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If you want to drive organic traffic to your website, you must understand two critical aspects of SEO strategy:

• Relevance
• Authority

With relevance, the key is knowing what your audience is searching for and providing the highest quality and most relevant content so it’s a no-brainer for Google to serve it up to them.

But this isn’t an exact science.

You could create the best content out there from your perspective, but it’s a competitive landscape, and Google takes myriad other factors into account when ranking pages on the SERPs. One of those being… how authoritative (or trustworthy) the provider of that content is.

You might think that “authority” is subjective, but Google has one critical way to measure it: backlinks.

Why are backlinks important?

While there are 200 known Google ranking factors, backlinks counts as one of the most important for Google search.

That’s because a link to another website is more than just a link — it’s a vote of confidence, a recommendation, a way for publishers to say to their readers: “Here’s a source I trust. Go check it out yourself.”

It’s incredibly difficult to get that kind of endorsement, especially for small businesses or startups. But if you want to boost your SEO performance, you need to make sure you consistently earn high-quality backlinks to your website, better and faster than your competition.

Additionally, Gabi Theard, Director of Marketing at Trujay, says, “A link building strategy doesn’t just increase your SEO score and visibility on Google. It also shows readers where your company falls in relations to other brands — and reminds readers that there is, in fact, a human behind the screen. Backlinks can demonstrate a relationship between two sites and how each site is working to help the other grow.”

“Plus, backlinks help readers get the highest degree of information that answers their questions.”

High-Quality Backlinks

Keep in mind, though, that not all backlinks are created equal. If you think of a backlink as a vote of confidence, it only makes sense to also evaluate the credibility of that vote.

In the past, tactics such as link farms, PBNs, and comment spam allowed black-hat SEOs to create vast backlink profiles and successfully game the system. However, these black-hat link-building techniques no longer work because Google has gotten savvy to them. In fact, too many “unnatural” links may even earn your site a penalty.

In other words, quality matters just as much as quantity when it comes to backlinks.

Earning high-quality backlinks is probably the most challenging part of SEO. You’ll want links that are:

• Authoritative – The site has an authoritative backlink profile (many votes of confidence), generates a lot of traffic, and even ranks well in the SERPs itself. In addition, .gov and .edu sites tend to carry more weight, as do industry-leading sites.
• Relevant – The referring page tackles a similar topic or niche. e.g. If your technology company’s homepage gets a backlink from a blog post on “how to golf,” this would not be seen as a relevant or quality backlink.
• Unique – You will get an edge if the site refers to you but does not refer to your competitors. Otherwise, the backlink may be good to have, but it’s table stakes.
• Natural – The link is not sponsored, the anchor text is not branded or spammy, and the referring page has a natural number of links on it.

As an SEO strategist specifically focusing on link building at HubSpot, I’m no stranger to the challenge of finding high-quality sources that will link back to your site. To help you improve your company’s SEO ranking, I’ve cultivated this list of creative and unique ways to earn backlinks.

1. Reclaim Unlinked Mentions

Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is probably the easiest, quickest way to build high-quality backlinks.

All you need to do is keep an eye on who is mentioning your brand, on blogs or in the news. You can do that using something as simple (and free) as Google Alerts. If you want more insights into your mentions, like the number of shares or the domain authority of the website where the mention comes from, you can opt for tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs Content Explorer or Mention.

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Oftentimes, you’ll notice the author hasn’t included a link back to your website when they mention your brand, product, or service. That’s when you can send them a quick note, asking for a proper link attribution. This also allows the publisher to give their readers a better experience, letting them click through and learn more about the brand mentioned. It’s a win, win.

The creative part of this tactic is that you can use the same method to reclaim links for other mentions that are related to your brand — including events you organize, employees names, research reports, etc.

For example, you can keep a lookout for interviews that feature your company’s executives and ask for a link back to their profile page on your website. Or, you can look for mentions of reports or statistics you’ve published, and ask for a proper link attribution to the original source.

2. Get Contextual Links

Have you noticed how some articles feature additional resources, either recommended in text or inside a “Read more” section?

Here’s an example of a “read more” section from SEJ, where they link to a related piece:

These links embedded in the text of an article are called contextual links.

The key to getting contextual links is to find the right link prospect to reach out to. You can find them by researching articles that are related to the content you’re promoting and already have a “Read more” section.

For instance, let’s say you have a new study on email marketing. Try looking for articles that speak about marketing trends and recommend other articles.

Here’s how to find them using search engines like Google:

• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Read more”
• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Recommended articles”
• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Recommended reading”

When you reach out to the author to pitch your study, don’t forget to mention why your content is worth getting featured. A persuasive boilerplate and a personalized email will go a long way.

Additionally, Theard says: “Once you get into the habit of earning backlinks, you may start to notice that other publishers come to you directly. With the right relationship-building strategy, publishers come to you rather than you inquiring to them.”

She adds, “Relationship-based backlinks are critical, as opposed to simple (and frequent) link exchanges. Google can, and will, pick up on backlink publications that are whimsy; a backlink for a backlink is not a good backlink. A relationship-based backlink is accepted by Google through relevant keywords, the credibility of websites, and genuine effort to have website referrals be at the top of calibers.”

3. Get “Best X” List Mentions

Today’s consumers look for all available options before making a purchasing decision. They often use comparison websites or articles, like “The 13 Best Free Email Marketing Tools in 2021” to see what others recommend.

To get a sense of how popular these Best X articles are in your industry, use a keyword research tool and check for monthly search volume. For instance, there are more than 3,400 searches per month for the query “best CRM for small businesses” (according to data from Ahrefs).

Getting mentioned on articles that list the best products like the one you offer is a fantastic way to reinforce your brand, get more people to try out your product and, of course, earn high-quality backlinks.

Alex Birkett, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, explains why getting featured on these lists is so important for your business: “If you look at these search results in terms of pure click-through rate, there’s an upper limit on how much traffic you can bring to your own product page by ranking on your own site’s listicle.”

Birkett continues to say — “As Nick Eubanks has mentioned, if you can broaden your view from trying to rank #1 to trying to monopolize all of the sites on the first page of a search query, you can multiply the amount of click-throughs to your site, your website traffic, and, down the line, your sales volume. And that’s not even factoring in the less trackable aspects, such as social proof and brand awareness.”

“In other words, this tactic goes beyond just link building and taps into acquisition and brand awareness potential, too.”

To get your product or service included in a list round-up, start with a simple Google search to find high-ranking blogs that write about your product or industry.

Here are some useful search terms to help you find relevant prospects:

• Best [X]
• Best [X] for [Y] e.g. Best CRM for entrepreneurs
• Top [X]
• Top [X] for [Y] e.g. Top 10 CRM for small businesses

Collect the most relevant prospects in a list and prioritize them based on domain authority (or Domain Rating if you’re using Ahrefs), backlink profile, ranking, and referral traffic potential.

Once your final list is ready, write a short pitch for the author to show them why your product or service deserves to be included in their list.

As per any outreach campaign, a short, persuasive pitch and a customized email will help you stand out.

4. Become a Source for Other Publishers

By using your expertise and unique data, you can become a source for other bloggers and journalists.

Every time someone quotes you, you’ll earn a backlink. But high-domain authority backlinks aren’t the only benefit of this tactic (although they are a huge benefit on their own). By becoming a trusted source, you’ll also increase your brand awareness and drive referral traffic to your website.

Best of all, it isn’t as difficult as you may think.

To start, simply subscribe to HARO (Help A Reporter Out). This is a free service that connects expert sources (like yourself) with bloggers and journalists who are looking for contributors.

Here’s how it works — every day, HARO will send you an email with queries from writers in your industry. You can pick the ones that resonate with your business and respond via email, including your credentials.

Speed is very important here, as most of these writers get many submissions. If you’re among the first to respond, you have a bigger chance to be seen and selected for the final piece. If you’re selected, you’ll likely receive an email from a journalist or blogger letting you know the article is live.

For instance, here’s an email I got a few days after I submitted a quote on HARO:

From my experience with HARO, it takes about four weeks for an article to get published after you send your response. Even if you don’t receive a follow-up email from the writer, keep an eye on the publication to see if your quote ends up making it into the piece.

I found that, on average, two out of 10 answers get picked up. That isn’t too bad, but if you’re like me, you don’t want to waste those eight other answers that don’t get to be published.

To ensure you still use those quotes elsewhere, I suggest you create a backlog of content and use it to answer similar questions on Quora, LinkedIn, or even your own blog or social channels.

5. Reach Out to Journalists

Bloggers and journalists are bombarded with emails pitching them information that is too promotional and doesn’t add value to their readers. That’s why many outreach emails don’t get any responses.

However, there are effective methods to make your pitch stand out. Paddy Moogan, Co-Founder of Aira, explains how his team uses this tactic successfully to earn high-quality backlinks for their clients:

“We take an individual from a client’s company, usually the founder, Managing Director, or CEO (although it can be anyone, really) and get them to provide us with their views and opinions on a set of topics.

These topics should be a sweet spot between what their company is credible to talk about, and general newsworthy topics. Classic examples at the moment are things such as what Brexit means for the X industry or what the future of X industry is in the world of AI or automation.

These broader topics are being talked about a lot in the press, so tying it to a topic that your client can talk about allows you to approach journalists and offer their comments for any upcoming articles. They often link to you because of this, and will also often link to profile pages on your client’s website, as well.”

Jeff Previte, Content Manager at Bluleadz, also shared with me a tip on how their agency stands out when pitching journalists: “When we conduct outreach for new link building opportunities, we like to use HubSpot video in our emails. We record a short video introducing ourselves and our company. After the introduction, we briefly explain how our content can deliver value to their audience and make some suggestions of what they can link to. This lends a human element. Most link building outreach comes from cold email templates. With a video, we give recipients a name, a face, and a voice they can associate with our company. That small touch helps us stand out.”

6. Update Old Content

If you find an article or a research report that hasn’t been updated in a while, check how many backlinks the piece has. If there are many publications referencing that content, then you found yourself a real gem.

You can simply go ahead and create a better, fresh piece, with more relevant data.

Once the content is live, you can then reach out to bloggers or journalists who’ve linked to the old content to let them know about your updated version.

Oftentimes, you’ll see the results of your outreach in a matter of days or weeks in the form of backlinks or social media shares. But there are also other benefits that come out of building that relationship in the first place. For instance, you might end up collaborating on other projects that can help you grow your brand, and your traffic.

Ultimately, when building your email outreach list, have a long-term benefit in mind and try building a relationship — instead of just focusing on the backlink.

7. Build Free Tools

Creating free tools, like calculators or template generators, is an effective method for earning links and even generating new leads.

In a nutshell, here’s how to get started:

1. Start with keyword research and see what comes up for “templates”, “tools”, or “generator” in your industry.
2. Check out what tools appear in Top 10 search results for those keywords.
3. Try to figure out which tool or generator receives the most backlinks right now.
4. Build something similar but way better, e.g. better design, more customizable options, etc.

For example, take HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator. There are over 29,000 searches for “signature generator” on any given month on Google, and our tool offers a very simple, aesthetically-pleasing solution.

Since we launched it, it’s been highly used and recommended, having earned over 5,520 backlinks from 1,168 referring domains.

8. Publish Ultimate Guides

An Ultimate Guide is a piece of content designed to be the best, most comprehensive resource on a given topic. It covers enough information that you don’t need to go elsewhere to learn more about that subject.

Here are two examples from our own blog:

• The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing

The reason why these Ultimate Guides attract inbound backlinks is because they help bloggers and journalists reference a concept they mention.

For instance, if someone writes an article titled “How to get started with SEO”, they can focus on a few tips and tactics without explaining, in-depth, what SEO is — instead, they can simply link to an SEO Ultimate Guide, if their readers have further questions.

Here’s an example:

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Alex Birkett, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, uses this approach with his personal blog, as well. Here’s how he explains it: “An Ultimate Guide doesn’t have to explicitly tell you it is an Ultimate Guide. It simply has to go above-and-beyond in its utility or perceived value.”

“For example,” Birkett continues, “I recently wrote a 6,500 word guide on A/B testing. It ranges from beginner issues all the way through advanced topics and fringe cases. Basically, it’s a bookmarkable article for anyone who runs A/B tests. Not only did it get a really solid initial spike of traffic from social shares, but it consistently gains organic links month-by-month.”

9. Use Images to Earn Links & Mentions

Infographics are probably the most common visual asset used to earn backlinks. It’s always good to experiment with them, if you haven’t done it before.

However, if you feel infographics don’t work well for your brand, here are a few other visuals you might consider creating:

• Charts and graphs with original data
• Diagrams to visually explain complex concepts
• One-page templates
• Free photo galleries for others to use

To give you an idea of how other brands use free photo galleries, check out this creative campaign from LinkedIn: The Real Face of Sales. The brand has created a free downloadable library of photos that feature real, non-cliche salespeople.

The photos are also available on Unsplash and Pexels (where they got over 35 million views), which helped with distribution.

10. Use Directories (yes, Directories!)

Despite what you may have heard, directories aren’t dead. In fact, they are probably one of the best ways to improve your local SEO and help potential customers find your business.

Of course, I’m not talking about spammy directories that are there just for the sake of links. Those are more likely to harm your SEO performance than anything else.

The directories you need to be on are the ones people actually use — like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Beyond these famous ones, there are many other general and niche directories that can help your rankings and traffic.

Here are a few resources to help you find relevant directories:

• 21 Web Directories That Still Have Value (Search Engine Journal)
• Top Local Citations by Business Category (BrightLocal)
• The Ultimate List: 57 Online Local Business Directories (HubSpot)
• 600+ Directory Sites and How To Do Directory Link Building (Linkio)

11. Use the Broken Link Building Method

This tactic involves reaching out to a website that has a broken outbound link (a link to an external source) and suggest they update it with a link to one of your pages. Of course, your page has to be a good resource on the topic to which they were originally linking, so it makes sense to swap the broken link with yours.

The reason this tactic works so well is because it’s adding a ton of value to the webmasters — it helps them fix an error on their website and it improves the experience for their readers.

The challenge with this tactic is, of course, finding these broken links.

You have a couple of options here:

1. You can look for websites with broken links and find relevant resources on your website that you might suggest in its place.
2. You can look for one dead page (404) that used to get a ton of links, recreate that article or offer with better, more relevant content, and then reach out to those who linked to the initial piece.

Either way, you’ll need a good SEO tool to help you identify broken links. You can try Siteliner, which is free if you have under 250 pages to review, or Ahrefs, which also published a guide on how to use the broken link building method using their tool.

Once you identify the target websites and have your content ready, you can start working on your outreach. Make sure to keep your email short and sweet and focus on being helpful, rather than just getting a backlink.

Make Sure You Have The Right Backlink Checkers in Your SEO Toolbox

Now that you have a list of tactics to try out in your next link building campaign, it’s time to make sure you also have the tools you need to succeed.

Because there are so many options out there, I thought I’d end this article with a list of my top free, tried-and-tested backlinks checkers.

To make it easier for you to pick the right tool for your next project, I went ahead and tested each tool to see how many backlinks they can find, as well as other unique features they each offer.

I used our domain (www.hubspot.com) to test the capabilities of each tool and here’s what I found:

1. Ahrefs Backlink Checker

With the second most active crawler besides Google, Ahrefs has the most comprehensive backlink database, giving you up-to-date data. In the free version of the tool, Ahrefs shows you Top 100 backlinks, Top 5 anchors, and Top 5 pages. That’s enough to get a birds-eye view of your website’s backlinks.

If you’d like to get into more details, the paid version offers far more extensive data and access to other tools that might be useful in a link building campaign, like Content Explorer or Broken Outbound links, to name a few.

2. Backlinks by Neil Patel

It may not pick up as many backlinks or referring domains as Ahrefs, but this tool gives a lot of value in the free version. For one, you can export to CSV up to 5,000 backlinks and see the Source Page Title, URL, and anchor text. You can also filter the view by including or excluding domains, anchors or zones (.es, .de etc.). All in all, I’d definitely recommend checking out this free tool.

3. MonitorBacklinks

MonitorBacklinks picks up almost as many referring domains as Ahrefs. Additionally, what’s unique about MonitorBacklinks is that it offers details on the top backlinks that you can see based on Trust Flow or Citation Flow. However, to access more of their database, you need to switch to their paid version.

4. OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler is a great tool for analyzing your backlink profile. The downside is that their database of links is fairly limited compared to Ahrefs or MonitorBacklinks. Still, there’s a lot of insights you can gain (for free) by filtering the available backlinks by categories such as industry, TLDs, anchors, or LIS (Link Influence Score). That’s something I haven’t seen in other free tools.

This tool also provides charts to show you which pages get the most links, or which countries link most to your website.

5. RankWatch

RankWatch has a great Dashboard feature where you can visualize your backlink profile. Among other things, you can see your link acquisition trend for the past three months, referring domains acquisition, and anchor distribution. The overall summary charts are available for free. However, if you want to see the exact list of backlinks or referring domains you’ve earned, you need to switch to the paid version.

6. CognitiveSEO

CognitiveSEO is great for getting an overall view of the total backlinks and referring domains — and, most importantly, checking your link velocity. You can see the link acquisition trend for the past 6 months for free, even without creating an account. Another interesting visual report is the Top 5 website pages, where you can see how your website performs by backlinks or referral domains.

All of the above tools provide valuable insights that can help you get started with link building. They all give a macro view on your backlink profile, but each one comes with different additional information. Try them out and see which one is best for you.

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

I care about customers. Whether they’re your customers, my customers, or my customers’ customers, I want every one of them to have a good experience every time they pick up the phone to call a business, open a marketing email, or visit a website.

It’s what gets me going every morning. That’s why I was thrilled in 2019 when I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s first-ever ‘voice of the customer’ team.

I assembled a group of passionate people, each more dedicated than the last to improving customer experience. We met weekly, talked about our customers, forensically analyzed feedback, and dug deep into the weeds to see where we could root out friction.

And then one day it hit us. The answers to most of our questions didn’t lie in more cross-functional meetings, increased headcount, or longer hours for support staff. The answers to our questions lay in operations.

Operations teams carry the responsibility for making sure that, well, everything works. If a marketer is having trouble segmenting a contact list, they reach out to operations. If a salesperson’s automated emails are misfiring, operations gets tagged in. If a service professional can’t access a customer’s communication history, it’s operations to the rescue again.

They’re the people who set every customer-facing team up for success. As such, they are the orchestrators of the customer experience. And yet, most companies view operations as a reactive function whose sole purpose is to frantically find fixes to issues as they arise.

It’s time for us as an industry to re-imagine operations and transform these teams from reactive fire-fighters into proactive friction-fighters. How can we do this? With revenue operations (RevOps).

It’s my firm belief that operations teams can only fulfill their potential when they work together under a unified RevOps strategy and are equipped with the right tools to execute that strategy.

Today, HubSpot is spearheading the onrushing RevOps revolution with the launch of Operations Hub — a new product specifically designed to empower operations teams to play an influential role in helping their companies delight customers at scale.

Because when a company scales, friction inevitably emerges, and customer experience is often the first thing to suffer.

Three Reasons Why Customer Experience Often Suffers When a Company Scales

There are few companies out there that impress me so much, I feel compelled to tweet about my experience, tell my friends, or write a positive review. These days, customers like me expect their interactions with every company to be quick, convenient, and contextual.

When a company scales and begins to achieve exponential growth, the challenge of keeping pace with customer expectations grows exponentially, too. There are three key reasons why:

1. More customers to support.

When a company is in startup mode, it will usually keep up with the growth of its customer base by increasing investments in staff. When customer growth starts to outpace the company’s ability to maintain a high standard of customer experience, it will likely raise capital and hire new employees to support the expanding demand. This works … for a while.

When that company is ready to scale – that is, to grow its business faster than its investments – it needs to support a growing customer base without simply hiring more employees and without letting the quality of the customer experience drop. To do this, it has to reinvent its approach to delighting customers or risk losing the trust of its user base – and its market share.

2. More tools to manage.

As a company grows, it will inevitably encounter new challenges. And in a world of over 8,000 martech solutions, there is no shortage of tools out there that could be brought in to help solve a problem quickly. So, it’s common for different teams to adopt different tools to help them solve different problems.

Over time, this approach results in a brutally bloated tech stack that takes so much time and energy to manage, there’s little left to dedicate to customers. What’s more, when tech stacks are unnecessarily complex, it becomes increasingly difficult for customer-facing teams to access reliable data, making it nearly impossible to deliver the type of contextual experience customers expect.

3. More touchpoints to maintain.

When a company is getting off the ground, it will tend to focus on a small number of high-impact channels. For example, its early social media marketing strategy may focus exclusively on, say, Facebook and Twitter, and it might only take customer queries over the phone.

As that company seeks to scale, however, it will add new channels to its marketing mix and offer its customers more ways to get in touch. Pretty soon, it’ll find itself interacting with its audience not only on Facebook, Twitter, and over the phone, but on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and via 24/7 web chat, too.

To manage this multitude of touchpoints, that company will need a new strategy to ensure it maintains the quality of experience it offered to customers when there were only a few channels in play.

These three issues are a by-product of scale. They are challenges a company wants to have … and solve. Yet, most businesses fall short. They naturally fall back on the methods that have helped them reach this critical moment in their journey — many continue to frantically hire staff long after it’s sustainable to do so, some rush to tack more tools onto their tech stacks without the infrastructure to make them all work together, and others simply leave certain touchpoints unattended, leaving customers unimpressed.

Operations professionals are uniquely positioned to help a company solve challenges like these. But historically, companies across our industry have failed to recognize the potential of their operations teams, leaving them stuck in silos and asking them to solve issues without the right tools or team structure to do so effectively.

Moving From Function-Out To Customer-In

Operations professionals are rarely among the first hires a company makes. They tend to be brought in only when systems start to creak and the friction between teams becomes unbearable. A company’s marketing leader might hire an operations professional onto their team to help improve its lead scoring system, while its head of sales brings in their own operations hire to work on reporting.

Before long, there are multiple operations teams working in different departmental silos, often out of different operating systems. In this setup, even if each operations team does an exceptionally good job at fighting friction within their department, friction can still be rife between their departments.

For example, the sales team might be having difficulty accessing and understanding the marketing team’s data, hurting their ability to personalize their outreach based on a prospect’s recent engagement.

With no team accountable for overseeing this critical cross-departmental touchpoint, prospects will continue to receive impersonal emails, the marketing team will continue to receive exasperated messages from their sales colleagues, and the sales team will continue to struggle to win over prospects.

I call this a “function-out” perspective, where each customer-facing team is only focused on the portion of the customer experience they’re directly responsible for, and each operations professional is tasked with supporting their designated function.

What companies need instead is a “customer-in” perspective, where all teams work in unison, informed by a holistic view of the customer, to deliver a unified experience. Operations professionals have a critical role to play in driving this shift in perspective. But to be successful, they too need to be unified.

How RevOps Helps Companies Scale Customer Experience

One of the most powerful things a company can do to scale its customer experience is to unify its functional operations professionals under one centralized revenue operations (RevOps) strategy.

When operations teams are unified, they are not serving their separate teams’ goals, they are serving the customer. They work with the same data, which gives them a single source of truth on what’s really going on with customers at a holistic level.

They collaborate on cross-functional processes that allow them to bridge the gaps between teams where friction frequently festers. And perhaps most importantly, they work together to proactively identify issues before they have a chance to hurt the customer experience.

Companies that don’t yet have a large number of operations professionals among their ranks don’t have to wait until they do to start adopting a “customer-in” perspective. If they haven’t hired an operations professional yet, they should consider bringing one in as a priority and giving them a meaningful say in how all customer-facing teams work together, not just one.

They should also examine the ways their internal teams are set up within their current operating model, assess whether the systems they’re using are contributing to silos, and begin to instill a culture of alignment around the customer.

After all, RevOps is not just the name of a team, it’s a philosophy by which to run a company — one that thrives when operations teams are equipped with the right tools.

Introducing Operations Hub

Today with the launch of Operations Hub, we are giving operations teams a suite of tools that allow them to assume their rightful place at the forefront of the customer experience and empower them to guide their companies through the customer experience challenges that come with scale.

With Operations Hub, teams can sync data across their business apps bi-directionally and in real-time, allowing them to manage a tech stack with ease, no matter how complex it is.

They can roll out workflows that automatically keep their database clean and up to date, helping them to maintain a reliable view of the customer, no matter how many touchpoints they manage. And they can design sophisticated custom automation actions to deliver a deeply personalized and contextual experience to customers, no matter how large their customer base grows.

Together, these tools free up operations teams to conduct bold ambitious experiments, test big innovative ideas, and launch ground-breaking new strategies, all in the name of delivering an exceptional customer experience. For too long our industry has put a limit on the potential of operations professionals. That changes today.

Back in 2019, I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s ‘voice of the customer’ team. That experience opened my eyes to the vital role operations teams have to play in scaling customer experience.

At the beginning of 2021, I had the opportunity to launch another team at HubSpot: the revenue operations team. With Operations Hub at our fingertips and our operations professionals unified as one, we are on a mission to elevate the role of operations teams not only at our company, but across the entire industry.

If you work in operations like me, you have a right to feel excited. Where you were once reactive, you can now be proactive. Where you were once siloed, you can now be in sync with your operations teammates. And where you were once an afterthought of the customer-facing teams you support, you can now be the orchestrator of your company’s customer experience strategy.

Traffic is a low-impact word for most people but a high-impact word for marketers. Traffic can ultimately dictate success, whether it’s the number of leads that come to your website, visit your social channels, or watch your videos.

There are two different types of traffic you can have, organic and non-organic, that can come from all over: email, social media, organic searches, backlinks — the list goes on.

Non-organic traffic can be a bit harder to come by, which is why, when creating non-organic content, you want to ensure that it will drive results. However, it’s easier said than done when it comes to figuring out what works for your business. In this post, hear from HubSpot content strategists and marketers about the types of content that bring in the most non-organic traffic as inspiration for creating your own.

4 Content Types That Get Non-Organic Traffic, According to Content Strategists

Data-Driven Content

Pam Bump, Audience Growth Marketing Manager & Staff Writer for the HubSpot Blogs, says that she often sees solid non-organic traffic from email and social media to blog posts that feature statistics or recent industry figures. Bump says, “People love to share, link to, or read up on new data that impacts their career, industry, or lives in some way.

The data-driven content you share can be related to overall industry trends, stat roundup posts (like this one), and data comparison pieces, like this one about Millenials vs. Gen Z, written by Bump herself.

If you have the means, it’s worth considering running internal experiments and publishing your own original data. This can help you drive referrals and backlinks from other websites as non-organic leads and build your domain authority. When HubSpot does this, Bump says, “A credible website might include our data and say ‘according to Hubspot,’ and link to our original data post because it simply has information readers can’t get anywhere else.”

Content Featuring Quotes and Interviews

In the same vein as data-driven content, people want to learn something from what you have to offer, especially if they’re learning it from experienced industry leaders and professionals.

Bump gives a piece titled Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021, According to 21 Experts, as an example. It was written by MOZ CMO Christina Mautz, and she included quotes from reputable industry leaders. The piece was shared on HubSpot social channels and emails and has since received a significant amount of views from non-organic sources in just three months.

When you create content like this, the industry leaders you feature in the piece may share the posts with their audiences, helping you gain brand awareness and traffic from additional sources. Francesca McCaffrey, Tech Content Strategies, notes that leadership-type content brings in significant non-organic traffic for the HubSpot Product Blog, especially when shared on social media. She says, “Leadership thought pieces are also a significant source of non-organic traffic for us, as they tend to inspire lots of commentary and clicks on networking sites like LinkedIn.”

Emerging Trends

Making an effort to create content about emerging industry-related trends can do wonders in terms of attracting email, social media, and referral traffic.

Bump wrote a post about Clubhouse, a relatively new social platform that didn’t have high MSV search terms affiliated with it yet. Bump added headlines to the content that would gain traction when the app got bigger, like “What Is Clubhouse?” Since publication, the post has earned an impressive amount of non-organic views and, as expected, has picked up organic traffic as the app grows in popularity.

Covering emerging trends also helps you stay on top of new keywords that aren’t as competitive. If you’re one of the only sources creating content for the keywords, search engines will recognize you as a source of authority when the trend becomes more popular.

Technical Guides and How-Tos

McCaffrey says that technical guides and how-to type content from the Product Blog submitted to reputable industry sites perform especially well with non-organic traffic.

She gives this piece as an example that was submitted to Hacker News, a reputable cybersecurity publication. McCaffrey says, “Making it to the first or second page of a site like Hacker News can really boost non-organic traffic, and translate into organic traffic over time. The piece made it to the front page, driving thousands of viewers to that post in a day.”

Like pieces containing quotes and interviews, this type of content performs well because people can learn from it; they can take away actionable skills to apply to their own lives.

All in all, the content you choose to create should directly relate to your business, as you’ll find the most success if you’re creating content your audience is already looking for.

However, it’s worth considering purposely creating content that you know has the potential to bring in a significant amount of non-organic traffic. Leverage these tips from expert HubSpot content strategists, and begin creating content that drives traffic.

Today’s buyer’s journey includes a number of interactions across various touchpoints and channels. There’s rarely a conversion of sale that occurs based off a single interaction.

Rather, conversions and sales often stem from a mix of interactions via a variety of sources such as blog articles, social media posts, webinars, in-person events, conversations with reps, content on your website, email marketing campaigns, and more. All of these touchpoints play a role in getting your customers to convert.

Attribution allows you to give credit for conversions to those marketing touchpoints and channels throughout the buyer’s journey. Multi-touch attribution takes this a step further.

Multi-Touch Attribution

In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of multi-touch attribution, what makes it unique from other types of attribution, and multi-touch attribution models. Let’s get started.

What is multi-touch attribution?

Multi-touch attribution, which may also be referred to as fractional attribution, is how you determine the value of each touchpoint throughout the customer journey that results in a conversion.

In other words, it’s when credit for a conversion is given to every touchpoint that a customer experienced throughout the buyer’s journey.

Why is multi-touch attribution important?

The reason multi-touch attribution is so important is that it allows you to pinpoint all of the channels that contribute to a conversion and which of those channels have the most impact on a conversion. It gives you a clear picture of how your channels and touchpoints influence every conversion.

This is valuable information that you can use to enhance those touchpoints for future prospects to improve the customer experience and buyer’s journey. It shows you exactly how different touchpoints and channels work together to influence deals on an individual level.

You can also use this information to better understand what matters most to your target audience throughout the buyer’s journey and which aspects of the customer experience are most influential when they’re making a decision.

You may have heard about other types of attribution before, such as first-touch and last-touch. Let’s talk about what makes multi-touch attribution unique next.

Multi-Touch Attribution vs. First-Touch Attribution vs. Last-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is unique from first-touch and last-touch attribution because it doesn’t attribute a conversion to the first or last marketing touchpoint a customer has prior to converting.

For example, say a HubSpot customer read a blog post, attended INBOUND, interacted with a social media post, and then became a customer.

First-touch attribution would conclude that the blog post that the customer read gets the credit for their conversion whereas last-touch attribution would give the credit to the social media post they interacted with. Meanwhile, multi-touch attribution would consider all of these touchpoints and assign credit to each of them.

Meaning, multi-touch attribution is unique because it takes all touchpoints into consideration and then assigns credit to each of those touchpoints based on the amount of influence it had a customer’s decision to convert. First and last-touch attribution — which may also be referred to as single-touch attribution — do not. These methods feel slightly outdated when compared to multi-touch attribution because they don’t account for the many touchpoints and channels that exist for prospects and customers to engage with.

Multi-Touch Attribution Models

There are a number of attribution models that you can use to determine which touchpoints are the most important in the buyer’s journey — and different multi-touch attribution models weigh the multiple touchpoints in different ways.

Here are four of the most common multi-touch attribution models to help you get started.

1. Linear Attribution

A linear attribution model, also known as an even-weighting attribution model, gives equal credit for a conversion to every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. This can be considered the “standard” when it comes to multi-touch attribution models.

Who should use linear attribution?

Linear attribution is great if your prospects are often in the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey for an extended period of time because it shows you the impact that all of your content and messaging has during that extended phase.

It’s also ideal if you want to know the ways that your touchpoints work together to influence a deal or if you’re new to multi-touch attribution and don’t have a baseline understanding of how your touchpoints tend to do among your audience.

2. Time Decay Attribution

A time-decay attribution model is when you organize your touchpoints based on their percent influence on a conversion so that the least-influential touchpoint (with the lowest percentage) is first and the most-influential touchpoint (with the greatest percentage) is last.

Who should use time decay attribution?

Time decay attribution is ideal if you’re measuring the success of short-term touchpoints like campaigns.

3. U-Shaped Attribution

A U-shaped attribution model, also known as a bathtub model, gives the first and last touchpoints in the buyer’s journey a higher percentage of credit than the touchpoints in the middle.

Who should use u-shaped attribution?

U-shaped attribution is ideal if your team wants to focus on the impact of the first and last of your multiple touchpoints. There’s less emphasis on touchpoints that support the middle stages of the buyer’s journey.

4. W-Shaped Attribution

W-shaped multi-touch attribution gives credit to the first and last touchpoints in the buyer’s journey as well as gives value to the touchpoints that occur in the middle of the buyer’s journey. Then, all remaining touchpoints are assigned equal credit.

Who should use w-shaped attribution?

W-shaped attribution is helpful if you want to understand which touchpoints actually convert leads but also identify the touchpoints that encourage customers to engage and continue to move through the buyer’s journey.

In addition to the four multi-touch attribution models above, you can also create customize your multi-touch attribution model using attribution software.

Multi-touch attribution software — like Wicked Reports — has the power to make the process of identifying which of your marketing touchpoints are succeeding or failing among your prospects simple.

Source

In fact, Wicked Reports gives you a complete view of how customers interact with your brand and tracks incoming clicks against your CRM and sales data so you can identify the most important clicks in relation to your team’s unique marketing goals.

Pro Tip: Seamlessly integrate Wicked Reports with your HubSpot CRM platform.

Use Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is a powerful process that marketers can use to identify the various factors that influenced a purchase decision for a customer. It also helps marketers understand which of those factors were the most influential in their decision.

This information can be used to improve the buyer’s journey and the marketing content and communications shared throughout it as well as provide an understanding of what matters most to your business’ unique prospects when making a buying decision.

So, you’ve finally got your foot in the door at your dream company. You’ve submitted the perfect resume and made a lasting impression during the phone screen. All there’s left to do now is to win over the hiring manager in the face-to-face interview.

As a well-informed candidate, you’re doing your research on the company and preparing your answers to the most important interview questions you can think of — the most notorious of them all being: “What is your greatest weakness?”

You don’t want to respond, “I tend to work too hard,” or “I am too much of a perfectionist.” That can easily come across as scripted and insincere at best and lacking in self-awareness at worst.

Alternatively, you don’t want to respond with weaknesses that will prevent you from succeeding in the role. For instance, if you’re applying to be a project manager, you don’t want to admit that you’re, “not very good with time management.”

Fortunately, there are ways to answer this question that will help you demonstrate your value as a candidate. Here, we’ve cultivated some incredible answers to the mainstay, “What is your greatest weakness” question — and don’t worry, these answers aren’t “perfectionism”.

1. Choose a weakness that will not prevent you from succeeding in the role.

When an interviewer asks, “What is your greatest weakness?” they want to find out:

• Whether you have a healthy level of self-awareness
• Whether you can be open and honest, particularly about shortcomings
• Whether you pursue self-improvement and growth opportunities to combat these issues, as opposed to letting these weaknesses hold you back

Ultimately, you’ll want to use this question to demonstrate how you’ve used a weakness as motivation to learn a new skill or grow professionally. Everyone has weaknesses — your interviewer doesn’t expect you to be perfect.

If you’re applying for a copywriting position with little necessity for math skills, you might admit, “I struggle with numbers, and don’t have much experience with data analytics. While math is not directly tied to my role as a writer, I believe it’s important to have a rudimentary understanding of Google Analytics to ensure my work is performing well. To tackle this weakness, I’ve been taking online courses in data analytics.”

An answer like this shows the hiring manager that you recognize your areas for growth and are able to act on them without being told to do so. This kind of self-starter attitude is a plus for virtually any team.

2. Be honest and choose a real weakness.

The answer “perfectionism” won’t cut it when talking about your biggest weakness is simply because it’s not a real weakness. Perfectionism can never be attained — it’s a fear-based pattern that leads to short-term rewards like getting the job done early and exceeding expectations. However, in the long-term, trying to attain perfectionism leads to burnout, low-quality work, and missed deadlines. Burnout is one of the biggest contributors to decreased productivity, turnover, and low employee engagement — all of which cost a company money, time, and talent.

Instead, choose a real weakness. Underneath the desire to do perfect work may lie a weakness of trust. Perhaps you don’t trust that you’ll be able to make mistakes on the team, so you strive to do everything perfectly. That’s a real weakness that you can definitely overcome.

3. Provide an example of how you’ve worked to improve upon your weakness or learn a new skill to combat the issue.

Hiring managers don’t expect you to overcome your weaknesses completely overnight. Everyone has areas they must constantly work on to keep them sharp. Think of it this way — if you’ve dedicated six months to working out, you won’t be able to stop one day and maintain your progress. It’s an ongoing process that you have to work at.

By providing an example of how you’re working to improve your area of weakness, you’ll give the interviewer a glimpse into a few positive attributes about your work style:

1. You know how to identify and mitigate issues that come up.

2. You’ve found a helpful solution to a problem that you and perhaps others on the team face, which means you can be an immediate resource to the team.

4. You demonstrate self-awareness and an ability to look to others to provide you with resources necessary for growth.

More often than not, you’re going to need to look outside of yourself to overcome a weakness. Whether you look to your supervisor, the HubSpot Blog, or a mentor for help, the simple act of asking for help demonstrates self-awareness and resourcefulness — two skills that are hard to teach, but valuable to learn. Tapping into your resources shows the interviewers that you can solve problems when the answer is not yet clear. That’s a character trait that has a place on any team.

Briefly share an example of a time where you asked someone for help in an area that you’ve identified as a weakness. This gives the hiring team a clear picture of how you’ll work with the team to balance out that weakness.

5.Don’t be arrogant and don’t underestimate yourself.

The most important thing you can do when responding to the question “What is your greatest weakness?” is exhibit confidence in your answer. (If confidence is your weakness, keep reading.) Even if you’re not the most confident person, I’m going to assume you’re at least honest with yourself. If you’ve identified an area of weakness and you’re sure about it, let that assurance shine through in your answer. There’s no need to feel embarrassed about something you’re genuinely not good at as long as you’re working to get better.

Before you start expressing a genuine weakness to your interviewer, get comfortable with the types of answers that make hiring managers want to work with you. Take a look at the following examples and find a few that fit your personality and work style. Then, practice reciting them aloud so they come naturally to you.

Here are seven examples of how you might answer “What is your greatest weakness?” and why they work.

Here are seven examples of how you might answer “What is your greatest weakness”, and why they work.

1. Patience

“I don’t have much patience when working with a team — I am incredibly self-sufficient, so it’s difficult when I need to rely on others to complete my work. That’s why I’ve pursued roles that require someone to work independently. However, I’ve also worked to improve this weakness by enrolling in team-building workshops. While I typically work independently, it’s nonetheless important I learn how to trust my coworkers and ask for outside help when necessary.”

This answer works because the weakness — the inability to be patient when working with a team — doesn’t hinder your ability to perform well in the role since it’s a job that doesn’t rely on teamwork to succeed. Additionally, you display an eagerness to develop strategies to combat your weakness, which is a critical skill in the workplace.

2. Organization

“I struggle with organization. While it hasn’t ever impacted my performance, I’ve noticed my messy desk and cluttered inbox nonetheless could interfere with my efficiency. Over time, I’ve learned to set aside time to organize my physical and digital space, and I’ve seen it improve my efficiency levels throughout the week.”

Plenty of people have messy desks. This answer works because it’s a relatable and fixable weakness. You note that disorganization doesn’t interfere with your ability to do your job, which is critical, but you also acknowledge it might make you less efficient. To ensure you’re performing at 100%, you mention personal steps you’ve taken to improve your organization skills for the sake of self-improvement alone, which suggests a level of maturity and self-awareness.

3. Delegation

“I’m incredibly self-motivated, and I sometimes find it difficult to delegate responsibility when I feel I can finish the task well myself. However, when I became manager in my last role, it became critical I learn to delegate tasks. To maintain a sense of control when delegating tasks, I implemented a project management system to oversee the progress of a project. This system enabled me to improve my ability to delegate efficiently.”

This answer allows you to demonstrate an ability to pursue a new skill when a role calls for it and suggests you’re capable of flexibility, which is critical for long-term growth. Additionally, you are able to showcase a level of initiative and leadership when you mention the successful implementation of a new process that enabled you to succeed in your past role, despite your weakness.

4. Timidity

“Oftentimes, I can be timid when providing constructive feedback to coworkers or managers, out of fear of hurting someone’s feelings. However, in my last role, my coworker asked me to edit some of his pieces and provide feedback for areas of improvement. Through my experience with him, I realized feedback can be both helpful and kind when delivered the right way. Since then I’ve become better at offering feedback, and I’ve realized that my empathy can be used to my advantage to provide thoughtful, productive feedback.”

This answer works because you’ve explained how you were able to turn a weakness into a strength through real-world experience. Typically, timidity can be seen as a flaw in the workplace, particularly if a role requires someone to provide feedback to others. In this case, you’re able to demonstrate how timidity can be used as a strength, through thoughtful reflection and practice.

5. Candidness

“My blunt, straightforward nature has allowed me to succeed over the years as a team manager, because I’m able to get things done efficiently, and people often appreciate my honesty. However, I’ve recognized my bluntness doesn’t always serve my employees well when I’m delivering feedback. To combat this, I’ve worked to develop empathy and deeper relationships with those I manage. Additionally, I took an online leadership management course, and worked with the professor to develop my ability to deliver feedback.”

Oftentimes, facets of our personalities can help us in certain areas of our work, while hindering us in others. That’s natural. However, you must demonstrate an ability to recognize when your personality interferes with the functions of your role, and how you can solve for that.

In this example, you first explain how your blunt nature allows you to be successful in certain situations. Then, you mention that you understand your bluntness can be seen as a lack of empathy and provide examples of how you’ve attempted to solve this issue. Ultimately, your awareness of how you might be perceived by others shows a level of emotional intelligence, which is a critical asset for a team leader.

6. Public Speaking

“Public speaking makes me nervous. While I don’t need to do much public speaking in my role as a web designer, I still feel that it’s an important skill — especially when I want to offer my opinion during a meeting. To combat this, I spoke with my manager and she recommended I speak at each team meeting for a few minutes about our project timeline, deadlines, and goals when developing a website for a client. This practice has enabled me to relax and see public speaking as an opportunity to help my team members do their jobs effectively.”

In this example, you mention a skill that isn’t applicable to the role, but one which you nonetheless have been working to improve. This shows your desire to meet more business needs than necessary in your current role, which is admirable. Additionally, it’s impressive if you can show you’re willing to reach out to your manager with areas in which you want to improve, instead of waiting for your manager to suggest those areas of improvement to you — it demonstrates a level of ambition and professional maturity.

7. Data Analysis

“I’m not great at analyzing data or numbers. However, I recognize this flaw can prevent me from understanding how my content is performing online. In my last role, I set up monthly meetings with the SEO manager to discuss analytics and how our posts were performing. Additionally, I received my Google Analytics certificate, and I make it a point to analyze data related to our blog regularly. I’ve become much more comfortable with data through these efforts.”

In this example, you’re able to show your desire to go above and beyond a job description and actively seek out skills that could be helpful to the success of your company as a whole. This type of company-first mentality shows the interviewer you’re dedicated to making yourself a valuable asset, and try your best to understand the needs of the whole department, rather than just your role.

There’s Strength In Every Weakness

Regardless of whether you’re bad with numbers or you tend not to speak up in group settings, there’s a strength behind every weakness. The strength is in how you work to overcome it. Leaning on your teammates who excel in those areas is a great way to show that you’ll work well on the team and that you know how to use your resources to solve problems. Taking professional development courses shows that you’re willing to work toward improvement. No matter which of these answers you share with the hiring team, they’ll be more than happy to help you grow and exceed the expectations of the role.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I’ve become a morning walking companion to people I may never meet.

How is this possible? They take me along in their earbuds as they stream my podcast, Build a Better Agency

It’s a wonderful sign of things to come for marketers willing to venture into the podcasting universe.

Once a fringe platform, podcasts are now surprisingly mainstream. According to Nielsen, six out of 10 people understand what they are, and 112 million Americans — 40 percent of the nation’s population — have listened to at least one. Though podcast listeners lean male, it isn’t by much: 56 percent are men, while 44 percent are women.

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Marketing professionals must not only be aware of these statistics, but they must also leverage them in their own campaigns. When 67 million men and women are monthly podcast consumers, it’s a niche that deserves serious contemplation. Add to that fact the amazing statistic that 63 percent of podcast listeners made a purchase based on something the host recommended, and you have yourself a veritable gold mine.

Of course, you have to crawl, then walk, then break into a steady trot to glean the benefits.

A no-nonsense primer from a podcast experimenter.

In my case, I’d written blog posts, conducted webinars, and published articles in places like Forbes and Fast Company for some time. These content producers worked, but I felt a different portal would help connect with more agencies and leaders in an accessible, easy to find, on-demand format.

As a longtime podcast listener myself, I recognized that the podcasting platform was the next logical step for me — especially if I wanted to reach a narrow audience of mid-sized agency owners and leaders as an authority in my field for more than 23 years. And as a long-time professional, I hired Predictive ROI, an Agency Management Institute agency, to produce the podcast so I wouldn’t make as many rookie technical mistakes.

Still, opening yourself up to podcasting is a little like breaking the lid on Pandora’s box. Until you do it, you have no idea what to expect. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t head off issues before you go live.

Expect a certain amount of learning as you go, but be ready to explore the technology before fully launching your podcast. You wouldn’t open a bakery with your very first pie, so don’t hit “publish” until you get the lay of the land and make a plan. (Being a podcast guest prior to launching your own is a smart idea, too.)

Podcasting in the beginner’s circle.

Even if you’ve never been in front of a mic before, you can map out the first phase of a solid podcast schedule. From there, you’ll be able to branch out.

1. Create a checklist to keep yourself on task.

I asked myself tons of questions repeatedly before committing to podcasting. They included everything from the niche audience I wanted to reach to whether being the host of a podcast was a short-term fad or a long-term interest. I also considered what podcast style I preferred to offer the public, including a show prep and publishing schedule.

Obviously, your checklist will be individualized, but be sure it includes a section on technical elements. Setting up audio, iTunes, accounts, and interviews can be tricky if you haven’t done your homework.

2. Set up your basic show format.

Every interviewer prefers to run his or her podcast in a particular way. Many podcasters ask guests the same questions, but as a listener, I find that gets stale in a hurry. Sure, it’s less prep work, but it makes the host look lazy. I preferred interviewing subject matter experts but wanted to occasionally keep the door open to produce a solocast. My compromise was a 4–1 ratio of interviews to solocasts.

I was reasonably confident that I could have a few questions on hand and then launch into a conversation on the fly from there. A big risk? Maybe. But I believed I could pull off a 45-minute to 60-minute conversation without a safety net.

3. Leverage the heck out of your network.

The first 10 episodes set the tone for any podcast launch, so make sure you line up high-profile, interesting, engaging guests who won’t be turned off if you have very few — or no — listeners. My friends came through in a big way for me, offering me rock stars from day one. Not only did they help publicize the podcast, but they also generously allowed me to ride on their social media coattails.

4. Track your downloads.

Rob Walch was one of my recent podcast guests who offered an important consideration for any podcasters: You have to stay on top of your downloads. Rob’s suggestion is to hit at least 500 downloads an episode to feel sure you’ve broken the cycle of only having people in your inner circle tune in.

What’s a reasonable download number for your, quote, “success”? Only you can determine this, but it helps to keep a steady eye on the numbers. Starting to see a downward trend in listenership? Go back to square one and ask those tough questions again so you can pivot before your podcast loses traction.

5. Produce great content consistently.

Does everyone have a bad episode once in a while? Sure. And if you’ve planned in advance and have great content in the bag, you can simply not release it in lieu of a better one. Before you release your podcasts publicly, try to have several on hand. That way, you get the relief of a buffer zone.

Don’t try to start too quickly. You can always ramp up your delivery later. With my travel schedule that sees me on no fewer than 200 planes a year, I decided to get 10 episodes in before I proved to myself I could sustain the effort. August and September 2015 were a flurry of set-up and recordings, and we opened our podcast doors — virtually — in October 2015. Since then, we’ve published a new episode weekly without fail.

6. Prepare to become a podcast promoter.

Your target personas won’t find your podcast without a little help, so promote it like your life depends on it. I utilized our company’s email list, my personal social channels, and myriad other platforms. In addition, I requested that each guest promote his or her episode.

We were fortunate to get on iTunes New and Noteworthy, landing us in the top five of several of its subject-specific lists during our first month.

7. Learn how to monetize your podcast.

Finally, it’s important to figure out how to earn an income based on your podcasting. One way is to promote your book, workshop, or online course, creating thought leadership at the same time.

If you have a narrow audience lacking depth or width and you just can’t sell advertisements or sponsorships, you can still make numbers work in your favor.

Sound like hard work? It is, but it’s totally worth it if you strategize. Two years after unveiling my first episode, we have 110 five-star reviews, and episodes are downloaded in more than 125 countries. I’m pleased to say we’ve also earned a presenting sponsorship from HubSpot. Podcasting hasn’t just been a feeder for the business, but a phenomenal marketing opportunity as well.

Have you thought about taking the podcasting plunge? The water’s a bit choppy at first, but there’s plenty of room for another swimmer!

Every day, there’s a new article on Facebook Ads. Case in point, this one right here.

Given how powerful the advertising platform is, there are tons of recommendations out there aiming to steer you in the right direction for your next campaign.

However, not all recommendations are worth implementing.

Let’s revisit some of the most common Facebook Ads assumptions out there and get to the truth. It won’t be as dramatic as an episode of The Maury Show, but it will do.

Myth 1. Facebook Ads don’t work for B2B brands.

Truth: Facebook is a great platform for B2B advertising.

When it comes to advertising to businesses, the first place people think of is LinkedIn, a network known for fostering professional relationships. Facebook has always been seen as a strictly direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising platform.

Facebook wasn’t designed to be a business networking app, said Rex Gelb, paid ads director at HubSpot, and thus, wasn’t a top consideration for B2B lead generation. He argues it should be.

“To some extent, people are always open to business-related content, even if they’re just mindlessly scrolling through their Facebook and Instagram feeds after a long day at the office,” said Gelb. “If you work in B2B, don’t hesitate to give Facebook a try – you might be surprised by the results.”

Based on HubSpot’s 2020 Not Another Marketing Report, brands see the most return on investment (ROI) on Facebook compared to other social media platforms.

SaaS companies like Honeybook say Facebook is their largest acquisition channel, according to the social network. And they’re not the only B2B company that relies on Facebook Ads to generate leads.

“We find it to be successful for B2B companies like ourselves to promote content and signups,” said Nicole Ondracek, paid ads marketing manager at HubSpot.

If you want to ensure you reach the right audience, Facebook Ads’ lookalike audience feature allows you to target users based on their job title, industry, and employer – similar to LinkedIn.

Myth 2. You need a lot of money to get started.

Truth: You only need $1 a day to compete with the big brands.

While some advertising channels require a decent budget to compete, brands can reach Facebook users for as little as $1 a day.

“There’s no big upfront commitment required and no large minimums,” said Gelb. “You’re free to take things as slowly as you’d like and only scale when it makes sense to do so.”

He adds that while one dollar will limit the ad inventory you have access to, you’ll be on an even playing field with everyone else.

Ondracek echoes this sentiment.

“While it’s nice to have a large budget to bring in enough conversions and learnings to optimize your campaigns,” she said, “sometimes all you need is a small daily budget to start bringing in leads and customers.”

On Facebook Ads, a little can go a long way.

Myth 3. You should create small, targeted audiences.

Truth: Build your target audience but leave some wiggle room.

Facebook Ads’ targeting capabilities are impressive. You combine that with the idea that the more targeted your campaign, the better the results, and you run the risk of getting too narrow.

“It’s all about testing,” said Ondracek. “In some cases where we’ve tested large audiences (20M+), we’ve seen better success than narrowed audiences [and] going after a specific list of contacts.”

Creating exclusions during your audience creation process makes sense most of the time. For instance, excluding users located outside of a specific region. However, when your targeting gets too narrow, you can miss out on opportunities to reach audiences who would convert on your ad.

“Within your target audience, don’t restrict Facebook too much by layering on dozens of filters such as age, device, placement, and gender,” said Gelb. “Facebook’s ad serving algorithm was designed to find the most qualified audience at the cheapest cost.”

“If you give Facebook the freedom to go find those people,” he adds, “in many cases, you’ll end up with more scale and at a cheaper cost.”

Essentially, let the algorithm do its job. Define the key characteristics of your target audience and leave some room for your ad to reach those you may not have considered.

Myth 4. You should retarget all of your website visitors.

Truth: Not everyone should be retargeted.

The Facebook pixel allows you to track user behavior on your website and retarget those same users on Facebook to guide them down the funnel. However, not every person who visits your website should be retargeted on Facebook Ads.

You should still segment which website visitors to focus on, as not everyone who visits your site is ready for retargeting.

For instance, let’s say someone visits your “About Us” page. There are many reasons for this: They could be interested in your products, but they could also be looking for a new role. With that in mind, retargeting users based on any action taken on your website may not be valuable or cost-effective.

Instead, focus on visitors who exhibit high-intent behaviors and will be more likely to convert. For instance, visitors who add products to their shopping carts, visit your pricing page or read your testimonials.

Being selective will not only help you manage your budget better (especially if you have a small one) but it can also help you yield better results.

Ondracek highlights that sometimes, you should re-evaluate if retargeting is even the right strategy.

“When retargeting works, it’s great,” she said, “but we’ve found, in some cases, that retargeting site visitors is actually more expensive than prospecting.”

It’s all about finding what works for your brand. Just because Facebook is known for retargeting, doesn’t mean that’s the strategy that will work for your company every time.

Myth 5. Boosting a post will yield the same results as a campaign.

Truth: Boosting may not always align with your goals.

When you boost a post on Facebook, it’s a quick and easy way to expand your reach and gain some quick exposure. However, boosting a post won’t necessarily convert users in the same way a campaign would.

Why? Well, if your post isn’t already designed to drive a particular action and you boost it, you may gain more impressions but no conversions.

Depending on your goals, you may yield better results for less by creating an ad campaign. With the manual bidding feature, you can monitor how much you spend. You can also optimize your campaign based on your conversion goal.

So, while boosting a post may seem like the best solution for a brand with limited Facebook Ads experience and a small budget, it may be quite the opposite.

If you are going to use that strategy, be sure to consider the following:

• Does this post have a clear call-to-action (CTA)?
• Will boosting this post help you reach your goal?
• Could this work better as part of a larger campaign?

Answering these questions will help you determine when to boost and when to go in another direction.

The biggest takeaway here is that there aren’t hard-and-fast rules when it comes to Facebook Ads. Some strategies may work for some brands and not for others. The only surefire way to figure out what works is by experimenting with various strategies.

Ever wonder what’s fact or fiction when it comes to Facebook Ads? In this article, we debunk some myths about the social network’s advertising platform.

As the world continues to move in a remote-first direction, it’s important to consider how to make your company’s in-person events remote-friendly.

Even if you don’t always do remote events, the remote option is great for anytime your team is spread around the world.

But, a virtual offsite meeting? Sounds oxymoronic. How can you have an offsite, that doesn’t feel like work, virtually?

In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into how these brands thought about virtual offsites in a creative way. And didn’t just ask everyone to be on Zoom for 8 hours.

1. Loom VR Virtual Offsite

At the end of 2020, Loom decided to host a virtual offsite. What made this different than attending an 8-hour Zoom meeting?

Well, first, the company sent VR headsets to their team to allow employees to feel like they were leaving their homes for a large company meeting they used to travel for.

We just announced our @loom offsite being done in VR and us shipping everyone an Oculus headset. The smiles. 🙂

— Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth)
December 10, 2020

According to Loom, “with virtual reality, we were able to send everyone an Oculus Quest 2 headset to bring the virtual world to them. Plus, we were able to limit Zoom content to only two hours per day to keep the content engaging.”

Once they got started with virtual reality, they had to find virtual reality apps to host their events. But they also included their employees in the planning process. The company sent a Google Form to employees to share any ideas for activities and sessions they could do during the virtual offsite.

Loom worked with a partner to create a virtual reality island where team members could go for watercooler conversations, ice breakers, and happy hour.

Interestingly, the virtual reality component was not mandatory. Any events that were VR exclusives were optional. And the VR island they created was also accessible via desktop, so everyone could participate.

It’s important to remember that when you’re creating a virtual offsite experience, you want everyone to be able to show up. Hopefully, the tools you use will be available on several devices or you can make those events not mandatory if it takes a special device.

The team also created unstructured time during their day so that people working from home could still do their normal work and activities.

2. First Round Review Interactive Virtual Offsite

Another company thinking about virtual offsites creatively is First Round Review.

First Round Review held a virtual offsite and had activities including group meals, cooking competitions, self-reflection exercises, group presentations, unconference events, and more.

The company knew that they wanted to use all different kinds of formats for their activities so that they could keep people’s attention.

Before they planned the event, they wrote down their objectives, breaking them into task- and team-focused outcomes. Then, they came up with ideas to achieve those outcomes.

Again, First Round Review knew they didn’t want to spend all day on Zoom. A few things they did to make their virtual offsite interactive and successful were:

• Send an interactive surprise: The team sent everyone a kit that they were instructed not to open beforehand. The kit included candy, a chalkboard to write on, coffee, and a kombucha starter kit. This was a fun way to kick off the virtual offsite.
• Get in costume: The team was all sent special hats and everyone showed up to the meeting wearing their merch.
• Cooking challenge: Groups were split into breakout rooms so each group could cook together live. Then, everyone presented their meals together and people voted on creativity and presentation.
• Unstructured time: This is huge. Don’t make people spend all day on the computer. Include unstructured time and breaks.
• Playtime: Include team bonding events such as trivia or virtual escape rooms. First Round Review even hired a magician to join them for a group dinner.
• Show gratitude: First Round Review spent an entire meeting having everyone write out gratitude for every team member and then emailed everyone their list of comments from their coworkers. For each teammate, they had everyone spend one minute answering by writing a line or two in response to the following questions: What’s something you admire about this individual? What’s something this person did recently that you appreciate? Why are you grateful to count this person as a teammate? Answers are anonymous. After they’re all in, the meeting owner will round up the lines for each individual and share them in a private email.

One of the biggest takeaways from this virtual offsite is that you can have several formats, different sessions, interactive and engaging content, and still get work done in strategy sessions.

3. Wikimedia Product Team Virtual Offsite

The Wikimedia Foundation Product team also had productive virtual strategy sessions and meaningful team bonding in a remote environment across various time zones.

To achieve this, a lot of planning went into it. The team first decided what story they wanted to tell during their offsite. To ensure this was discussed throughout the virtual offsite, they revisited their product roadmap to understand where the team had been and where they’re going. On the first day, they held a retrospective to accomplish this.

Ultimately, the creative way that the company thought about this offsite was in the agenda and planning.

If there was a presentation or low energy session, they wanted to make sure it was followed up by a high engagement interactive session.

Additionally, the timing was important. They decided that instead of having 8-hour Zoom meetings, they’d have four hours of virtual sessions a day, broken into 2-hour blocks with a break in between of about 1.5-2 hours.

The offsite included low energy sessions including a Q&A with the Chief Product Officer, where they prepared questions ahead of time and used a thirty-minute window to go through their questions. But followed up those sessions with interactive activities.

One session even had team members create a homepage for newcomers based on previous features built by the product team. This had the team actively working in the tool so they could see what features stand out.

They also had a session with a specialist that was a step-by-step process of the Wikipedia editing process so employees understand the user experience.

Other fun sessions included friendly games online.

When planning a virtual offsite, it’s important to consider the timing and energy levels of the event. Spending all day on a video conferencing tool isn’t going to be effective for most people.

Hosting a virtual offsite doesn’t need to be an overly complicated process. And it doesn’t need to be a boring, 8-hour long Zoom meeting. You can host interactive sessions, presentations, and truly engage with your employees.

Search engine optimization (SEO) may seem like a straightforward concept.

You pick keywords related to your business, create content with those keywords, and you’re set to watch your site grow — a simple three-step process, right? Nope.

While those are fundamental elements of SEO, it can actually be quite challenging to create a strategy that helps you drive traffic and enough of it to meet your overall business goals.

It can be difficult to get your feet off the ground. Thankfully, there are various tools specifically designed to help you with SEO, build domain authority, and achieve high ROI. In this post, we’ll hear inspiring stories from HubSpot clients that have used our SEO tools to achieve business success.

5 SEO Success Stories To Inspire Your 2021 Strategy

1. Ironpaper

Ironpaper is a digital marketing agency that helps their B2B clients grow. They worked with one of their clients, Goddard, to achieve significant success using HubSpot’s SEO tools.

Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper, says, “While Goddard fills a real need for their customers by designing medical devices, historically they’ve struggled to find quality leads that could use their services. Instead, their website attracted a lot of spam and unqualified contacts.” Ironpaper began making critical SEO updates with HubSpot tools on Goddard’s site, focusing on internal linking, content strategy with business-relevant keywords, and technical SEO issues like broken links and meta tags.

Over an eight-month campaign, Ironpaper helped Goddard gain 2,361 Google positions across various keywords relevant to their offerings. Franchell says, “Because we created targeted content centered on strategic keywords, Goddard’s Google rankings increased even throughout a dip in traffic.”

The company also now ranks in the top 100 for 50 strategically targeted terms and can use HubSpot’s insights reports and dashboards to monitor their progress to ensure that their future marketing efforts are hyper-targeted for the audience they’ve worked hard to develop.

2. Apptega

Apptega is a cybersecurity and compliance platform. As they grew their business, they knew they would need an optimized website that generated leads. They also recognized that their existing WordPress site wouldn’t be enough for them to reach their goals.

Joelle Palmer, Apptega’s Digital Marketing Manager, says, “We had built a Frankenstein monster in WordPress. Our dev team would constantly have to drop what they were doing and fix our website.” Apptega then decided to migrate its existing site into CMS Hub.

Apptega saw almost immediate success with HubSpot’s SEO tools: “We saw one of our core pages move from a number100+ ranking on Google to position number three in two weeks. SEO usually takes three to six months to work…that was truly amazing for us as a company to experience.”

Some of the tools Apptega used within Marketing Hub to achieve their growth are the on-page SEO recommendations that direct users to pages that need attention and additional ways to optimize content.

3. Beacon Digital Marketing

Beacon Digital Marketing specializes in driving results for FinTech, SaaS, and B2B businesses.

As HubSpot Platinum Partners, they understand how to use and implement HubSpot tools to drive growth and success. While they typically assist other businesses, they took an internal look in August 2020 and decided to implement an SEO overhaul of a post on their blog that they believed could perform better than it already was.

They focused on a few critical areas for improvement: updating metadata, optimizing for a featured snippet, and re-targeting original keywords. The HubSpot content mapping tool helped them create a strategic pillar-cluster plan, and the on-page SEO recommendations provided them with helpful tips. After implementing their new strategy, they noticed an almost immediate 50% increase in page views: July 2020 showed 991 organic search traffic views, and August 2020 had 1,552.

Their optimization allowed them to draw more traffic to an existing blog post, and they have also seen an increase in organic traffic to additional pages on their website. This goes to show that a well-rounded SEO strategy can impact all areas of your business, as an increase in traffic leads to curious customers eager to learn more about what you have to offer.

4. Take Note

Take Note is a UK-based business that provides a range of audio and video transcription services, captions, and on-site note-taking. When demand for their business grew, they struggled with balancing disconnected tools to support their needs and obtain consistent growth. Thomas Carter, Director of Marketing at Take Note, said, “I think for us, SEO is the way to grow within such a competitive market.”

The business officially signed on to HubSpot in 2018 and has since increased its website traffic by 22%. At the same time, their customer base and revenue have grown by 16-22%. They’ve also seen an increase in leads. Carter adds, “Long term, we want to continue to focus on ensuring the quality of our services remains exceptionally high while using technology such as HubSpot to automate and optimize behind the scenes.”

5. Revenue River

Revenue River is a digital sales and marketing agency that helps companies scale and become competitive in their industry. One of their clients, Kofinas Fertility Group, saw their site traffic significantly impacted by COVID-19. Eric Pratt, the Managing Partner at Revenue River, says, “The site saw declines from mid-February all the way through May.”

The business got to work and conducted competitive analysis and keyword research to identify areas of opportunity for growth. They decided that the best course of action was to create pillar content and supporting content clusters, which would help them establish their domain as a source of authority in their industry.

Since implementing the new strategy in November of 2020, the site has nearly doubled its organic traffic. Between March and June of 2020, they saw 86K impressions, and January-March 2021 saw 1.1M.

Pratt says this success “Came about because of a combination of SEO strategy planning for research, topic clustering, and on-site/page optimization features to enrich the SEO appeal of the content we’re producing and publishing through HubSpot.”

Improving Your SEO Doesn’t Have To Be A Challenge.

The success stories we’ve highlighted in this post show that SEO doesn’t have to be a challenge, especially with the help of a high-powered SEO tool. Learn from these clients and create a strategy that works for your business.

 

New social media sites continue to emerge, new features are added, and algorithms are always being updated, making it tough to keep up with social media best practices.

However, social media is here to stay. According to Instagram, there are more than one billion active users every month and more than 500 million active Stories every day. Even more, 90% of accounts follow a business on Instagram, making this platform a prime choice for all types of businesses.

Instagram Stories are a popular trend that isn’t going away. Pamela Bump, Audience Growth Writer at HubSpot, says, “Instagram Stories serves as an outlet for brands to creatively show their products, services, or happy customers in action. Branded Instagram Stories also enable audiences to learn more about topics related to your brand’s industry. Helpful and valuable content might also allow prospective buyers to trust your brand more.”

With this knowledge, you want your marketing team ready to develop a strategy for your Instagram Stories. To create this strategy, your team should decide what kind of images or videos they want to post.

How do you plan on taking those images? With phones or professional cameras?

Below, you’ll learn the Instagram Story dimensions and why they’re important to your Instagram marketing strategy.

If you shoot an Instagram Story video using your phone, the dimensions will likely be 1080 pixels by 1920 pixels, so you don’t have to resize it. If you’re using another camera or a custom setup, however, you’ll have to use a video editing app to make sure your video has the correct dimensions.

While this may seem like a lot of work, it’s exceedingly important for user experience and for ensuring maximum engagement on your Story.

Why are Instagram Story dimensions important?

Instagram has provided these dimensions and sizes to make sure that your Story is uploaded with as much quality as possible. These dimensions are also ideal for most mobile devices, guaranteeing that your video, image, or gif shows up properly across different operating systems and screen resolutions.

Using Instagram Story dimensions also:

• Helps your brand look more professional
• Ensures that the content looks high-quality
• Prevents unnecessary pixelation

If you don’t adhere to these dimensions, your images or videos will be cut off, and the content that you wanted to share won’t show up as intended. That’s why it’s best to pre-size your images and videos using an Instagram photo editing app.

Speaking of, let’s go over the ideal Instagram Story image size. Spoiler alert: it’s the same as the Instagram Story video dimensions, which makes it easy to remember.

Whether you upload a video, image, or a mixture of both to your Story, it’s critical to keep your content in a “safe zone” where it won’t be cut off or hidden.

The Instagram Story Size Safe Zone

The “safe zone” refers to the area in your Instagram Story where the content isn’t obstructed or at risk of getting cut off.

Instagram will automatically show blue lines if you try to move content out of the safe zone, especially if you’re adding stickers or GIFs. When I tried to move the timestamp to the edge of the screen, Instagram didn’t let me go toward the edge or let me cover my profile picture up top.

Instagram will also provide guides when you’re placing elements on your Story, allowing you to center them perfectly.

On personal Instagram Stories, it’s common to post videos using the front camera of your cell phone. The frame can be tilted, and your face can be cut off; this is all good and well.

On an Instagram business account, however, you’ll want to make sure that all videos are shot professionally and that the item that you want to promote takes center stage on the screen. Most importantly, if you’re planning to add polls or stickers, leave enough space in the frame so you can place this content without obstructing something else.

Below, we’ll go over some additional tips for sizing your Instagram Story.

Instagram Story Size Tips

1. Ensure your content is high-quality before you upload.

Instagram will compress images during the upload process, so an already grainy or pixelated image will only get worse once it gets to the platform.

Check that your images are at least 72 ppi resolution before you add them to Instagram.

2. Upload the right size, shape, and aspect ratio.

Instagram is strict about adhering to its dimensions to ensure quality photos and videos. When you upload a vertical image or video from your phone, you most likely won’t have to think about these dimensions because Instagram will automatically format them.

However, if you have horizontal photos that don’t fit the dimensions, Instagram will crop your photos, zoom in on content, or zoom out (making your image look small and placing it on a background). This typically results in lower-quality images and videos. So, make sure you stick to the 9:16 aspect ratio.

3. Use photo editing apps.

Photo editing apps can help you control the quality of your Stories and ensure you’re always using the right dimensions. To edit your photos for Instagram, you can use the following tools:

Canva

This is the perfect option for creating images for your Instagram Stories. To get started, Canva has templates that are designed with the Instagram dimensions in mind. Canva offers free and paid plans.

Lumen5

This software makes it easy to produce videos for Instagram Stories. Once you get started creating a video, you can choose the right dimensions on the platform. Lumen5 offers both free and paid plans.

Easil

Easil has templates for Instagram Stories to help you create engaging content. They have templates for single images, and multi-card Stories as well. Easil offers free and paid versions.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark makes it easy to create images and video graphics for Instagram Stories. You can build your own Stories with their typography and imagery options. Adobe Spark has free and paid plans available.

Embed Social

Embed Social is a different kind of tool for Instagram Stories — with Embed Stories, you can make your Stories Shoppable by adding CTAs and creating embeddable code that you can add to your website. Embed Social offers free and paid plans.

With these tools, you can input the specifications, upload images and videos, and complete the editing process. These work well if you have higher-quality images taken with a professional camera or want to add graphics or text to your images or videos.

4. Upload vertical content.

While Instagram posts are more flexible in orientation and dimensions, Instagram Stories work best in a vertical format. Make sure your photos and videos are vertical before posting. If the content doesn’t lend itself to a vertical orientation, consider publishing it as a normal post instead.

5. Stay under 30 MB in file size.

Be mindful of your file size; Instagram will only accept up to 30 megabytes. This should give you plenty of wiggle room to upload high-quality photos and videos.

If the quality doesn’t look right, it’s time to troubleshoot.

How do I fix the quality of my Instagram Stories?

There might be instances in which your Stories don’t upload with the quality that you’d like. Let’s go over a few questions you might have about quality, plus some troubleshooting tips.

Why are my Instagram Stories blurry? Why does the picture quality change on my Instagram Story?

Your Instagram Story could be blurry for two reasons:

1. Instagram compressed the video or image to a degree that makes it look blurry.
2. The dimensions or aspect ratio is off.

To fix this, you’ll want to double-check the quality of the image or video you uploaded. What’s its file size? Is it at least 72 ppi? If the file size is too small or the ppi is too low, then Instagram’s compression process worsened it further. Consider creating a higher-quality version so that, when Instagram compresses it, it doesn’t look as pixelated.

Next, double-check the dimensions. To ensure the highest quality possible, try to use the full 1080 x 1920 size.

If those two check out and your Story is still blurry, follow the following tips to isolate the problem.

1. Check if the quality is better on other devices.

If your internet connection is poor, Instagram Stories will appear lower quality than they would on a faster connection.

Instagram does this to save resources for user experience as you interact with other areas of the site. Consider asking someone you know if the quality is low on their end as well. They — and your audience — may be viewing your Stories with no issues.

2. Turn off Data Saver.

Data Saver is a feature that prevents videos from loading in advance, which helps reduce your data usage.

If your connection is fine but you’re still having issues with quality, this feature may be lowering the quality of your feed on your end.

3. Test photos from different cameras.

As a last resort, test whether there’s a difference in quality between your phone’s integrated camera versus the Instagram camera. The photos you take with your phone’s camera versus the in-app camera (or vice versa) may weather Instagram’s compression settings better.

Instagram Story Sizes are Essential for an Instagram Strategy

All marketers should use Instagram Stories. While posting regularly on your feed is a great tactic, adding Stories into your strategy will result in a better ROI from your time and resources spent on the platform. Instagram Stories can improve your discoverability, increase brand reputation and awareness, and help you and your business grow better.

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