revisit your strategy.

The higher the CLV, the more valuable the customer from a financial standpoint.

How to calculate and track it? Calculate this KPI on your own or through a spreadsheet using the formula:

Customer lifetime value =

average transaction size x number of transactions x retention period

11. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): This is the amount of revenue a business receives from a customer each month, such as for a subscription-based service or consulting retainer.

Why is it important? This is how much money you are “guaranteed” to have each month from your customers. It allows you to plan budgets and make other financial predictions.

How to calculate and track it? Information from HubSpot can help guide this calculation, but ultimately, this is another you’ll need to calculate it on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Monthly recurring revenue =

average revenue per customer x total number of customers

12. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a measurement of customer satisfaction using a scale of 1-10 to gauge how likely a customer would recommend your business to a friend. (10 being extremely likely, 1 being unlikely)

Why is it important? NPS gives you a good idea of how happy customers are with their purchase and how likely they are to buy again or stick around. Plus, referrals, recommendations, and other forms of word-of-mouth can lead to quick closes, so you want to make sure your customers want to give them.

How to calculate and track it? Owl Lab’s Sophia Bernazzani Barron recommends calculating NPS using these three steps:

1. Survey your customers and ask them, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

2. Categorize respondents according to their score: Scores 0-6 are Detractors, 7-8 are Passives, and 9-10 are Promoters.

3. Disregarding the Passives, subtract the percentage of Detractor responses from the percentage of Promoter responses to determine your Net Promoter Score. This score can range from -100 to 100.

13. Return on Investment (ROI): the amount of money you gain from your marketing efforts compared to their cost.

Why is it important? You never want to spend more than you make. Like CPL and CAC, calculating and tracking your marketing ROI can help you determine how you are performing in that regard.

How to calculate and track it? You can calculate your ROI using this formula:

ROI =

(Total Revenue – Total Investment) / Total Investment

Learn more about calculating marketing ROI.

Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics

14. Number of Email Contacts (or Email List Size): This is how many people in your database have opted into email marketing and communication from you.

Why is it important? Email marketing is not dead. In fact, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months, so your email list size does matter. The more email contacts you have, the more people you can reach with targeted campaigns.

Read: Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (Expert Tips + Data to Know)

How to calculate and track it? You should be able to see the total number of contacts in your database using any of your email marketing tools, including HubSpot. In HubSpot, navigate to CRM > Contacts and see the total number of records below the header.

But this number may not always be accurate. It also includes contacts whose email addresses you have but perhaps have unsubscribed.

Knowing this, I recommend having an active list in HubSpot, pulling all of the CRM’s subscribed and engaged contacts.

15. Email Open Rate: The percentage of people opening your marketing emails.

Why is it important? There’s no point in sending an email if people aren’t opening and reading it. This metric lets you know how successful you are at this or if you need to adjust your subject line, send time, or sender, among other things.

How to calculate and track it? This is another metric that should be easily found in any mainstream email marketing tool.

In HubSpot, you just need to navigate to the email in question, click “actions,” then “view performance,” and you’ll find the open rate called out right below the header.

If your tool doesn’t provide this metric or you use a personal email client, you can calculate your open rate using this formula:

Email open rate =

(number of emails opened / total number of emails delivered) x 100

Note: While you can certainly calculate email metrics on your own, it’s next to impossible to know exactly how many people opened your email without a third-party tool.

So, even if you don’t have the budget, I recommend investing in a free email marketing tool to track your metrics more easily.

16. Email click-through rate (CTR): This is how many people click a link in the email you sent out of those who opened it.

Why is it important? An open is one thing, but the click is what you’re really after with email marketing. CTR tells you just how effectively your email copy convinced someone to take action.

How to calculate and track it? Like open rate, CTR can be found prominently in your email performance page or dashboard like here in HubSpot:

You can also calculate your CTR using this formula:

Email clickthrough rate =

(number of email clicks / total number of emails delivered) x 100

Like opens, this can be difficult to measure without a formal email marketing tool. If you opt not to use an email marketing tool like HubSpot or MailChimp, use bit.ly or other UTM tracking tools to create trackable URLs.

Social Media KPIs and Metrics

According to our research, social media ties with a company’s website or blog as the top ROI-driving channel for marketers in the past 12 months. So, it’s important to know how you’re performing there.

Organic social media is usually best suited to boosting brand awareness and engaging your audience, while paid social media can generate big results in sales and more.

The KPIs I recommend for both reflect that, but you can dig deeper into social media analytics in our ultimate guide.

17. Social media reach (following): Total number of followers across social media or per platform.

Why is it important? Like an email subscriber, a social media follower “opts in ” to stay in contact with your business and hear more about what your brand has to offer.

This number gives you a good estimate of your initial reach on social media before things like engagement and hashtags.

How to calculate and track it? Most social media tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial have tools to monitor your followings on multiple platforms. HubSpot will track this for Facebook, Instagram, X, and your LinkedIn Company page if connected.

To view yours, navigate to “Marketing,” “Social,” then “Analyze.”

18. Social media engagement: This measures how many interactions your posts on social media are getting.

Why is it important? Social media is all about connecting and one of the biggest indicators that your content is successfully connecting with your audience is engagement. Engagement is also often a big factor in social media algorithms.

The more engagement a post gets, the more likely it is to get shared to explore and discovery feeds.

Some common social media engagement metrics include:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares or Retweets
• Messages
• Tags or Mentions
• Replies
• Impressions or views
• Plays

How to calculate and track it? Again, most social media management tools can monitor your followings on multiple platforms, as does HubSpot.

HubSpot shows you clicks, shares, impressions, and interactions (likes, reactions, and comments) of both posts published via its tools and directly on Facebook, Instagram, X, or a LinkedIn Company page.

Paid Ads Performance

If you’re looking for more bottom-of-the-funnel impact from your social media, paid advertising is likely in your strategy. All major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube offer advertising options.

Here are some of the metrics you should be tracking to get the highest social media advertising ROI.

19. Impressions: This is how many times your ad gets seen.

Why is it important? Reach is a huge metric when it comes to any type of advertising and impressions is a reflection of that.

If you’re investing with the goal of increasing brand awareness, you’ll especially want to make sure you’re getting a healthy amount of impressions.

How to calculate and track it? This is something your advertising platform will share with you. However, if you use HubSpot to manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google ads, you can see them there as well.

20. Click rate: The percentage of clicks your ad gets compared to how many times it is seen.

Why is it important? Getting noticed is good, but eliciting action is even better. Your click rate helps identify just how successful you are at that.

Plus, if the goal of your ad is to generate traffic or leads, you need to make sure this number is healthy to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

How to calculate and track it? Like impressions, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Click Rate = number of clicks / number of impressions x 100

21. Lead rate (or lead conversion rate): The percentage of impressions that turned into leads from your ad.

Why is it important? If the goal of your social media advertising is to generate leads, this should be your number one metric. However, even if it’s not, this can tell you a great deal about how compelling your ad copy or creative is.

If your lead rate is high and that wasn’t your goal, there’s something working well with the ad that you should take note of.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Lead Conversion Rate = (Number of Leads Generated / Total Number of Impressions or Visitors) x 100

Note: If your goal is leads, you’ll also want to track the number of leads generated from your ads.

22. Cost per impression (CPM): How much you’re spending to generate an impression from your advertising. Impressions are typically billed by the thousand.

Why is it important? This metric tells you how cost-effective your advertising spend is. You should not be spending more on generating impressions than you are making from them.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

CPM = Total cost of campaign / number of impressions x 1000

23. Cost per lead: How much you’re spending to generate a lead from advertising.

Why is it important? This metric tells you how cost-effective your advertising spend is if you’re focused on generating leads.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your specific advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Cost Per Lead = Total cost of campaign / number of leads

24. Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated from a social media advertising campaign compared to every dollar you spend. It’s usually a ratio.

Why is it important? No big revelation here: You want to make sure you’re making more money from your advertising than you are spending.

How to calculate and track it? You can calculate your ROAS using this formula:

ROAS=

Revenue generated from ads / cost of ads (ad spend)

HubSpot will also tell you this for your LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook Ads as “ROI.”

How to Report Your B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

Data without meaning is useless.

That’s why once you’ve identified and can successfully track all your metrics, you need a plan for analyzing and reporting findings to your team and other stakeholders.

As Allie Konchar, Partner & Head of Client Operations of digital growth agency Omniscient and former HubSpotter, explains, “Marketing reports uncover meaningful, actionable data that help you draw important conclusions and meet organization-wide goals.”

Marketing reports can be critical to informing future marketing decisions and strategies, so it’s important to learn how to create them successfully. This article by Konchar further details how to build and analyze marketing reports.

We’ve also created a collection of monthly marketing report templates to get you started. These will help you:

• Track the monthly growth of your visits, leads, and customers.
• Measure your website’s visit-to-lead conversion rate.
• Accurately track which channels are performing best.
• Plug your metrics into a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck to present to your boss.

Get yours here for free.

Tracking your way to success with KPIs

Ok, I know — that was a lot. And the truth is, there are likely even more B2B marketing KPIs your team will need to track to truly have a firm grasp on its performance.

But once you’ve got the right tools and templates in place to help you make sense of everything, it’s much easier to scale and adjust your efforts. Use this list and the tips shared to get started and start tracking your way to marketing success.

When most people start implementing inbound marketing, they’re primarily worried about getting enough new leads in the funnel.

But once you have a lot of leads, you need to figure out who‘s really interested in your product and who’s just starting to look around.

That’s where lead scoring comes in. In this article, I’ll share lead scoring models for you to consider, important data to look at, and best practices for effective lead scoring.

Table of Contents

• What is lead scoring?
• Lead Scoring Models
• How to Determine What Data to Look At
• Is one lead score enough?
• How to Calculate a Basic Lead Score
• Lead Scoring Best Practices
• Improve Your Sales With Lead Scoring

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, often in the form of numerical “points,” to each lead you generate to evaluate the likelihood of them becoming a customer.

You can score your leads based on multiple attributes, including the professional information they‘ve submitted to you and how they’ve engaged with your website and brand across the internet.

This process helps sales and marketing teams prioritize leads, respond to them appropriately, and increase the rate at which those leads become customers.

Learn more about the concept of lead scoring in the video below:

Every company has a different model for assigning points to score their leads, but I’ve found one of the most common ways is to use data from past leads to create a value system.

How? First, you‘ll take a look at your contacts who became customers to see what they have in common. Next, you’ll look at the attributes of your contacts who didn‘t become customers.

Once you’ve looked at the historical data from both sides, you can decide which attributes should be weighted heavily based on how likely they are to indicate someone’s a good fit for your product.

Lead scoring sounds easy, right? Depending on your business model and the leads in your database, this can quickly become complicated.

To make this process a little easier on you, I’m going to walk you through the basics of creating a lead score, including what data you should look at, how to find the most important attributes, and the process for actually calculating a basic score.

Why is lead scoring important?

You may be wondering if lead scoring is outdated or if it’s still a relevant sales method. The short answer is lead scoring is as important today as it has been for years.

The methods may have evolved, but the purpose of lead scoring continues to be essential for sales and marketing teams.

For starters, lead scoring allows you to prioritize and focus your efforts on leads that are the most likely to convert to customers.

And when 53% of salespeople say selling got harder in 2023, I think it’s a good idea to turn your energy towards sales that have a higher chance of closing.

Mark Osborne, B2B sales expert and founder of Modern Revenue Strategies, adds that for many businesses, markets are tightening due to uncertainty and higher interest rates, which has resulted in less capital — making every lead even more precious.

“Remember the 80/20 rule: that 80% of your revenues come from just 20% of your clients,” suggests Osborne. “This is even more pronounced when expanded to the percentage of leads that become your best clients.”

Businesses without systems for scoring and prioritizing the best opportunities are likely spreading themselves too thin across all opportunities and won’t win the best clients.

Plus, says Osborne, without a lead scoring model in place, you could be losing business to the competition.

“Savvy competitors have learned to swarm on the best opportunities as soon as they identify them,” he says, “giving those prospects the highest level of personalized attention and service to win those crucial deals.”

Lead Scoring Models

Lead scoring models ensure the values you assign to each lead reflect their actual compatibility with your product.

Many lead scores are based on a point range of 0 to 100, but every model you create will support a particular attribute of your core customer.

Here are six different lead scoring models based on the type of data you can collect from the people who engage with your business:

1. Demographic Information

Are you only selling to people of a certain demographic, like parents of young children or CIOs? Ask demographic questions in the forms on your landing pages, and you can use your leads’ answers to see how well they fit in with your target audience.

One thing I suggest is to remove outliers from your sales team’s queue by subtracting points for people who fall into a category you don’t sell to.

For example, if you only sell to a certain geographic location, you might give a negative score to any lead who falls outside the proper city, state, zip code, country, and so on.

If some of your form fields are optional (like a phone number, for instance), you might also award extra points to leads who provide that optional information anyway.

2. Company Information

If you‘re a B2B organization, are you more interested in selling to organizations of a certain size, type, or industry? Are you more interested in B2B organizations or B2C organizations?

You can ask questions like these on your landing page forms, too, so you can give points to leads who fit in with your target audience and take points away from leads who aren’t at all what you’re looking for.

Osborne also suggests tracking external company data on company information such as new leadership, M&A activity, new investments, or a PR crisis as this knowledge “can be valuable in understanding the prospective company’s current context and fit with your value proposition to uncover the potential for long-term, profitable engagements,” he says.

3. Behavioral Data

For Ben Grant, CEO of LearnSales, behavioral data is essential for lead scoring in 2024.

“I’m diving deep into behavioral data such as what content [prospects] are engaging with, how often they visit our site, and even the time they spend on specific pages,” he says. “This gives us a clearer picture of their intent.”

In my experience, how a lead interacts with your website can tell you a lot about how interested they are in buying from you.

Take a look at your leads who eventually become customers: Which offers did they download? How many offers did they download? Which pages — and how many pages — did they visit on your site before becoming a customer?

Both the number and types of forms and pages are important. You might give higher lead scores to leads who visited high-value pages (like pricing pages) or filled out high-value forms (like a demo request).

Similarly, you might give higher scores to leads who had 30 page views on your site, as opposed to three.

What about leads who have changed their behavior over time? If a lead has stopped visiting your website or downloading your offers, they may not be interested anymore.

You might take points away from leads who’ve stopped engaging with your website after a certain period of time. How long — 10 days, 30 days, 90 days — depends on your typical sales cycle.

Keep in mind that your sales cycle may look different these days compared to years prior. In 2023, 53% of companies experienced longer sales cycles.

4. Email Engagement

If someone opts in to receive emails from your company by filling out an email popup, you may not know how interested that person is in buying from you.

Open and click-through rates, on the other hand, will give you a much better idea of their interest level.

Your sales team will want to know who opened every email in your lead nurturing series or who always clicked through your offer promotion emails. That way, they can focus on the ones who seem most engaged.

You might also give a higher lead score to leads who click through on high-value emails, like demo offers.

5. Social Engagement

How engaged a lead is with your brand on social networks can also give you an idea of how interested they are.

How many times did they click through on your company’s tweets and LinkedIn posts? How many times did they comment or share those posts?

In my experience, social media is tied to referrals for generating the highest-quality leads, so it’s not a channel to overlook.

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If you’re not already collaborating with your marketing team to get this data, start now, recommends Grant.

“Our sales and marketing team are in constant communication, ensuring that the criteria we use for scoring are aligned with real-world results,” he says. “This synergy helps refine our lead scoring models and improve accuracy.”

6. Spam Detection

Last but not least, you should give negative scores to leads who filled out landing page forms in ways that could indicate they’re spam. For example, were first name, last name, and/or company name not capitalized?

Did the lead complete any form fields by typing four or more letters in the traditional “QWERTY” keyboard side-by-side?

You might also want to think about which types of email addresses leads are using compared with the email addresses of your customer base. If you’re selling to businesses, for example, you might take points away from leads who use a Gmail or Yahoo! email address.

How to Determine What Data to Look At

There’s a lot of data to weed through — how do you know which data matters most? Should you find out from your sales team? Should you interview your customers? Should you dive into your analytics and run a few reports?

I recommend a combination of all three. Your sales team, your customers, and your analytics reports will all help you piece together what content is most valuable for converting leads into customers, which will help you attach a number of points to certain offers, emails, and so on.

Talk to your sales team.

Sales reps are the ones on the ground, communicating directly with both leads who turned into customers and those who didn’t. They tend to have a pretty good idea of which pieces of marketing material help encourage conversion.

Which blog posts and offers do your sales reps like to send leads? You might find some of them telling you, “Every time I send people this certain piece of collateral, it’s easier to close them.” This is valuable information. I recommend you find out what those pieces of collateral are and assign points accordingly.

Talk to your customers.

While your sales team might claim certain content converts customers, you might find that the people who actually went through the sales process have different opinions. That’s okay: You want to hear it from both sides.

In fact, according to our 2024 State of Sales Report, building and maintaining a strong rapport with customers is a key focus area for sales professionals.

Conduct a few customer interviews to learn what they think was responsible for their decision to buy from you. I suggest you interview customers who have had both short and long sales cycles so you get diverse perspectives.

Turn to the analytics.

I recommend you also complement all this in-person research with hard data from your marketing analytics.

Run an attribution report to figure out which marketing efforts lead to conversions throughout the funnel. Don‘t only look at the content that converts leads to customers — what about the content people view before they become a lead?

You might award a certain number of points to people who download content that’s historically converted people into leads and a higher number of points to people who download content that’s historically converted leads into customers.

Another way to help you piece together valuable pieces of content on your site is to run a contacts report. A contacts report will show you how many contacts — and how much revenue — have been generated as a result of certain, specific marketing activities.

Marketing activities might include certain offer downloads, email campaign click-throughs, and so on. Take note of which activities tend to be first-touch conversions, last-touch conversions, and so on, and assign points accordingly.

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Is one lead score enough?

If you have one core customer right now, a single score suffices. But as your company scales, you’ll sell to new audiences. You might expand into new product lines, new regions, or new personas.

You might even focus more on up-selling and cross-selling to existing customers rather than pursuing new ones. In my experience, if your contacts aren‘t “one size fits all,” your scoring system shouldn’t be either.

With some marketing platforms, you can create multiple lead-scoring systems, giving you the flexibility to qualify different sets of contacts in different ways. Not sure how to set up more than one score? I’ve gathered a few examples to inspire you:

Fit vs. Interest

Let’s say, for instance, your sales team wants to evaluate customers on both fit (e.g., is a contact in the right region? The right industry? The right role?) and interest level (e.g., how engaged have they been with your online content?).

If both of these attributes are a priority, you can create both an engagement score and a fit score so that you can prioritize outreach to contacts whose values are high in both categories.

Multiple Personas

Say you’re a software company that sells two different types of software via different sales teams to different types of buyers.

You could create two different lead scores — one for a buyer’s fit and the other for their interest in each tool. Then, you’d use these respective scores to route leads to the right sales teams.

New Business vs. Up-sell

As you grow, you might start to focus on upselling or cross-selling as much as new business. However, keep in mind that the signals that indicate the quality of new prospects and existing customers often look completely different.

For prospects, you might look at demographics and website engagement, whereas for existing customers, you might look at how many customer support tickets they’ve submitted, their engagement with an onboarding consultant, and how active they currently are with your products.

If these buying signals look different for different types of sales, consider creating multiple lead scores.

How to Calculate a Basic Lead Score

There are many different ways to calculate a lead score, but I think the simplest way to do it is this:

Featured Resource: Free Lead Scoring Template

Download for Free

Manual Lead Scoring

1. Calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate of all of your leads.

Your lead-to-customer conversion rate is equal to the number of new customers you acquire, divided by the number of leads you generate. Use this conversion rate as your benchmark.

2. Pick and choose different attributes of customers who you believe were higher quality leads.

Customers who requested a free trial at some point, customers in the finance industry, or customers with 10-20 employees could be attributes.

There‘s a certain kind of art to choosing which attributes to include in your model. You’ll choose attributes based on those conversations you had with your sales team, your analytics, and so on — but overall, it’s a judgment call.

You could have five different people do the same exercise, and they could come up with five different models. But that’s okay as long as your scoring is based on the data we mentioned previously.

3. Calculate the individual close rates of each of those attributes.

Calculating the close rates of each type of action a person takes on your website — or the type of person taking that action — is important because it dictates the actions you’ll take in response.

So, figure out how many people become qualified leads (and ultimately customers) based on their actions or who they are in relation to your core customer. You’ll use these close rates to actually “score” them in the step below.

4. Compare the close rates of each attribute with your overall close rate and assign point values accordingly.

Look for the attributes with close rates that are significantly higher than your overall close rate. Then, choose which attributes you’ll assign points to, and if so, how many points.

Base the point values of each attribute on the magnitude of their individual close rates.

The actual point values will be a little arbitrary, but try to be as consistent as possible.

For example, if your overall close rate is 1% and your “requested demo” close rate is 20%, then the close rate of the “requested demo” attribute is 20X your overall close rate — so you could, for example, award 20 points to leads with those attributes.

Logistic Regression Lead Scoring

The simple method above for calculating a lead score is a great start. However, the most mathematically sound methods employ a data mining technique, such as logistic regression.

Data mining techniques are more complex and often more intuitive than your actual close rates. Logistic regression involves building a formula in Excel that’ll spit out the probability that a lead will close into a customer.

This is more accurate than the technique I outlined above since it’s a holistic approach that takes into account how all of the customer attributes — like industry, company size, and whether or not someone requested a trial — interact with one another.

If you prefer a less complex lead-scoring method, I think the manual approach above is a great place to start.

Predictive Lead Scoring

Creating a lead score can do great things for your business: improve the lead-handoff process, increase lead conversion rate, improve rep productivity, and more.

But, as you can see from the two methods above, coming up with a scoring system can be a time-consuming task when done manually.

Plus, coming up with scoring criteria isn‘t “set it and forget it.” As you get feedback from your team and stress-test your scores, I’ve found you’ll need to tweak your lead-scoring system regularly to ensure it remains accurate.

Wouldn’t it be easier if technology could eliminate the manual setup and continuous tweaking, leaving your team more time to build relationships with your customers?

That’s where predictive scoring comes in. Predictive lead scoring uses machine learning to parse through thousands of data points in order to identify your best leads, so you don’t have to.

Predictive scoring looks at what information your customers have in common, as well as what information the leads that didn’t close have in common, and comes up with a formula that sorts your contacts by importance based on their potential to become customers.

This allows you and your sales team to prioritize leads so you’re not harassing those who aren’t (yet) interested and engaging those who are.

The best part about predictive scoring? As with any application of machine learning, your predictive score gets smarter over time, so your lead follow-up strategy will optimize itself.

Featured Resource: Predictive Lead Scoring Software

Download for Free

Lead Scoring Best Practices

We’ve covered a lot so far, so I want to wrap it up with a few best practices I learned from the sales leaders I spoke to.

Here are some lead scoring best practices to follow if you want to improve your sales in 2024.

Leverage AI and machine learning.

In the age of AI, sales professionals would be wise to use one of the numerous AI tools to their selling advantage, especially during the lead scoring process.

Not only can AI tools improve efficiency, but 66% of sales pros say that AI helps them provide a personalized experience and better understand their customers.

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Grant is also taking advantage of AI’s power to personalize data.

“We’re leveraging AI to analyze patterns and predict which leads are most likely to convert,” he says. “Machine learning models can adapt and get more accurate over time, which is a huge step up from traditional lead scoring methods.”

Lead with data.

I think one of the best parts about lead scoring is that it’s an objective method. When the data indicates how interested a prospect is, that’s something you’ll want to lean into.

Data is one of the most important resources sales teams and marketers have at their disposal, and lead scoring has become even more data-driven with the tools available today.

If you want to save time spent on unqualified leads and prioritize sales-ready ones with data-driven decisions, then your sales team should use a lead scoring model that makes it easy to organize and understand your data.

Make real-time adjustments.

If you think lead scoring models are outdated, it could be because the traditional methods didn’t take into account real-time industry or business changes.

“Lead scoring is no longer a set-it-and-forget-it deal,” says Grant. “We’re making real-time adjustments based on the latest data. This agility helps us stay ahead of the curve and respond to changing market conditions.”

There are so many lead generation tools available to help your sales team make real-time decisions and properly qualify inbound leads.

Improve Your Sales With Lead Scoring

Scoring your leads can go a long way in determining which leads are good fits and interested in your offering and which might need more nurturing before being sales-ready.

Check out our lead scoring templates to get started defining your criteria and assigning points!

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When I first heard how HubSpot’s YouTube team bumped one channel’s views up by over 400%, I begged for permission to share the story. (I’m not above debasing myself on your behalf.)

It’s a lesson that applies to nearly all content marketing — and one I promise you’re not going to hear anywhere else.

Are you ready for it? Not all distribution is good distribution. And that includes your own.

Below, I chat with our head of YouTube about how and why cutting off all external distribution actually increased our YT performance. And his advice for when you should consider picking up the axe, too.

The Road to the Chopping Block

When Carl Mueller joined us as HubSpot’s head of YouTube earlier this year, he noticed that one of our YT channels had a problem the others didn’t. If a video was six minutes long, most viewers were dropping off after only a minute or two.

Though, to be fair, that’s still longer than my kid made it through Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Carl’s been producing video for over 10 years for names like Business Insider and Morning Brew. Which is to say, where media and marketing mash up, Carl knows his s***.

So when he says the content wasn’t the problem, I know he’s not just trying to avoid hurt feelings.

“I got here in late February, and the first thing I did was watch our content from a quality perspective,” he says. “But then I looked at the metrics, and the numbers were surprisingly low. I don’t think the metrics reflected the quality of the videos.”

But if the content wasn’t the problem, what was?

The call is coming from inside the house.

As Carl investigated the problem, he noticed that around 90% of the views for this particular channel were coming from external sources. That includes Facebook, Instagram, blogs, newsletters — everything except YouTube.

“What I’ve noticed is that when you’re asking someone to jump from another platform to YouTube, you’re asking them to change their consumption behavior,” he explains. “Is that person sitting down with time to spare to watch a 10-minute video?”

The answer to that depends heavily on what platform they’re jumping from.

And about 90% of those external views were coming from The Hustle newsletter.

“Which, at first glance, makes a lot of sense. It seemed like good, targeted distribution. But it meant that most of our total viewership was coming from the newsletter.”

That seems like the opposite of a problem, right? As I’ve not-so-subtly mentioned before, The Hustle has an audience of over 2.5M and above-industry-average engagement rates. It’s the kind of audience most marketers would trade a body part to get in front of. (And I mean a useful body part. Not just a pinky toe.)

And in the vast majority of cases, they’d be right. The Hustle is an absolute catapult for content, often driving thousands and thousands of views to blogs, short-form videos, and content offers. So why didn’t that work here?

Carl lays it out:

“The newsletter goes out at, what, 5:30 in the morning? People open it in bed.” They click on a video, “watch a few minutes, and then leave.”

Or they save it for later and then forget about it in a sea of tabs. (Guiltyyyyy!)

“If you were in their shoes, are you going to watch that whole video? For me, the answer is probably not,” Carl laughs. “Maybe sometimes if I’m laying on my couch. But if the average newsletter reader is not in a position to watch a long-form video, then that is a lot of bad retention metrics.”

For this otherwise highly engaged audience, that was about a 20-30% retention rate.

Let’s do some quick math. What does it equal when 90% of your audience has a 20% retention rate? An unhappy algorithm.

As Carl puts it: “YouTube won’t promote your content if your own viewers aren’t watching it.”

We needed surgery, stat.

Making the Cut

“We decided as an experiment to pause all direct external distribution,” Carl says.

But why all distribution, and not just the mismatched audience?

“We wanted to first see if we had a core audience on YouTube. We wanted to serve the videos only to our subscriber base and see if they liked them.”

And it worked. Better even than Carl predicted.

“I was warning everyone that we were going to perform worse before we performed better. A few thousand guaranteed views were going away,” Carl recalls. “But it was pretty immediate. The first video after the shift got 27,000 views. A couple of videos later we had one hit 300,000. Then after that 450,000.”

About 90 days after pausing distribution, the channel’s average views and average watch time both rose by 420%, and our subscriber count jumped 257%.

This goes against everything I’ve learned about content marketing, where more distribution equals more views. What gives, Carl?

“It’s compounding success. If something performs great, YouTube is more likely to promote the following video.”

An audience built on YouTube is ready to watch a YouTube video. And if the majority of your viewers are watching the majority of your content, it sends positive signals to the YT algorithm. YouTube then serves your videos to a wider audience, and a virtuous cycle is born.

“Not all distribution is good distribution,” Carl says. “That’s a universal takeaway for all channels and all content. Make sure you’re targeting the right audience at the right time.”

Ask your doctor if pausing distribution is right for you.

Here’s where I hit the pause button, because I can sense that some of you are getting antsy to DIY.

I asked Carl what he would say to readers who are now thinking about axing their own distribution.

“Make sure your channel is in the same circumstances as our channel. It had a heavy reliance on external distribution and low watch times. If you have that combination, then likely those unengaged external views are impacting your performance.”

So, to be clear: If you don’t have low engagement, your distribution is likely doing its job, and axing it will not help you grow further.

Similarly, if the majority of your views aren’t coming from external distribution, then it’s probably not the cause of any low metrics.

But Carl’s not letting the rest of you walk away empty-handed. Here are some takeaways for everyone:

1. Consider behavior patterns when sharing with a potential audience.

This is sound advice for any kind of marketing, not just video marketing.

Before you distribute your content through any channel, consider the consumption habits of that audience.

Are they in the right place to share a social media post? Download a PDF? Listen to a podcast?

“There is value in external distribution, but you have to make sure that it’s to the right people at the right time, and at the right stage in the content’s lifespan.”

2. Seek on-platform distribution.

“On YouTube, I would always prioritize on-platform partnerships, video swaps, or call-outs. Targeting people on YouTube is the best place to get people to watch your video on YouTube.”

And that generally holds true for most kinds of content. Consider, for example, that you’re most likely to find TikTok viewers on TikTok. Or that newsletter readers are often willing to be blog readers. (And, like magic, here you are.)

3. Optimize for the platform, not the distribution channel.

“Let YouTube do its thing for a little while,” Carl advises. “If that’s not working, change thumbnails, change titles. Do everything you can to optimize for YouTube.”

Not to be a broken record but, again, that applies to any kind of content or platform. Optimize first for search, social, or wherever your audience primarily finds your content.

“And if that’s not working, then it might be worth taking the risk of putting it somewhere else.”

4. Set clear expectations.

If your audience clicks a link without knowing it leads to a video, a lot more people are going to abandon ship. Same for long-form written content.

To avoid this, you need to set the expectations for what they’re about to encounter.

“If we do share — because there is value in sharing videos with the newsletter audience — we make it very clear that it is a video,” then he switches to a mock-stern voice. “All caps. WATCH VIDEO. You are leaving. ARE YOU PREPARED?”

Now you are.

How to See YouTube Reports in HubSpot

Marketing Hub Enterprise users can actually pull their YouTube performance data straight into HubSpot so you can see all of your glorious success in one place.

You can check out custom reports on watch time, views, shares, subscriber counts, engagement, etc. — allowing you to be the Carl Mueller of your company.

First, you’ll need to connect your YT account to HubSpot.

1. In HubSpot, click on the settings icon in the top navigation bar.
2. Choose Marketing then Social.
3. Click on Connect account in the top right.
4. Select YouTube Reports in the box that pops up.
5. Select the YouTube account to connect.
6. Review permissions and click Allow.

Now that you’re all connected, here’s how to access your reports:

1. Navigate back to Marketing and then Social. (Unless you’re already there from the first part. Then skip this part.)
2. Click the tab that says Analyze.
3. Click the dropdown menu that says All accounts and make sure YouTube is selected.
4. Apply filters for date range, campaign, etc. to your heart’s content.